The next speaker at the Bots Building Bridges workshop is Mathieu O’Neil; Mathieu begins by highlighting the challenge of information overload and is connection of mis- and disinformation. Media and information literacy are key tools for enabling people to better manage such information overload, and there are number of opportunities here.
These might preemptively build competencies for the longer or shorter term, provide better context for information, or react to the circulation of disinformation through debunking and fact-checking. Key here is also the development of better discernment abilities, enabling people to identify when they need further information; once this need is discerned, critical thinking (and indeed critical ignoring) abilities should kick in.
Mathieu now takes us through some experimental workshops designed to test educational approaches to building such critical thinking capabilities, which to date have had mixed success; a report on Civic Information Literacy Tools summarises the findings so far.
