We welcome this guest posting from Damiano Orrù, librarian at Vilfredo Pareto Library School of Economics at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Italy. We met Damiano at the Conference on Learning Information Literacy across the Globe in Frankfurt, Germany in May 2019 and he has since completed our Metaliteracy MOOC Empowering Yourself in a Post-Truth World. He wrote this post in response to the Coursera MOOC as part of his own BiblioVerifica blog. Thanks to Damiano for completing our MOOC and providing these excellent resources!
BiblioVerifica Blog for Fact-checking by Citizens
Damiano Orrù, librarian at Vilfredo Pareto Library
School of Economics, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy
As a Coursera MOOC student, I completed the course “Empowering Yourself in a Post-Truth World” in 6 weeks, deepening the themes of disinformation and verification of facts and news.
All these contents and tools are useful to teach “how to spot fake news”[1] by the cognitive and behavioral domanins of Metaliteracy. The cognitive domain of the Metaliterate Learner is important to understand information and news, analyzing sources and contexts. The behavioral domain is essential for a conscious sharing and production of content through chat, social media, e-mail, forums, blogs. Several Metaliteracy practices are excellent tools for empowering citizens to use critical thinking and to evaluate sources.
The BiblioVerifica[2] blog aims to support citizens (not just students) in the autonomous practice of fact-checking, based on open access and open data resources. Currently, this idea embraces dissemination of open data and open access content for all fact-checkers citizens by eight librarians as editorial staff[3]. BiblioVerifica blog has developed a network of stakeholders in the library and school environment since 2017. For the future our intiative may involve teachers and librarians to develop and share open education oriented fact-chekcing practices and tools. This free digital reference activity will engage citizens and schools in Italy.
The blog engaged citizenzs also by serious gamification app: BiblioVerifica Olympics[4] a contest based on 15 multiple choice quizzes, open to all citzens, for self assesment, available for free, without money prize or sponsor. In 2018 the first olympics quizzes covered the topics of reliable sources, verification strategies, research tools, etc… The second edition covered the topics of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] in the current year. For the future may improve this tool for engage learners by Metaliteracy contents or debunking practices.
Around European countries BiblioVerifica blog launched CrowdSearcher[6], an international platform supporting the European policy Tackling online disinformation[7] by open education resources, open contents, open data.
In the next weeks the BiblioVerifica bloggers will continue to support European citizens, also suggesting Metaliteracy’s tools, so useful, almost indispensable, to create tutorial and videos, serious games and infographics about media and information literacy.
This media and information literacy against misinformation is disseminated by librarians, without sponsor, without remuneration for posts or tutorial, by “BiblioVolontari“. As librarians the bloggers stick to IFLA Code of Ethics for Librarians and other Information Workers[8]:
a) access to information
b) open access and intellectual property
c) neutrality, personal integrity and professional skills
BiblioVerifica blog is open to all volunteer librarians around the world, fostering critical thinking, analysing personal BIAS, suggesting reliable sources, fighting propaganda and misinformation by empowering citizens in a Post-Truth World!
[1] https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174
[2] http://biblioverifica.altervista.org/
[3] http://biblioverifica.altervista.org/bibliovolontari/
[4] http://biblioverifica.altervista.org/olympics/
[5] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300
[6] http://crowdsearcher.altervista.org/
[7] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/tackling-online-disinformation
[8] https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11092
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7493-5648
https://linkedin.com/in/orrudamiano
Rome, October 27th 2019
Metaliteracy.org 