Information and media literacy in libraries
In today's newsletter, I'm celebrating Victoria's historic treaty laws, I look at media and news literacy in libraries and share a six panel comic from a recent workshop.
Welcome to my free newsletter. Stay up to date with all my latest writings and ramblings. Wherever curiosity takes me.
First, I want to start with the news that Victoria’s Statewide Treaty Bill has passed the upper house with support from Labor, Greens, Animal Justice and Legalise Cannabis MPs. This means it is the first of its kind. A proper Treaty between the First Nations people of Victoria and the State Government. On behalf of the Assembly, Co-chair and Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung and Dhudhuroa woman Ngarra Murray said:
“This is a historic moment for our people. We will tell our children about today, and they will tell their children, passing down to future generations the story of how decades of Aboriginal resilience and activism led to Australia’s first Treaty.”
“Treaty marks the beginning of a new era, one where First Peoples’ 60,000 years of knowledge and culture is respected and celebrated. It’s an opportunity for all Victorians to acknowledge our shared history, heal and move forward together.”
This is momentous, historic and, hopefully, will lead to other states getting serious with their own Treaty process.
I wanted to share that first because, this was and will always be Aboriginal land. Long overdue, this Treaty is now reality.
This week I attended a webinar(or I should say, I had to watch the recording) on news and media literacy with Dr Aimee Hourigan who’s doing some great work with ABC Education. She mentioned that 74% of Australian adults express concern about misinformation and 97% don't have skills to verify information online.
She also shared that one in four adults say social media is their main source of news and Australians under 35 see mainstream news media as a major threat of misinformation (46%), which is higher than their distrust of politicians (43%). With a very concerning, 41% of young people agreeing they know how to tell fake news stories from real stories.
Given all this and with the changing media landscape, with people getting their news predominantly through social media, podcasts and influencers, there are serious concerns and impacts on the quality of news and information that people are receiving. In this context, it’s great to know that libraries are seen as a trusted institution.
It was interesting to see how the program was delivered in partnership between Parramatta Library and ABC Education. A library staff member was involved in the workshops. Surprisingly, a large number of the attendees hadn't been or weren't regular at the library but they were keen to come back for other programs about media literacy and even media making.
It would be interesting to see if we can do a similar program at our library as I believe it's absolutely essential to learn to assess biases, verify sources and quality of information. Developing critical thinking skills in the community is about social cohesion and promoting healthy citizenship and democracy. Definitely a lot of food for thought here.
So, how do we support young people and adults to gain the media knowledge and skills to engage critically with news and media?
In schools, I’ve been saying for nearly two decades now that Media Studies should be a core subject (like English and Maths), at least from Year 7. Yes, we can embed it into different subjects, but it should be its own subject. Young people want to be heard, they want to see their lived experiences, needs and interests reflected in media. They also want to engage with media in healthy ways and are keen to learn.
And, we need to also engage with adults who are being hit with a rapidly changing media landscape so they can keep up with the changes, evaluate/assess sources and engage with media and information challenges. Learning to consume and create media critically is instrumental to our future and in my view, public libraries can play a vital role in this.
KICKING AROUND THE NET
What if we’ve been teaching reading wrong all this time? Educator Timothy Shanahan has some thoughts in a thought provoking article published on The Harvard Gazette. To me, he makes a lot of sense, we need to challenge young readers more. In fact, while reading it memories flooded in of Vygotsky social learning, scaffolding and the zone of proximal development. I couldn’t help but smile when his name and theories were mentioned at the end of the article.
A litle aside…
When I was a teacher, I often said to students who complained that something was hard, “if it’s easy you’re not learning, it’s my job to give you something hard that will challenge you, but not too hard that I will lose you.” I feel that he’s right, there’s often a tendency to give kids a book at their level, but it’s more important to follow their interests, to engage them with texts they want to read, so they develop a connection with reading, so it becomes something that is enjoyable. And to give them books that challenge them. I remember a student who was dead bored with the text that he had to read for English. He was in Year 7 and the mandated novel did not interest him. It was too easy and plain for him. He wasn’t challenged and he was bored. Instead, he was reading Frank Herbert’s Dune and he devoured the book. We talked about it and he got so much out of it. Like Shanahan says, we should definitely be bolder in giving kids books that will challenge them.
