Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv, professor and student at Stanford University, maintain that it is crucial to teach students how to recognize misinformation, a point that the recent election made clear. The Republican Party repeatedly called Democratic candidates “radical socialists” and smeared any proposal to improve the lives of people as “socialism.”
They wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The 2020 election has once again demonstrated how easy it is to spread misinformation online. And universities across the U.S. are failing in teaching students how to identify it. Many colleges offer students guides to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites. But too many of them base their advice on a report from 1998. That’s nine years before the first iPhone, and 18 years before Russian interference sparked an urgent discussion on how we interpret information online.
There’s something deeply wrong with using advice on the internet of 20 years ago to teach students how they CONTINUE READING: Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog
