1. Briefly summarize & reflect on each of today's readings (what did you take away from these readings). How could you apply this to education or your educational practice?

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(1) Leetaru, K. (2019, July 7). A reminder that 'fake news' is an information literacy problem - not a technology problem. Forbes.

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This article distinguishes technical skills related to webpage designing and software engineering from information literacy, which is far more important than anything else when we want to discern fake information on the Internet. Information literacy, which may equally be termed as digital literacy or media literacy, is not the same, the author argues, as being able to handle the technical aspects of the Internet very well. This argument is one of the most powerful ones I have ever seen in my readings so far.

This argument is not at all difficult to understand. In my analogy, I can put it this way: if you know the alphabet of English and the meaning of many words, it does not mean that you can necessarily connect all the words of a sentence and decode its meaning. You also need grammar and genre and the sociocultural construct that are contained in the sentence in order to be able to decode the meaning of the sentence. In other words, literacy is different from language, and literacy goes far beyond the realm of language. The author of this article makes a lot of sense to me because, just as there is a huge difference between literacy and language, there must be an immense difference between digital literacy and computer software/language.

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(2) Edwards, Lee, Stoilova, Mariya, Anstead, Nick, Fry, Andra, ElHalaby, Gail and Smith, Matthew (2021) Rapid evidence assessment on online misinformation and media literacy: final report for Ofcom. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.

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In terms of the need to distinguish between media literacy and technical interventions, this article is similar to the first article I have already discussed above. One thing that stands out in the current article, though, is the three (3) ways the authors did their research: gray literature, expert interviews and rapid search of data pertaining to the topic. It seems to me that they have done quite extensive research on misinformation (fake news) as well as on the technical interventions to discern and stop it. However, when I read the final conclusions and recommendations of this article, I was a bit disappointed that the researchers found a lot of holes in the scope, depth and direction of current research in this field. For example, most studies have been concentrated on Facebook and Twitter alone, so future researchers would have to cast their nets more broadly to include more recent social platforms such as TikTok.

However, what I have found to be most interesting in this article is what is named 'System 2 Thinking', which is slow, critical and rational, as opposed to 'System 1 Thinking', which is fast and intuitive. The authors argue that society should engage more of our System 2 Thinking in discerning misinformation (fake news). I think the difference between these two thinking modes lies in the power of our cognitive split between incestuous amplification and lateral crosscheck. The former is fast and intuitive because we want to belong to like-minded people (therefore "incestuous" habit; or simply, tribalism); we also click quickly the 'Like' button for their messages because we already love these 'like-minded' people. However, more important is the fact that we should have a "journalistic instinct" to control our behavior because there are always two sides to the same story. When dealing with any story circulating on the social media, we should do cross-checking and triangulate the sources, which is what I think the authors of this article is referring to as 'System 2 Thinking'. Anyway, what I am trying to say here is that different authors coin different terms such as triangulation, System 2 Thinking, critical thinking. They mean all the same to me. The bottom line is that we need to slow down and take the time to think carefully before making our decisions on the information available on the Internet.