In response to Breanne:
Public PLN: Balancing PLN, Media Literacy & Public Discourse
Hi Breanne! Thanks for your insightful post this week. I liked your point about how you can build up this awesome PLN and then are proven to be unreliable, then it can all be for nothing. I think this plays an important role in our future as educators, and something to think about whenever we decide to post about something.
When you discussed “fake news”, I too had mentioned in my post about the algorithms that these platforms give us. It shows us what we want to see and hear, so we have to be extra mindful about what we choose to believe, and if we are unsure, then to do our research! I think some people often forget that you can just as easily do a quick google search about a topic to find out more information rather than assuming something is true and sharing it or making comments about it.
As well, thank you for bringing up your point about people rushing to advocate for causes or posting donation links that may not be credible in our Mattermost group. I think this is a really important point to remember, especially when we are researching advocacy communications.
I actually have a link for you!
This website called “Charity Navigator” allows you to search for a charity or cause and check the credibility of it. It gives you all the information about the charity, and it shows you their score out of 100, based on their finances (how much of the donations actually goes to the charity), and their accountability & transparency. I will post this in our Mattermost chat as well!
This is one of many tools that we can use to check the information that comes to us over social media! It’s important we take the time to research everything before we post about it, because in this day and age, you really just never know whats real and whats misleading.