Hey friends, it's me again and it's me again. I once again had some scheduling issues because hey, it's the end of the school year and you know, it happens. We're heading into summer. Hopefully we're all going to get a chance to rest and relax. I'm looking forward to talking to a bunch of folks this summer. And speaking of, we're going into summer. So we're going to be wrapping up our season here for the first season of the SLLN podcast. and I'm gonna be bringing you one more guest next week.
I'm very excited to talk to Katie Capshaw and she's gonna be sharing some great ideas with us. Before we get there, I don't wanna leave you hanging for the week in between, so I'm gonna share another lesson, but I wanted to take a second but first to just talk a little bit about this first season because I'll be honest, this has gone so much better than I ever thought it would. I had originally planned to do one episode a month. That was kinda where I was...
That's what I was doing when I was doing the second season of the One Lesson at a Time podcast for SLC. And I had so many folks so willing to share when I got started back in October that I thought, okay, maybe instead of once a month, I'll do once every two weeks. And then there were so many people, I was like, you know what? It's gonna be once a week. So I had originally thought maybe I would do...
10 episodes except I started in October so like nine or maybe eight in this first season and we're up in like the high 20s now. So just so beyond my wildest dreams. I've been so fortunate to talk to such wonderful folks. So thank you to everybody who has been a guest so far and I am looking forward to talking to all of my guests as we head into season two. I've already got some folks that I'm really looking forward to talking with and I really want to talk to you.
If I haven't actually had a chance yet. Talk to you to hear about the lesson that you've loved to hear about that activity that you think is so great Please do reach out. I would love to talk to you I'd love to hear about what you're doing and find ways that we can share that with other school librarians So if you haven't yet, please consider drop me a line or get in touch with me I'm on different kinds of social media spending a lot of time on Twitter these days on blue sky You can email me.
There's lots of ways so please do feel free to reach out. I love talking about folks, even if you don't want to be on the episode, I just love to talk to you about school library stuff, because I love it. So, okay, with that said, as we're heading into our second to last, our penultimate episode for season one, I figured I would come and share with you a lesson on information literacy, reliable resources, and perspective.
So this is another lesson from my argument and debate class that I used to teach. And it's one that I think is valuable because it gives students sort of an overview, and maybe teachers, an overview of what information literacy is. I recently wrote a piece about the difference between information literacy and media literacy. And I think it's really easy for folks to conflate those, maybe even confuse those, although they are very different. ideas, information literacy and media literacy.
Information literacy is the big picture that incorporates lots of different kinds of information, including within it the subgroup media literacy. We're not going to get into those differences right now, but I want to just kind of throw out there. Yes, there's absolutely a difference. And if you're interested in learning more, finding some ways to discuss that with folks, check it out on the AASL blog. But let's talk about this lesson. This. Let's talk about this lesson.
So this lesson starts with just kind of explaining to students, like let's define the term information literacy. Like what does that mean? And one of the things I lean on very heavily when I talk about information literacy with students is reliability and how we use the information. And I have since creating this lesson kind of come to believe there's two main elements. of information literacy.
And if you've got these two components covered, it's going to carry you through a wide range of different ways of thinking about information and how we use it, how we access it, how we think about it, how we share it. So I think we've got to consider context of the information. Where's it coming from? What is the situation it is a part of? because we very rarely get information that is by itself just its own separate thing.
It's almost always, if not always, part of something larger that's going on. And when we get a piece of information, we're only getting a piece of a much larger puzzle or a much larger picture. So we've got to just immediately stop and ask ourselves, okay, when I've got this information, where does it fit within a larger picture? Where is it sort of placed? both within my own personal knowledge, but also within the larger context of just the world around me. So we've got to consider context.
That's a key element. The other element is perspective. I need to think about not only my own personal perspective on the information, but what's the perspective of the source that is sharing this information? Because that can shape how the information is presented and what I actually end up seeing. So by thinking about context, and perspective, I'm sort of thinking about a lot of different ways that this information is interacting with the world and how I'm interacting with the information.
So if we're considering those two as starting elements of any kind of information literacy, I feel like we can't go wrong. So the lesson itself starts with, okay, we're talking about information literacy as being something about the reliability of the information we're looking at, because I think that's a key component.
And then I talk to the students a little bit about Sort of how technology offers us so many ways of getting information, but it doesn't technology doesn't do a great job of mediating that flood of information. So we've got to think a little bit about yes, we can get lots of information online, but we actually get too much information when it comes to finding stuff online. There's too much stuff out there for us to ever take all in.
So we've got to think about that the quantity issue versus the quality issue. And we've also got to think about how technology now can literally change what we think we're seeing. It can change images, it can change video, it can change audio. So what we think we see and what we think we hear isn't necessarily true. So we've got a lot to think about as we're looking at where we get our information. Within information literacy, media literacy is an important component, or news literacy.
