Online Safety and Digital Literacy: Start Thinking About It
Yasmine Claire takes us on a tour of some concepts.
When you first start thinking about dealing with information overload, you can get overwhelmed by jargon. Look at these terms: Digital Literacy. Media Literacy. Information Literacy. Critical Thinking. Online Reasoning. Fact-Checking.
But they all boil down to just two issues: keeping yourself safe on the internet (and offline) and keeping yourself sane. (This is also the mission of Media Buddhi.)
Luckily, the building blocks for all the buzz words above are the same.
A few weeks ago, we spoke with Yasmine Claire, a teacher at Stonehill International School, Bengaluru, which runs under the International Baccalaureate programme. Claire, who teaches Theory of Knowledge, Psychology and English, is uniquely qualified to get us started in digital literacy. And when we asked her to take an online class for children and young adults, she readily agreed.
It quickly became clear though that her workshop works for everybody, and not just children and young adults. If you have the time, we recommend you watch the entire video above. It runs to a little more than an hour. However, if you’re pressed for time, here are lightly edited excerpts from her talk:
How do you know what you know?
How do I know? Or…how do you know what you know?
I know two plus two is four. I know a bit of geography...I know that the earth goes around the sun. But how do I know this? This question is deceptively simple, because when you start asking yourself it, you begin to think, "Yeah, I don't really know this. This is something my parents always told me. This is something my teacher said. My friends were discussing this. And because they said it, and I like my friends, it must be true."
To answer the question, How do I know what I know? is difficult...
When we ask this question, [sometimes we get the answer]: “we know it from Google.” So my next question is: Is Google all that reliable?
How Google Search distorts information
Type in, for example, "rich person" on Google Search and then click on Images. Remember, I've used the word 'person'. Not 'man', not 'woman'. But things that get thrown up are white men in suits. You have to count at least 6-7 white men before you find a woman. And even more if you have to look for a person of color. This is just how the Google algorithm works. It contributes to a lot of the misinformation that we have today.
Why do we take reports at face value?
We tend to take reports at face value [for] many reasons. If I call one of my psychology students and ask them to explain why, they would say it's because we are hardwired [to do so]. We are evolutionarily predisposed to take the quick route. It's called System One thinking. System One thinking is quick, it's intuitive. You don't really want to think something through because you are programmed to save energy. You're programmed to use the energy for other things. So if you read a headline, no matter how misinformation-and disinformation-filled it is, you tend to believe it.
Another [reason] is our confirmation bias. We tend to look at information through lenses that only prove our point and disregard things that don't. So this especially impacts students.
Questioning sources
We tend not to question our sources. And this is becoming a huge problem, especially in the last 5-8 years. We have a lot of digital sources that look very, very good. They are well-designed. They use the right kind of language. If these are science-based websites, they use scientific terms, phrases like “clinical trials have shown”, and “research has proved that…”.
So we tend not to have the time to double check [those claims] on our own.
If you’re researching or if your child is researching a specific topic, encourage them to go beyond Wikipedia. I tell all my students that if they put something in the bibliography that is a Wikipedia link, I don't accept it. So what I mean by this is, use Wikipedia as a stepping stone. Read it. Get a gist of what you're researching for from there. But please move on beyond that because Wikipedia is reliable to an extent, but not to a complete extent.
Knowledge from authority
To what extent should we rely on knowledge given by authority? And if we do, what are the potential problems over there? Why can knowledge from an authority figure be problematic?
You hear this sort of very authoritarian, confident voice. That person is using language that you can relate to…
…So how do we work through this? So how do you make sure that the online-time spent by your children is productive, qualitative and not riddled with misinformation? The first thing is that you have to reflect on the information yourself. And then teach your children to reflect on it. Analyze information. Give your children a piece on a topic from The Guardian, from a right-wing website, from another news website like Al Jazeera [English], and compare the same piece of information and see how it's presented differently.
That is a very important step towards media literacy. It helps you to understand and it helps you to see that the same information can be presented so differently.
We live in a Eurocentric world
We live in a very, very Eurocentric world. One of the things that I did in school was for my English syllabus. I just removed every single American and European and English writer. So there was no Shakespeare, there was no William Wordsworth. My students had to look at Indian poets. They looked at African poets, they looked at Latin American authors and poets, to the point where one child said, I thought we were in an international school, why are we only doing Indian poets? And that really struck me. And for that moment, I was taken aback, but I explained it to him and I told him why we are not looking at Eurocentric poets, and then he was okay with it. It's an initial bias, that if I'm looking at poetry, if I'm looking at stories, I can only look at people like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, etc, etc.
Help your children
So, reflect, research and help your children resolve any kind of questions that they have. Any kind of challenges that they feed and that they experience. You sit with your child or you yourself evaluate the reliability of the content. Not everything you read is reliable, no matter how well it is presented.
How can you become an enquiring critical thinker?
How do I become an enquiring critical thinker? Please examine your cognitive biases. All of us have cognitive biases. Examine them. Question before you accept. Learn about your logical fallacies.
In the beginning of this presentation, I asked you: How do you know what you know? You know something as a result of a cognitive conclusion you've come to, you also know something as a result of an emotional conclusion you come to. A lot of learning comes through emotion. A lot of learning comes through memory, stories that can be passed on in your families, in your culture, in your societies. There are many ways of knowing. You need to know what your strongest way of knowing is, and try and see why you see the world through that lens.
Digital safety for children
Finally, just a very quick thing on digital safety for children. I want to begin with something that parents should not do. Please don't be overbearing in your internet monitoring. Our children are smart. They are digital natives. They are a bit smarter than us. They know how to get around all kinds of restrictions that you create. Don't have that kind of situation on your hands. Don't be overbearing.
If you give them confidence and you show them that you have confidence in them, their online experience is going to be different. Terribly strict online restrictions always backfire. Don't always limit internet usage because they will find ways and rebel, just as any one of us would. I would if I was a student.
For getting young people to hold social media accounts: Most social media platforms have an age limit before which you cannot join.
Don't stop your teenager, for example from having a social media account. Talk to them about it, interact with them about it. Don't force yourself to be on their friend list if they don't want you. But give them the confidence that you're there for them when they experience any kind of an uncomfortable situation on the internet.
Interland is a very interactive adventure game kind of platform that helps young people understand internet security.
One thing that we tell our students is: everything leaves a digital footprint. I’m amazed that children are so good with technology. They know of all kinds of tech and social media related things, but don't seem to realize the kind of digital footprint they leave.
Are there any particular subjects you would like me to tackle or improve/expand upon? Comment here or reply to this email. I’m always interested in doing better.