Combating Digital Polarization: Teaching Undergraduates Web literacy Using "Four Moves and a Habit"

Abstract

In this session, presenters will share how we launched this national project on our campus through collaboration with faculty in a variety of disciplines. Presenters will introduce the classroom activities that we employed to teach undergraduate students to analyze and verify the information they find online, focusing on an innovative technique referred to as “Four Moves and a Habit”. Presenters will explain how this technique is incorporated into a tiered information literacy program through the curricula with assignments in a variety of courses including freshman seminars, writing composition, political science, and environmental science. Presenters will demonstrate how to weave “Four Moves and a Habit” into the traditional web evaluation curriculum and how to engage students in verifying information with gamification and interactive technologies. A pre-test and post-test assessment are incorporated into the project to measure students’ ability to verify, contextualize, and reason about information they find online. Presenters will discuss this assessment and share plans for future applications of the DigiPo curriculum.