Blog 2: Our Literacies Have Literacies! Librarians as Sponsors of Literacy

 

 


Video thumbnail shows headshot of Buffy Hamilton, a White woman with shoulder length brown hair and red scarf around her neck. She is standing in front of a dry erase board and above that is a screen that shows a slide from a presentation. 

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Because we cannot see the effects of our information diet (The Liturgists, 2017), we do not know when we are over-consuming what I’m calling “junk information.” 

 

My information diet is social media, news from sources like NPR, and primarily print media of books of poetry and nonfiction. Most of the news I encounter is from social media, either from news organization’s social media post or individuals re-posting news organizations. One aspect of my information diet I’m encountering more is AI generated images that are presented as real, or “born digital images” (Valenza, 2016, Fake news section). 

 

Some people on my social media re-posted an AI image of people at a “Cocaine Festival.” I was able to tell it was an AI image because of how some of the fingers of individual appeared, but the person who posted it thought it was real. I commented on the post that it was an AI-generated image but wasn’t sure if they knew what that meant, and they never commented. I wonder how many of my students would be able to tell they were AI-generated images. 

 

You can read more about this viral post here: False! Photos of Cocaine Festival inMexico AI-generated.  

 

A school librarian’s information diet should be varied and diverse as the learners/communities we serve. One thing that stands out to me from the podcast is when they say the more we agree with something, the more we need to be more skeptical of it (The Liturgists, 2017). Being more aware about the information we consume, identifying our own biases, and seeking information outside of our comfort zone or area of expertise should be consistent for librarian information diet. 

 

I am a former acolyte of CRAPP. This week’s lecture and resource was the first I have heard about triangulation and I like it better than CRAPP. I always felt that CRAPP was somehow inadequate because it was too many steps and potentially confusing for students. As shown in the Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy many high school learners do not possess adequate news/information literacy skills (Valenza, 2016) needed to effectively use a resource like CRAPP. This evokes the frameworks for me.

 

Profile of the South Carolina Graduate, South Carolina Department of Education. Image includes blue and yellow colors, a globe is in the center surrounded by words that describe that knowledge, skills, and characteristics a South Carolina graduate should possess.
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The P21 Frameworks remind me of the South Carolina Department of Education’s Profile of the SC Graduate (see image above). Critical thinking skills and information and media literacy skills are essential to the P21 Framework and the SC Profile of a Graduate. In the Podcast, they discussed the steps of determining if something is fake news. Those steps include determining if there is an editorial review board, who owns the publication, is it well written and more steps (The Liturgists, 2017). Additionally, a person can use sites such as PolitiFact or Snopes to check facts. All of these are good steps, but they require a person to know the steps and take the time to check the information. In short, they require critical thinking.

 

Some literacies include media literacy, digital literacy, information literacy, technological literacy, news literacy, civic literacy. For students to be proficient in any of these literacies, they must possess critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is like an umbrella in which all the literacies are sheltered underneath. Frank W. Baker is a also a leading expert in providing literacy tools to educators. In her YouTube lecture, Hamilton (2014) uses Brandt’s“sponsors of literacy”  to describe how librarians can play a positive role in developing literacy for students. As time progresses and technology evolves, librarians will have new aspects of literacy to teach to students. It's our responsibility to make sure our information diet includes ways we can keep up with the evolving times and burgeoning literacies.

 

 

References

Antero Garcia. (2014, February 11). Metanarratives of literature practices: Libraries as

sponsors of literacies. [Video] YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boOZI-hGlyI  


The Liturgists (Producer). (2017, March 7). Fake News & Media Literacy [Audio podcast] The Liturgists Podcast. https://theliturgists.com/fake-news-media-literacy-podcast-page/

 

Profile of a South Carolina graduate (2015). South Carolina Department of Education, https://ed.sc.gov/about/profile-of-sc-graduate/

 

Valenza, J. (2016) “Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A News Literacy Toolkit for a post-truth world.” School Library Journal.  https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/


 

Comments

  1. Megan SextonJune 25, 2023 at 8:10 PM

    "Junk information" is an excellent term for a lot of what is posted online! I found your section regarding AI generated images very interesting--I would be interested to know how difficult some of those images can be to spot or if most of them have those telltale signs like you mentioned in your example. AI is still fairly new to me but seems to have gotten more prevalent, with even Snapchat adding an AI feature.

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