California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a bill that will help California students get the training they need to discern legitimate sources of information. The new bill requires the state Department of Education to provide schools with a list of resources and instructional materials on media literacy. Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Mexico, and Washington state have already passed similar legislation, and several other states are considering it. This should go a long wa

We are very honored to share this fascinating interview by Tessa Jolls of the Consortium for Media Literacy. She interviews Jason Ohler, Professor emeritus of educational technology and virtual learning, as well as a distinguished President's Professor, University of Alaska and Professor in Fielding Graduate University's Media Psychology PhD program. Tessa Jolls (TJ) : Jason, in your essay you explained how we as humans are hardwired to believe fake news. There’s this notion

Editor's Note: As part of our support for the 3rd annual U.S. Media Literacy Week taking place November 6-10, 2017, this post written by Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, Executive Director for National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), is reposted from MyOn.com, a media literacy education platform that encourages students to keep reading year-round. In my [latest] blog, Verify, Verify, Verify: An Essential Media Literacy Skill, I provided three tips to help students

We were visited recently by CBC News recently because they wanted to see how we teach "media literacy" to 8th grade students in a Cyber Civics class. Oh, and without using computers, by the way. For this lesson students used the C.R.A.P. Detection skills learned in a previous lesson (this is an acronym devised by Howard Rheingold of Stanford University, and it provides students with an unforgettable mechanism for evaluating and identifying falsehoods online). Students used th

A football game in 1951 inspired what would become a landmark study in psychology. Dartmouth and Princeton squared off in an end of season match that turned ugly, resulting in a broken nose, a broken leg and a flurry of penalties. The game’s lack of sportsmanship became the topic of much public debate, with each side blaming the other for the lack of civility on the field. Psychologists Drs. Hadley and Cantril, from Dartmouth and Princeton respectively, decided to study the d