Why is it increasingly important for today’s students to be able to differentiate fact from opinion and exam data for underlying meaning and bias?
This is a pre-COVID question. The example of “myth-information” presented by Crockett et al. stressed the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (2011). In 2022, this example feels quaint and charmingly harmless. We lived through a global pandemic where people would rather take animal deworming medicine instead of listening to the advice of medical experts (Puckey, 2022). Crockett et al. write, “With so much information available, no one today can be an expert” (2011, pp. 58). Is this a sentiment they would still agree with today? At the very least, I feel they need to refine their argument and come back with a more nuanced idea. We absolutely should not be claiming that nobody can be an expert. If nobody is an expert, everybody is an expert, which leads to the real dangers of InfoWhelm.
InfoWhelm is the idea that there is simply too much information for people to consume (Crockett et al. 2011). InfoWhelm has not gotten better since 2011. The danger of InfoWhelm is not the fact that there is too much information. The danger is the fact that there is too much misinformation that looks true. Anybody can get caught up in this no matter how educated. Even though the opioid epidemic has been a problem since the 1990s, NPR found that even as late as 2018 “more than 1 in 5 Americans had an opioid prescription filled” (Mann, 2020). Many, many doctors were misled by the drug companies’ false marketing materials. As patients we want our doctors to be up with the best medical research, but even they’re being taken in by misinformation.
Students need to be able to differentiate fact and opinion and critically analyze information because we’ve seen when it doesn’t happen a lot of people can get hurt.
Crockett, L., Jukes, I., & Churches, A. (2011). Literacy is not enough: 21st century fluencies for the digital age. 21st Century Fluency Project.
Mann, Brian. (July 17, 2020). Doctors and dentists still flooding U.S. with opioid prescriptions. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/887590699/doctors-and-dentists- still-flooding-u-s-with-opioid-prescriptions
Puckey, Melisa. (July 29, 2022). Can Ivermectin be used to treat COVID-19? Drugs.com. https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/ivermectin-treat-covid-19-coronavirus- 3535912/
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