Canadians consider online misinformation one of the most serious threats facing the country, on a par with climate change and ahead of issues such as infectious disease, concerns about the global economy and cybersecurity.
MediaSmarts’ experts are available to facilitate virtual and in-person workshops in school and community settings for parents/guardians, educators, youth and the general public. Our workshops cover topics such as online safety, misinformation, digital well-being, managing tech in the home, diversity and representation in media, digital citizenship, critical thinking, online hate and more.
This public awareness program, created in partnership between MediaSmarts and the Facebook Canadian Election Integrity Initiative, focuses on authentication of online information.
There have been four main approaches to integrating digital media literacy into the curriculum.[1] The first, infusion, makes digital media literacy an integrated part of the inquiry process. The second, integration, makes digital and/or media into its own, separate subject, or gives it a prominent place within an existing subject: media literacy was first brought into the Ontario curriculum in Ontario following this approach in 1989 as one of the four strands of English Language Arts, on a par (at least in theory) with Reading, Writing and Listening.[2] The third, cross-curricular competencies, identifies digital media literacy competencies as “not something to be added to the literacy curriculum, but a lens for learning that it is an integral part of all classroom practice”[3]; and the last, dispersion, locates them within various grades and subjects without any overall design.[4]
While it’s important to be skeptical of political news, especially during an election, it’s also important to be able to recognize and dismiss outright disinformation: the deliberate spreading of false or misleading information. To a large extent, attitudes towards information and expertise themselves have become politicized, with people on the left being more likely to trust experts and their advice and those on the right being less so.
One of the reasons why teens turn to shortcuts, such as judging a claim based on the reliability or apparent authenticity of the person making it, or turning to peers and influencers over trusted expert sources, is that they simply encounter too much information to deal with. To overcome this, we need to learn information sorting: how to quickly tell whether or not a source is even worth our attention before considering it.
Contrary to popular belief, cyberbullying remains a problem in high school. Students in these grades should learn the ways that they can speak out and make a difference, both in cases of individual cyberbullying and in building more tolerant and respectful online spaces.
While many of us strongly prefer online sources when seeking out health and science information, a majority first encounter health or science stories through traditional news outlets.
Because social media makes us all broadcasters, we have a responsibility not just to avoid sharing misinformation but to take action when people in our network share it.
There are several challenges in identifying evidence-based best practices in media education: first, because most evaluations compare media literacy interventions either to a control group or to another intervention not based on media literacy; second because, as noted above, there is often a mismatch between what a program is teaching and the results it is measuring. As a result, “empirical evidence of best pedagogical practice, as opposed to self-testimony or retrospective reporting, is scarce”[1]; in other words, while we can say generally that media literacy works, it is difficult to say precisely which elements of media literacy programs work better than others.