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Poynter part of $3 million Google grant to improve teen digital literacy

 
The Poynter Institute For Media Studies, St. Petersburg. [SCOTT KEELER | Times]
The Poynter Institute For Media Studies, St. Petersburg. [SCOTT KEELER | Times]
Published March 20, 2018

The Poynter Institute announced Tuesday that it is receiving a $3 million grant from the charitable arm of Google to help train young consumers of the media how to better spot fake news.

The project, called MediaWise, will be a partnership between Poynter, the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Local Media Association to develop a curriculum designed to teach teenagers in classrooms about digital media literacy and fact-checking. The National Association for Media Literacy Education will seek to get their work into classrooms.

The impetus of this project came from a study conducted by the Stanford History Education Group, said Tina Dyakon, director of marketing and advertising at Poynter, and a member of the project team since its inception.

The study presented teenagers, Stanford students, professors and professional fact-checkers with digital content and assessed how each group determined whether it was credible or not. They found that teenagers and students weren't equipped with ways to judge what they were presented and were more likely to believe false information. The professors performed slightly better, but only the professional fact-checkers performed well.

"What they found was that (fact-checkers) did a handful of things that are very teachable," Dyakon said.

Over the next two years, Poynter and the Stanford History Education Group, working with teens and teachers across the country, will develop curricula that will be tried out in classrooms before being made widely available for any teacher to use.

Sam Wineburg, founder of the Stanford History Education Group and Margaret Jacks professor of education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, said society is currently in the midst of an "information revolution."

"Right now, we've invented devices that are handling us, not us them," he said. "We'll be creating curricula in a way that hasn't been done before. The technological changes have been so rapid that curricula has not kept up with changes in digital society."

The project will also partner with prominent YouTube content creators and expand fact-checking initiatives to the original platforms of misinformation — false Snapchat stories will be debunked by posts on the platform, known as snaps, for example.

"It was really important to make sure we're creating content digestible and reachable for the teens and bringing awareness and strategies to the teens where they live, online," Dyakon said.

Dyakon said educating younger people is essential in today's polarized political climate.

"I think when you think about our civic responsibility to be an informed electorate and you juxtapose that with the amount of misinformation and politicized propaganda in the digital arena, we feel it's important to arm the next generation of American voters to develop the skill set they'll need to be successful."

The grant comes from Google.org, the charitable arm of the popular search engine. It is part of a larger $300 million campaign it has launched to combat fake news and boost subscriptions to reliable news sources.

Poynter is a nonprofit school for journalism education that owns the Tampa Bay Times and the fact-checking website PolitiFact.