Join us for a special webinar with our guest presenter, Huw Davies from the University of Edinburgh.
Sign up for this webinar here: webinar signup
This webinar on digital literacy will explore the following themes with an opportunity for discussion and questions with Huw:
- Pre-bunking is more effective than de-bunking. Lies travel the world before truth gets its boots on. Radicalisation is cheap and scalable, de-radicalisation is the opposite.
- Political and digital literacy are indivisible. In the recent election, populist movements such as Reform reached young people through social media including TikTok and YouTube. Yet, few young people understand why they were shown such content, what populism is, why its definition is contested and what it represents. There is a lot of evidence that digital platforms help radicalise their users. Yet, few young people understand why and how this is happening.
- Political and digital literacy are cross-curricula concerns. Every subject and subject teacher can contribute. History teachers can examine the misuse and abuse of history and its source material. Biology teachers can challenge resurgent race science. Geography teachers can prepare young people for new forms of climate denialism that are circulating online. Maths teachers can, for example, help explain how and why social media billionaires misrepresent statistics.
- In the age of Chat-GPT (and other LLMs) critically informed human instructors are more important than ever. The AI is essentially a plagiarism engine that synthesises many sources. Its sources and epistemological intelligence are problematically limited. Moreover, bad faith actors are producing their own LLMs.Suggested background reading:
https://medium.com/@huwcdavies/digital-literacy-vs-the-anti-human-machine-b2884a0f075cSign up for this webinar here: webinar signup
