Presentation European Conference on Literacy Dublin, July 2022 Representation, evaluation and production: how information design, online critical reading and computational thinking can help teachers to be future-ready with Web 3.0 strategies

1. Representation, evaluation and production: how information design, online
critical reading and computational thinking can help teachers to be future-
ready with Web 3.0 strategies
Jeroen Clemens
Critical Internet Literacy: “synthetic media“,
“lateral reading“ and beliefs
http://jeroenclemens.nl

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Think Critically and Think Wisely
Every education system around the world needs to develop
a critical mind capable of navigating today's information
understanding sources, distinguishing fact from fiction,
resisting hate speech and, above all, making informed
decisions about one's life
UNESCO, (Grizzle et al., 2021, IV).

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Information
Complex, Unknown and Scary

4. Attitude Believes
Knowledge and Truth

5. Digital
Literacy
Competence
Context Factors
Task Factors
Text Factors

6. Digital information
environment
Context
• Overwhelming and changing
• Not curated marketplace of
information
• Unclear authors
• Role of algorithms (information
bubbles)
Texts
• Nonlinear
• Hypertexts and -media
• Multimodal texts
• Synthetic texts (Deep fakes )

7. Task Factors
Literacy 3.0 Productive learning
• Learning Tasks = a research and
problem-solving task in an
online environment
• Process of constructing
meaning through critical
accessing, comprehending, and
using texts

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The need for critical reading
Quality of information: The ease of publishing and the absence of
traditional gatekeepers >>> a marketplace of information from
authors who vary in terms of knowledge levels.
Trust. Growing threat is disinformation and misinformation/ fake
news. distrust of the media, the government or people
Attitude: Difference between facts and opinions is no longer clear
to many people; facts are more often seen as someone else's
opinion or 'alternative facts

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The need for critical reading (2)
Texts: Synthetic media, the difference between 'real' and 'fake’ is
becoming increasingly difficult to see (e.g. Deep Fakes)
Information bubble. The ‘pillars’ of the past are back in the days
of algorithmic personalisation (Hobbs, 2020), where the reader is
offered filtered content and targeted advertising. You are
automatically placed in an information bubble, a new 'pillar'.

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A competent reader
Purposeful, Critical & Flexible
• decides whether a source is reliable and truthful & point of view of the
author
• visits irrelevant pages as little as possible and can find necessary pages
efficiently.
• is aware of the interaction between sources and determine the relationship
between the sources and their own knowledge and views.
• Less experienced readers easily copy information and often overlook source
information when reading more sources and are unaware of their filter that
allows for 'appropriate' information and excludes other information from
processing (Bråten et al., 2016, Cho & Afflerbach, 2015, Hämäläinen et all., 2021).

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Competence Students
• In PISA 2018, the greatest deterioration in reading skills can be
seen in the sub-process evaluating and reflecting (OECD, 2019)
• If adolescents seem to understand that online information
cannot always be trusted, many remain uncertain about how to
judge its credibility (Hämäläinen, 2021)

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• Who is the creator/ author
and why should I consider
them knowledgeable?
• What type of sources do I
need to gain the knowledge
I’m searching for?
• What did I already know
about this topic? How do I
know these things?
Woodward & Cho (2020)
Justification processes

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Knowledge Sources
Epistemic justifications
When evaluating information sources, readers use three types of
knowledge (Hämäläinen, et al., 2021) : Epistemic justifications
1. Personal: prior knowledge and beliefs.
2. Authority: the estimated expertise and intentions creator.
3. Knowledge of others: based on what others say about the
creator, the information given, or the authority of the source

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Students’ use of knowledge sources
Ability of students to evaluate self-selected authentic online texts
and the role of epistemic justifications (Hämäläinen, et al., 2021)
36% able to include all three types of knowledge
34% able to include most two types of knowledge
10% able to include most on one type of knowledge (mostly own knowledge and believes
20% students demonstrated limited abilities to engage in versatile and sophisticated
evaluation

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Students’ Assessment Methods / Heuristics
What do we see in the classroom: the skills and behaviour of
students and teachers
• (1) Which assessment methods (heuristics) do we see in lessons?
• (2) How do teachers deal with the weak heuristics shown?

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Students reasoning
weak heuristics
• Appearance: a professional appearance.
• Self reports on the About pages or social media profits as evidence of
reliability
• Content: the presence of references to other sources and of evidence,
often data or statistics
• URL. websites with certain domains, particularly .org, .gov and .edu, were
automatically more trustworthy than those with the domain .com
• Popularity, based on statistics such as the number of likes and shares and
the content of comments on individual posts, as well as the number of
followers.

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The role of the teachers
Looking at the teachers, the researchers conclude that they are often partly
responsible for the (continued) use of weak heuristics.
In the cases where weak heuristics were brought up by students, they usually
remained unanswered.
Teachers need to question actively the students reasoning.

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Knowledge Source 2.
Expertise and intentions of creator
• Common approach analysing a source, reading vertically,
staying within a website to evaluate its reliability.
• The common didactics is using a checklist or an online
questionnaire.
• This is not sufficient
• list consists mainly of yes/no questions and
• requires a lot of prior knowledge that is often not readily available
• What can we do?

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Knowledge Source 3:
Knowledge of others
How do professional fact checkers check and what can we learn
from them (Stanford History Education Group)
• In stead of vertical ‘close’ reading, fact checkers read horizontally
and deployed the heuristic of lateral reading
• Lateral readers evaluate unfamiliar sites by leaving them and
turning to the open Web. They use the knowledge of others,
including Wikipedia.
• By reading laterally, fact checkers reached more warranted
conclusions in less time (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019).

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Facts - Fiction and Bubbles
• Fats- Fiction. : Pay attention to disinformation (deliberate dissemination of
misleading information) and misinformation (sharing of factually incorrect
information with good intentions) and the notion of fake news
• New Media: Include new and synthetic media, the difference
between 'real' and 'fake' (e.g. Deep Fakes)
• Awareness: Make students realise that because of algorithmic
personalisation they always have to look for alternative
information and views: broaden your view
• Out there: What do other sources say?

21. An inspiring example for educators
https://cor.stanford.edu

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Conclusions
• Critical reading is crucial for online reading
• Reader uses three knowledge sources: (1) Personal knowledge
and believes, (2) Authority of the creator and (3) Knowledge of
others. Teach students to use all.
• Don’t read only vertically, but use lateral reading
• Pay attention to epistemic processing in reading: Judgement,
Monitoring and Regulation
• Pay attention to Facts and fiction: recognising misinformation
and disinformation

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Jeroen Clemens
https://jeroenclemens.nl
contact@jeroenclemens.nl
@jeroencl