And so... I bring up with the students the fact that we've got to think about where do we get our news? Where do we get our information? So we talk about that a little bit and we consider the word biased. Here's the thing. Some students aren't going to even know what the word bias means, right? So we've got to decide how we're going to present that definition. I just give them a very basic bias means favoring one side over another.
And I try to point out to them that all sources of information, come from humans and all humans have some kind of biases built in. Conscious, unconscious, and even the channels that we get information through have built in kinds of bias because there's no such thing as getting all of the information about a situation.
We just literally cannot, unless we are there ourselves and taking part in whatever's going on and even then we're still only getting our own personal perspective on what's going on, we're not necessarily getting all the points of view. So whatever information we get is going to have some kind of bias baked into it, just by its very existence. We need to be aware of that and we need to think about how do we try and minimize the bias or at least be aware of the bias.
And I tell the students ideally, yes, we want our information to come from unbiased sources, but we need to understand what the sources actually are. and understand that they are going to have some baked in bias just because of the information channel itself. And there's going to be bias based on the person that's reporting the information or sharing the information or even gathering the information in the first place.
They're going to place value on certain kinds of information over other kinds of information. So there's always going to be bias in any information that we're not gathering ourselves. And there's going to be bias in information that we do gather ourselves. And we've got to think about that. when it comes to thinking about bias.
Now I share the allsides .com media bias website which I used to use as part of the lesson and I have since kind of become a little bit ambivalent about sharing allsides .com.
It's been pointed out to me that when we look at sources that rate the bias of different media sources or news sources or information sources that a there's an inbuilt bias in those bias ratings and B it tends to put a variety of sources on the same playing surface as each other even though they may not deserve to be on the same level as each other by putting let's say NPR on the same rating chart as The Weekly World News, which is a source that used to talk about how Elvis was
cited in Florida and how I'm having Bigfoot's baby. Putting that on the same chart as NPR or the Wall Street Journal in some people's minds is going to conflate Weekly World News and these other sources, right? So we've got to consider when we're looking at these bias charts. Are they doing what we need them to do? Or are they actually maybe? setting up a different issue that we need to consider.
So then I talked to the students a little bit about perspective and context, why those are so incredibly important. And that was something that I added later on because it was not something that I was considering when I first started teaching this lesson. But it came to really stand out in my mind as a very important piece of information, piece of anchoring when we're thinking about information and news.
Within the slides that I shared with the students, There's a second slideshow that I bring the students to and it's just purely about perspectives and thinking about how we see, literally how we see things and sort of the way we look at information and the perspectives we see it from. And one of the very first slides is an image that it's a sort of a blue sky sort of a background and the front foreground.
is a white figure that is bulbous on one end and it's got two protrusions coming out the back. If you look at it one way, it kind of looks like a rabbit facing in one direction, his ears are sticking out the back of his head. If you look at it from a different direction, it kind of looks like maybe a duck or a goose with a bill that is facing in the opposite direction of the bunny, if you were seeing it as a bunny.
And so this picture... is includes the some speech bubbles and one of the speech bubble says hey look a duck and the other one says that's not a duck that's a rabbit and so I asked the students what do you see is that a duck or is it a rabbit and they go back and forth and they go back and forth and they go back and forth and they try and convince each other that you know it's a duck no it's a rabbit and then I asked them well
is there a way that we could find out if it was a duck or a rabbit and they go well no we can only see what's here and I said So we're only seeing some of the situation. We're not seeing the full picture. And I say if we pulled back, if we were able to pull the camera back from this image and see more of what was there, would having more context help us figure out if it was a duck or a rabbit? And sometimes the kids will go, no, no, it could be one or it could be other.
I said, well, it can't be both a duck and a rabbit, right? So if we pull the camera back, we're going to see either there's a duck body underneath here, or there's a rabbit body underneath here, or maybe it's some horrible mutant, but probably it's one of those two things, right?
So having more context and having a different perspective, if we change the perspective, we might get more context and that might help us figure out this thing that we're looking at that some people are gonna say is one thing and some people are gonna say is another because they're not seeing the full picture. And then that's followed by an image of a cylinder. section of a cylinder floating in space and there are two different colors of light shining on the cylinder.
Shining on it from one direction is a blue light and it makes a shadow of a square and shining on the 90 degree perpendicular direction is a yellow light and that makes the shadow of a circle. And the next slide shows that yes, the shadow of the square is true. Like that is actually a thing that is there. And the shadow of the circle is also true. Both of those things are true. And if I ask somebody, is this a square or is it a circle? It's true that it looks like a square in one direction.
