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0.504x

Sorting Truth From Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning

About This Course

Fake news and misinformation pose an urgent challenge to citizens across the globe. Multiple studies have shined a light on people’s difficulty in distinguishing truth from fiction, reliable information from sham. As we approach the November 2020 election, we can expect our screens to be flooded, even more so, with digital content that plays fast and loose with the truth.

With educators from around the world and faculty from MIT and Stanford University, you will learn quick and effective practices for evaluating online information that you can bring back to your classroom. The Stanford History Education Group has distilled these practices from observations with professional fact-checkers from the nation’s most prestigious media outlets from across the political spectrum. Using a combination of readings, classroom practice lessons, and assignments, you will learn how to teach the critical thinking skills needed for making wise judgments about web sources.

At the end of the course, you will be better able to help students find reliable sources at a time when we need it most.

What You'll Learn

Educators—from teachers to librarians—will learn about:

  • New knowledge that can be applied in your lessons and resources for your own students.

  • How to shift from ineffective information literacy practices towards the kinds of strategies employed by professional fact-checkers.

Syllabus

Unit 1: Search Like a Fact Checker

Unit 2: The Two Big Fact Checker Moves: Lateral Reading & Click Restraint

Unit 3: Evaluating Different Types of Evidence

Unit 4: Adapting Civic Online Reasoning

License and Terms of Use

This course is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY), which permits you to freely download, share, and adapt the material so long as you give appropriate credit.

Course Staff

Justin Reich

Justin Reich

Justin Reich is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an instructor in the Scheller Teacher Education Program, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the co-founder of EdTechTeacher, a professional learning consultancy devoted to helping teachers leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments. He was previously the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, where he led the initiative to study large-scale open online learning through the HarvardX Initiative, and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Justin is an alumni of the Fellows program at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he created the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative to examine how social media are used in K-12 classrooms. He writes the EdTechResearcher blog for Education Week, and his writings have appeared in Science, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Educational Researcher, the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Sam Wineburg

Sam Wineburg

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and History at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University. His writing has appeared in the New York Times , Washington Post , Slate , TIME Magazine as well as in many scholarly journals. His latest book (Chicago, 2018) is called Why Learn History (When It is Already on Your Phone).

  1. Course Number:

    0.504x
  2. Classes Start:

  3. Classes End:

  4. Length:

    9 weeks
  5. Year Created:

    2021
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