Education 2.0 & 3.0

One student wanted to know why so many nurses were spreading vaccine misinformation.

Other participants drew parallels to popular crime-fighting myths found in shows like “Criminal Minds.”

But most of the college students who participated in a fact-checking workshop from MediaWise, the social-first digital media literacy initiative of the nonprofit Poynter Institute, were simply happy to report feeling more digitally savvy after the hour they spent learning to spot fact from fiction online.

MediaWise and its Campus Correspondents have been working since 2020 to slow the spread of online misinformation. In 2022, the goal is to train at 100 diverse colleges and universities, and availability is now opening up for another 25 workshops.

Literacy is changing–not at its core necessarily, but certainly at its edges as it expands to include new kinds of “reading.”

Digital media is quickly replacing traditional media forms as those most accessible to most 21st century learners. The impact of this change is extraordinarily broad, but for now we’ll narrow it down to changes in how learners respond to the media they consume.