Universities should teach students skills to help them navigate the potential hazards of “fake news” and media manipulation on social media sites, according to the authors of research on the topic.
Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg of the Open University and Amy Brown of the University of Nottingham Ningbo advise institutions to teach students “critical digital literacy” awareness to address issues such as the role Facebook and social media sites play in politics and the dissemination of news and other information.
NMC Digital Literacy Report
NMC has released Digital Literacy: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief in conjunction with the 2016 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Commissioned by Adobe, the report explores the advancement of digital literacy, which is sparking new thinking in higher education about how to best prepare students for the demands of the global technological economy, although the authors note there is a lack of consensus across the sector about how best to proceed.