This evening I was able to join the monthly evening Zoom meeting of TIP Teachers, which is “Teachers for an Informed Public” in the state of Washington. As usual, a wealth of helpful media literacy resources were shared in the session, and I’ll attempt to highlight several of them in this post.
First of all, Shawn Lee and Liz Crouse have co-created the website Media Mentorship, in large part to share and empower educators to replicate the successes they have led in their local communities and throughout the state of Washington with MisInfoDay events through “Media Mentorship Events.” There are LOTS of great lesson materials and resources to bring this entire program to your school, and I need to dig into them more. I love their project tagline:
Misinformation tears us apart. Our students can bring us back together.
The 8 minute embedded video on the Media Mentorship website homepage provides a great overview and summary of the project and the available resources.
One of the participants in tonight’s online meetup was Rosemary (Donovan) Smith, who is the Managing Director of the Getting Better Foundation. One of the interesting (and cutting edge) resources on their website is an AI ChatBot which responds to user questions “through a media literacy framework.” Rosemary recommended the documentary “Trust Me,” which she helped produce:
Trust Me is a feature-length documentary exploring human nature, information technology, and the need for media literacy to help people trust one another, bring them together and create a more resilient population.
Our conversation this evening turned to wellness, health, and cell phones. I mentioned the Center for Humane Technology and their excellent podcast, “Your Undivided Attention.” Shawn found their May 2022 video, “6 Ways Social Media Hacks Your Brain” and we watched and discussed it together.
These are the six brain hacking methods of social media identified in the 7 minute video:
- Persuasive technology makes the trivial seem important by constantly triggering the brain’s salience network with notifications.
- Encourages seeking without fulfillment by exploiting the brain’s strong desire to want more than it enjoys.
- Forces multitasking, which depletes focus and cognitive resources.
- Weaponizes fear and anxiety by spreading negative content faster and more widely than positive content.
- Promotes constant social comparison, leading to negative self-perception and self-worth issues.
- Tells us whatever we want to believe by creating information bubbles and reinforcing confirmation bias.
We brainstormed some of the ways we might design student lessons which could help them dive more deeply into these concepts and theories. I was reminded of my own lesson, “Brain Hacking InfoPics,” which I use to encourage students to begin (or continue) interrogating media messages with essential questions about the author, audience, purpose, etc. of a media message. Quite importantly, I like to focus on media messages which elicit EMOTION, since that is a powerful way to get attention. I also use this lesson to introduce the SIFT web literacy framework (by Mike Caufield) which we use extensively on our unit about the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax / conspiracy theories.
Speaking of Mike Caufield, Shawn also shared the recent article Mike published in The Atlantic with Charlie Warzel, “The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine: A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.” (paywall free version) Since today is January 6th, its topics and message are especially relevant and timely.
The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine: A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away by @cwarzel.bsky.social & @mikecaulfield.bsky.social (The Atlantic, 6 Jan 2025)
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a…paywall free version: archive.ph/xcyIe
#MediaLit #MediaLiteracy #Jan6
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— Wes Fryer (@wesfryer.com) January 6, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Lastly, we had some discussion about measuring media literacy education’s impact. Rosemary mentioned the series of media literacy longitudinal studies and other reports by RAND, which I need to investigate further. I shared that I’d like to do some “action research” with my own middle school media literacy students to measure impact and effectiveness of my own lessons. If you have resources along these lines to suggest to me please share a comment or reach out via social media.
If you’d like to participate in TIP Teachers just fill out the Google Form on their website, click “Zoom Info” for an upcoming meeting.
In closing I’ll share this charge from the brain hacking video above, “Have a humane night!”
Source : TIP Teachers: Jan 2025
