Critical Surfing: Selecting Online Sources
Digital Skills and Ethics

The course aims to improve students’ ability to consciously address the changing digital information landscape. Classes will offer insights and practical tools for researching, selecting and evaluating online information sources. Specifically, participants will engage with the issues of disinformation, source authority and hierarchy, validation of expert knowledge, and the transformations of science dissemination and outreach in digital platforms. Tools and guidelines will also be presented that are useful for students to work on sources in writing academic essays (papers, theses, research reports) and to assess the veracity of information in everyday life, in order to foster the analytical skills necessary for active citizenship in the network society.

The course consists of four lectures of one and a half hours each divided as follows:

1. Online Disinformation: general framework on the transformations of online circulation of information, the changing processes of verification, and the dynamics related to misleading information.

2. Source research and evaluation: use of online tools to select authoritative information sources for the purposes of both daily information and academic essay writing.

3. Science outreach and digital platforms: introduction to online dissemination methods and expert evaluation, with an emphasis on critical analysis of the relationship between outreach and influencing. 

4. Presentation and discussion of final work: students will be asked to produce a collection of sources aimed at a young audience on a topic with which they are unfamiliar, highlighting which among them are those that are useful in getting a preliminary idea on the field and which are misleading (incomplete, uninformative, not current).

6 hours

The course is delivered in a blended format (in person and online).

Dates: May 2, 9, 16, and 23, 2024, from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM.

Information, Digital Platforms, Misinformation, Scientific Dissemination, Data, Bibliography, Social Media, Knowledge, Information Society, Post-Truth.

The badge is given to all those students who achieve a valuation of at least 70% during the practical exercises performed during the course (comprehension quiz at the end of each class and the final group work).

Course participants develop the ability to search and evaluate online sources in a way that improves their personal information supply, the ability to participate in public debate in an informed way, and their methods of bibliographic research.

Students improve their ability to adapt to changing online information contexts, strengthen autonomous continuous learning through improved information-seeking skills, and refine the accuracy and attention to detail of their arguments.

Admission

Course with free access

Useful information

The registration procedure will be updated soon.

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Contacts

Giovanni Boccia Artieri

  giovanni.bocciaartieri@uniurb.it

Contacts

  ok@uniurb.it