Why could California's new law on media education turn against schools?

The California Governor, Jerry Brown, has just signed a bill to promote the teaching and learning of media education in public schools, making it one of the few states that require a such teaching.

California law requires the State Department of Education to help teachers by providing resources on the subject on its website by the end of 2019. The decision to determine who should receive this instruction and how would be left to the school districts.

So, what exactly is media education? According to medialiteracynow.org:

Education in media education – which teaches students to think critically about media messages and use the media to create their own messages – is a key skill of the 21st century. Media literacy is essential to the health and well-being of American children, as well as their future participation in the civic and economic life of our democracy.

Media Education:

The California law was inspired in part by a study conducted in 2016 at Stanford University, which revealed that most college students could not distinguish the facts from the fiction on the Internet, including distinguishing the advertisements from the news . The report was produced by the Stanford History Education Group and the senior author and founder of the organization wrote the following post about his concerns about the law inspired by his study.

It is Sam Wineburg, professor of education and history of Margaret Jacks (courtesy) at Stanford University. His latest book, "Why learn history (when he's already on your phone)," has just been released. His latest article on this blog was an article on the National Assessment of Education Progress titled: "The Nation's Report" indicates that it evaluates critical thinking in history – but NAEP gets an F at this respect.

[How to teach history (and how not to)]

By Sam Wineburg

As a social scientist, you dream that your research will lead to changes in the world. Recently, I had this dream: California passed a bill to provide resources for media education in schools in this state, and the bill cited a study by the team of research. I should be ecstatic, right?

I'm not. I'm worried.

The authors of the bill are certainly right in saying that children need help. Our 2016 survey of 7,804 students in 12 US states showed that today's "digital natives" are numerically naive. They confuse ads with news. They equate placement in a Google search with reliability. They are blinded by graphs full of data and rarely ask where the data comes from.

I share the legislators' view that we have to do something. What worries me is that the solutions they offer are more likely to exacerbate the problem than to solve it.

Adopt the dominant approach to teaching credibility Web, by giving students a list of questions and asking them to delve deeply into a single website. Such lists, which appear as guidelines on many colleges and universities websites, tell students to spot the signs of digital doubts: banner ads, spelling mistakes, broken links, and so on. Students are told that they should evaluate if the information is up-to-date; to see if a contact is listed; and to evaluate whether the top-level domain (.org or .com) reveals "everything about the author or the source".

Forget the fact that children (and the rest of us) lack patience to browse question lists. There is a bigger problem. In the era of cheap models, creating a web page of official appearance or the list of a contact are laughable features. The last time a .org designation meant anything, it was when dial-up modems were at the forefront of technology.

Checklists offer an obsolete analog solution to a fundamentally digital challenge.

Consider the results of a recent study that we conducted and in which we observed fact checkers in reputable news outlets when evaluating live websites. We compared these professionals to other intelligent users: academics from three colleges and undergraduates at Stanford, the most selective university in the United States. We found that professors and students frequently had the same attributes: professional-quality graphics, official logos, and non-profit status statements. They lingered too long on one website, reading the screen from top to bottom as though it was a printed page.

The auditors did the opposite. Landing on an unknown site, they evaluated it by leaving it. They read laterally, compressing an unknown site in seconds, opening a new tab (or even better, several) and investigating the organization or person behind the information before crediting the site itself. Knowing how easy it is to handle, information checkers have avoided the "About" page of a site. For them, the Web East a website: you get a fix on a node coming out of it and looking at where it fits into a larger pattern. Rather than clicking on the first results, the fact checkers practiced click of restraint, extract the excerpt (the short sentence that accompanies each search result) before making a good first click.

Just as surprisingly, fact checkers have consulted a source that we usually tell kids to avoid: Wikipedia. But they did not always read the articles – instead, they often collected entries for the useful information that underpinned them so often, jumping to the bottom to follow the more authoritarian links that Wikipedia requires as a backup of its content. They knew that the more controversial the subject, the more likely it was that an article would be "protected" by the various locks that Wikipedia applies to prevent edits by anyone except high-level editors. They looked at the "Talk" page, the tab hiding on the screen, next to "Article," which offers an often fascinating commentary on the evidence relating to the claims of the article. Compared to the others we tested, fact checkers drew better conclusions in a fraction of the time.

They learned more by reading less.

So, instead of giving kids checklists, let them spend a minute looking at what the Web says about a site or organization before they dive – or worse, before a link to their friends. This, however, should not be taken as a plea to turn any reading into speed exercises. Careful reading – the deliberate search for patterns, details and nuances – is essential to any curriculum. But when the goal is to survive an avalanche of information, spending a few minutes analyzing the prose of a website – without even knowing whether it is reliable or not – is a huge waste of time and effort. 'energy.

In the short term, let's teach the credibility of the Web based on what the experts actually do. We should teach some strategies of choice and encourage them to put them into practice until they become habitual – as researcher Mike Caulfield says, the equivalent of looking in the rear-view mirror when changing lanes on the highway. Such strategies will not eliminate all the errors, but they will surely fill the most costly mistakes.

And while we're at it, let's not forget that an hour of media education between trigonometry and lunch is only an interim solution. A redesign of the entire program: how should we teach history when Holocaust deniers flood cyberspace with concocted "evidence"; or science, when anti-vaxxers maintain a "proven" link between autism and measles vaccines; or in maths, when statistics are routinely manipulated and the demonstrable effects disappear with graphs doubling optical illusions?

Introducing the curriculum in the 21st century will not be cheap, but the alternative would surely be more expensive.

In 2016, California voters had to consider 17 voting initiatives, ranging from proposals to increase the tobacco tax to the repeal of the death penalty. If an elector devotes only 10 minutes to each of them, we would consider it an act of responsible citizenship. The challenge ahead is to teach future voters to do these 10 minutes count.

The destiny of democracy depends on it.