The ever reliable and on point Amy Remeikis published an excellent article recently after David Marr’s horrendous interview with Chris Hedges. She makes lots of very strong, relevant points about journalism (I recommend reading the whole article). The most important issue is that Australian media seems to be concerned with being balanced and objective. It sounds great on paper, but it’s totally misguided. Trying to be objective and balanced gave us panels where climate scientists had to debate climate deniers and their endless conspiracies, mistruths and fabrications. Trying to be objective, has given us two years of mainstream media struggling to report on an ongoing genocide and giving constant air time to the criminals. A journalist should investigate and report truthfully. That’s the kind of journalist I want. In Amy’s own words:
It’s about moral clarity. You can’t be ‘objective’ about fascism. You can’t be ‘objective’ about genocide. You can’t be ‘objective’ about whether people have the right to live. You can’t be ‘objective’ about the climate crisis.
You can tell the truth. If existing media sources won’t or can’t do that, audiences will find those who do. And they aren’t going back.
Talking about objectivity, truth and biases. Let’s talk about Wikipedia and the new aberration that is Grokipedia. Everything has biases, Wikipedia has some too. But there are editors from all over the world and Wikipedia is pretty transparent in acknowledging its limitations, putting processes to limit incorrect information and having processes to makes thoses biases visible and to correct them. In contrast, Musk’s newly launched Grokipedia is AI generated and ideology driven. It will hallucinate(in other words, it will give wrong information) and it will also have right wing biases built into the model. Worse, those biases are hidden in the code with no human editor in sight. Grokipedia is another nuclear bomb unleashed by Musk to further destroy social cohesion and information quality.
Scientists and academics working in the field of neuroscience and artificial intelligence in Europe are pushing hard againt the uncritical adoption of generative AI and large language models and they’re getting organised! While Sydney University has signed a deal with Open AI for the use of Chat GPT, Belgian Professor Emeritus Luc Steels, also referred to as the father of AI in Belgium, has said: “Universities that encourage students to use ChatGPT? That stuns me.” The concerns and comments from this academics are well worth a read.
Katjia Bruisch, an environmental historian at Trinity College Dublin, published a great post on Dublin Review of Books about the need of a proper critique of AI in academic publishing. Her journey towards the publication of her book and how AI got in the way during the editing and publishing process is a great read.
Neil Cohn is one of the most fascinating and interesting researchers about comics, linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. February will be see the publication of his latest book, Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language. His exploration on how pictures communicate, people learn to draw and the nature of language itself will be presented in a non-fiction graphic novel written and drawn by Neil Cohn, himself. With humor and a clear, friendly, and accessible tone. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
I love comics. I’ve read them my whole life. And I have doodled my whole life but I’m not an artist.
When I attended the Graphic Narratives Symposium at Melbourne University, the day ended with a little workshop run by Clement Baloup. He asked us to think about food and to make a short comic in about 15 minutes. The brief was very open, it could be about a food we’re obsessed with, food that triggers memories, etc.
I wasted my first three minutes or so wondering what to do. Then I had an idea and spent about 2 minutes figuring a very basic outline of what would go into each of the 6 panels. Once I had that I started drawing and 10 minutes later I had the comic you find below .
I wish I had more time. I could’ve drawn everything much better(even with my clear limitations), worked on the dialogue and the facial expressions. But, as I said above, I’m not an artist and the exercise was about doing it fast, making it raw.
And despite my misgiving about my art style, like always, I really enjoyed drawing and the creative process of making.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
This week has been a whirlwind and I’ve ended up absolutely exhausted so this photo I took a few years ago in Philip Island seems appropriate. I don’t envy koalas generally. Sleeping for an average 23 hours a day is not for me. I have too many things I want to do. But sometimes, when I’m really exhausted after a busy week, I definitely envy their peaceful rest.
That’s it from me for now. Hopefully you found something interesting. Feel free to share with whoever you like. This newsletter is free and will always be free. It’s shared with a Creative Commons BY ND licence which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
