Co-designing for Trust: Reimagining Online Information Literacies with Underserved Communities Phase II

This project builds community-oriented infrastructure that enables underserved communities to design, collaborate on, and share educational resources that address problematic information as a critical threat to communications systems. We use problematic information to refer to misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of inauthentic behavior which deceive and create divisions [1]. Problematic information is a threat to democracy because it compounds socio-political divides and undermines citizen trust in public information and institutions [2-3]. Its scale and complexity necessitate not only technology and policy solutions, but also a reimagining of how to educate the public about information. In recent years scholars and educators – including members of our team [4-9] – have explored fundamental modifications to dominant paradigms for teaching information literacy in a digital age [16-21]. We refer to this reimagined set of literacies as digital literacy. Many new approaches have demonstrated initial success in providing critical thinking and fact checking skills. However, even these successes are limited in scope, making it difficult to fully address a challenge as expansive as problematic information. Phase I research explored the limits of existing approaches with a set of partners that we’ve come to call digital literacy interventionists. These interventionists came from a variety of institutions – including community organizations, public libraries and museums, K12 schools, and national nonprofits – yet they all shared a common interest in using formal and informal education to address problematic information. Our work with these partners in Phase I helped us to identify core objectives for Phase II.