It's true that it looks like a circle in another direction. But then pointing to the actual cylinder itself says this is truth. The truth is that it's not one or the other. That there's more going on. than just one angle. There's more to see than just this one perspective. There's more context than just the shadow. And then there's a following series of pictures that show different versions of this that actually show you that there's probably a lot more than just two ways to look at this.
And so there's going to be a lot of different opinions about what this could be or what it actually is. But if we pull that far enough, we can see how all of those things might be true for particular set of perspectives, but it's only when we look at the whole picture that we really truly understand what the whole thing is.
Then there's a couple of different pictures showing photographs that have been taken of different news stories from different perspectives that really kind of drive home the point of depending on where you place a camera, you can drastically affect what people think they're seeing. So, There's lots of different ways to help the students think about the fact that whatever mediated experience they're getting, it is mediated and they may not be seeing all of what's there.
And toward the end, there's a picture of, this floated around on the internet for quite a bit a while back, and there's a number on the ground.
and one person is pointing at it from one side and saying it's a six and somebody is on the other side pointing at it saying it's a nine and the text underneath that when it originally circulated said just because you are right does not mean I am wrong and the idea was when this originally circulated you can have a different opinion than somebody else and that doesn't mean that you're wrong but as I point out to the students well okay
One person's pointing at it because they're seeing it from one direction and see it as a six. The other person's pointing at it from the other direction, seeing it as a nine. Sure, what they think they're seeing is what they're saying.
But if we look at the bigger picture, if there's numbers on either side of this, if this is like a parking spot, a numbered parking spot, then there's either going to be a five on one side and a seven on the other, or there's going to be an eight on one side and a 10 on the other. This is either a six or a nine. It's not both. So sure, people can have different opinions. And sometimes thinking about perspective is important, but it's not enough. We've got to look at the bigger picture.
We've got to look at the context that piece of information is coming from. And I point out to students that they have to verify information because most media outlets exist to provide clear current. and factual information, but they're still going to be bias built in and they're not always going to be able to give us the full context and they're not always able to give us all the different perspectives.
It's not that they're trying to trick us necessarily, but we just need to bear these things in mind. They are facts that affect how we receive information. So with that kind of gone through and the students kind of using this to consider what they need to think about in terms of perspective and context. We come back to our main information literacy idea. I give them a couple of news literacy sources and point out a couple of facts
about finding reliable information like using .gov and .edu sites when they're doing research because those tend to be not perfect, but they tend to be a little more reliable than a .com or a .org or .net, which was a different lesson that we did talk about at a different point. I also remind them that we've got to confirm information when we get it from a source that we don't know personally.
And if it's a source that we haven't considered its bias, if we haven't thought about its perspective, if we haven't thought about the context it provides, we absolutely need to look at more than just one source. And we end, we get close to ending with a picture that shows, there's a picture. with a famous figure on it. And there's text. The text says, the trouble with quotes on the internet is that you can never know if they are genuine. And that is followed by an attribution.
And the attribution of that quote is Abraham Lincoln. And the picture that is on this quote of a famous person is Benjamin Franklin. I actually had a student the first time I showed this think that A, Abraham Lincoln really said that, and B, that the picture was Abraham Lincoln. They took it as it was given to them rather than thinking critically about it.
And so I point out to the students, we need to think about what we find just because we see it, just because it's packaged for us, just because it's put together a certain way, just because it looks like something we're familiar with. a quote and an attribution with a picture doesn't mean it's necessarily true. So we've got to think about how reliable our sources are and we've got to think about the perspective and the context. We've got to use what we already know to think about these things.
And the lesson itself ends with a series of misinformation and information literacy and news literacy games. And they're links to different websites that have different kinds of games. There's factitious, which challenges players to figure out which news stories are real and which ones are made up. And some of them are surprising for which ones can be real.
Then there's a game called Bad News, which teaches kids how disinformation spreads by making them the bad guy on a social media network that is trying to spread misinformation. So challenging them to try and trick people by using this series of preset... social media messages, which they really love, but also shows them here's how people manipulate information on social media sites. There's also Go Viral, which shows some specific ways people try to spread misinformation about COVID -19.
There's Harmony Square, which challenges people to be the chief disinformation officer for a small town, which is kind of fun. And The News Literacy Project offers the Should You Share It? quiz, which I challenge students to try and figure out if they can see why they should or shouldn't share, whether they are seeing reliable information or whether it's something that they should maybe not be sharing around other folks. So all of that is put together in a set of slides.
Again, you are more than welcome to take these, modify these, use these in the way that's going to work for you with your students. Maybe there's just a piece or two here and there. Maybe you just want the games. That's okay. use what works for you. So those are the elements of the lesson on information literacy, news literacy, reliable sources. Hopefully this is something you can use and now it's time to go to our book break.
