Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society released an interesting paper today focusing on how young people use digital media–how they search for and evaluate information, how they create, their levels of new literacies, and the social patterns that affect their work.

Investigators Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, & Ashley Lee drew heavily from research in information and library science, education and sociology and listed these four key findings that may help inform our practice:
1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

Filed under: digital literacy, evaluation, information fluency, information literacy, students