Join the discussion on the paper concerning critical thinking, co-authored with Federica Russo and Jean H.M. Wagemans of the UvA: "Argument-Checking: A Critical Pedagogy Approach to Digital Literacy." Check: https://www.academia.edu/s/d3415c0371
The paper was published in the proceedings of AIUCD - Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale 2022.
With the large amount of published news, the ability to evaluate the credibility of online news has become essential. This has led to a massive growth of fact-checkers and technical tools to detect fake news. Yet, what we can learn from the recent #coronaviruscrisis is that there still is a limited amount of effort that focuses on the use of information literacy. To assist people to critically access online information and news.
Critical thinking - the disciplined process of skillfully evaluating information - provides a scalable means to critically engage with online content. And when practically shaped as argument-checking it's likely a sustainable vaccine in the current age of "infodemic".
Developing a theoretical, practical, and pedagogical approach to argument-checking is also part of a collaboration with MMGA, within which we are designing training programmes on argument-checking, tailored to different audiences. MMGA is a blockchain-based annotation platform (with hundreds of registrants) in which screened and trained expert and/or critical thinking readers can annotate high-impact news sites such as NU.nl and AD.nl, two of the ‘Big Four’ largest Dutch online news platforms. MMGA has set up a collaboration between publishers and a screened community of readers, viewers and listeners to jointly counteract the effects of misinformation and improve the quality of media. . To achieve this goal, MMGA has built a transparent system for actionable suggestions from this community pool, which functions as an annotation platform and has been tested on NU.nl (translated as NOW.nl), a major Dutch news outlet with 7–8 million visitors. The test involved a group of critical and knowledgeable NU.nl readers (called ‘annotators’) who offered suggestions to increase the journalistic quality through the balanced use of sources and clearer transfer of information (Brave, 2019, 2021). More info: www.mmga.io/en/