So when I share books, I tend to share books that I think you can use in your school, that you might use with students or you might want to share with your staff. But this time, I am just, we're going into the summer and I have been enjoying a couple of different books by some different authors that are just fun for me to read. And they're not necessarily going to fit into my school library, either at the middle school or the high school level.
They're just awesome, fun, enjoyable books for an adult to read. So I'm going to share a couple of... different things that I've been enjoying. Maybe you'll find something that you want. Maybe you won't. That's okay too. So the thing that I'm currently deeply into is a series called Superpowers by Drew Hayes. And I actually came on Drew Hayes through a different series that he wrote that is called the Villains series. And it starts with forging Hephaestus.
And that series focuses on... a world where there are superheroes and supervillains. And this book follows someone who is trying to become a supervillain. And there's actually a guild of villains that try to regulate how villains operate in this world to help them get the most bang for their buck, let's say, and not trigger the superheroes of the world. And some of the superheroes are maybe not as good as they, as people think they are.
And some of the heroes maybe aren't as bad as people think they are. And it's a really, It's a very gray world of super powerful people. I'm kind of a superhero nerd, so I really liked it. Each book is incredibly thick. They are these chunks, they're cinder blocks of books, but they're so good. I had a hard time putting down the villain series. And so now I'm in Superpowers, which is a different series about a different world with superheroes.
And it follows this group of teenagers who are going into college. and they live in a world where there are superheroes and supervillains, but there are some people who are born with some kind of powers. And people who can control those powers are called supers. But there are some people who have powers that they can't really control.
They're called powers, and they can be very dangerous because they are not necessarily in control of their ability that gives them really amazing ways to interact with the world. Some of them. Some of them are very mundane, basic things. And... this group of powered teenagers get an operation that help them take control of their abilities and they go into a hero training program that runs in this world. There's several of them set up all over the US and in other countries.
The one that we're following, this small group of students, they're at a college that has this sort of secret, semi -secret program. for training people on how to become heroes. And only a tiny, tiny fraction of the people who go through this program actually end up becoming heroes. And there are five books in the series. There's basically year one, two, three, four are their years of college, freshman, sophomore, junior, senior.
And then there's a fifth book called Corpies that I haven't gotten to yet. I'm in their senior year right now. And it's really interesting to see the way that Hayes has sort of thought through this world of. what it might be like to live in a world that actually had people with these abilities and powers. Not all of them are on the side of good, not all of them are on the side of evil. Some of them kind of blur those lines a little bit, but it kind of tackles some interesting ideas.
And it's just kind of fun to see different ways of coming up with ways to create people with powers. So that I've been enjoying so much. And there's one other series that I wanted to share. I had never heard of... Robert Jackson Bennett before, till a couple of months ago. And I had seen a book recommended. He writes a lot of fantasy stuff apparently. I had never heard of him, never heard of any of his series.
But not too long back, I was on Reddit, where I find a lot of book recommendations actually. And someone had suggested his Foundry Side series. And I was so... curious when I read the description of this. So I went and I picked up the first book. It's actually the Founders Trilogy. First book is Foundry Side by Robert Jackson Bennett. And the first book starts with a young woman who has this strange ability. She through a series of events, we find out that she was she used to be a slave.
and she has gotten free, but while she was a slave, she had this operation done against her will that gave her this ability to touch objects, touch inanimate objects, and basically be able to communicate with them and see, feel, experience whatever they were able to experience, as it were. And this makes her an incredibly good thief. And so she is this thief that uses this power to...
She's kind of working her way up in the underworld of this particular area where there are groups that have created these little tiny fiefdoms inside of this kingdom. And each one of these different families, fiefdoms, has people who can scribe the words of creation onto objects and make those objects do things with those words of creation. And it's just... The magic system is so cool. It's so different and so amazingly put together. And the books themselves are really, really fascinating.
So I like, I tore through all three of those books. So if you're looking for something that's kind of like some fun fantasy, you might want to check out not fun, but like deep and interesting. And it does have some very funny moments and it does have some really interesting moments, but it goes kind of dark in places. So just be aware going in, it's got some darkness. but in a really engaging and interesting way. That's the Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett.
Or if you're more into superheroes like I am, maybe you want to check out something by Drew Hayes. Each one of his books is a cinder block, but they are really interesting and engaging cinder blocks. He writes super short chapters, but he writes a million of them. I am on, I think I'm about 60 % of the way through, I'm reading on my Kindle. I think I'm about 60, 65 % of the way through the book I'm on right now, and I'm on chapter 260 or something like that.
So. lots of short chapters anyway there's a couple books for you to think about we're gonna have one more guest coming up next week then we're gonna head into our summer I hope that you are getting ready to enjoy one if you're not already there and yeah that's about it for now we'll see you next week