Brainstorm: News Literacy in Online Spaces and Public Places

We’re keeping an eye on ways to expand news literacy initiatives through awareness and engagement, curriculum development, training, research and evaluation. We recently came across a news literacy webinar by New York City-based The LAMP (Learning About Multimedia Project). The webinar offers guidance for teachers on how to help students evaluate information from online news sources.

·         This 10-minute webinar on “Information Literacy: How to Evaluate Information from News Sources” is led by Katherine Fry, the LAMP’s education director. She uses the Occupy Wall Street movement as a lens for exploring and understanding a variety of websites and blogs.

·         The webinar outlines ways to evaluate news sources based on quality of content, the type of source and the presentation vehicle.

·         This is one of three webinars that the LAMP is scheduled to produce for World Wide Workshop’s Globaloria, a digital curriculum that uses game design to teach news, civics and digital literacies.

The LAMP also just launched "What's in the News?" workshops for eight branches of the Brooklyn Public Library. They will be holding news literacy workshops for librarians and for the general public (some of these will be held in Spanish). It’s great to see news literacy take root in libraries and public spaces. Our question to you: In what other spaces or platforms could news literacy make an impact?

In the meantime, check out the following news literacy resources from LAMP:

·         Check out the News: An introduction to news literacy and understanding how and why news is made.

·         The LAMP Resources: Downloadable resource guides on news literacy, digital literacy and media literacy.

--Janet Liao, program officer