Literacy Colloquy: Reading, Writing and Fake News: A Review of K-12 Digital Literacy on Social Media

The internet and the evolution of our digital world are innate in the post-truth paradigm. Digital literacy research and instruction have never been more relevant or critical. Our presentation will share insights from our systematic literature review of a decade of educational research covering digital literacy on social media. Including articles that address teachers’ and students’ perspectives, we synthesize digital literacy research as its been applied through social media in K-12 education. Analysis of the studies’ methods, digital platforms, settings and participants inform our thematic findings and implications for research and pedagogy. This review captures multiple gaps in the literature, but draws particular attention to the need for more teacher support and a significant lag between research coverage and social media trends.

Dr. Christine Greenhow is an associate professor of Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University’s College of Education. She studies learning and teaching with technologies such as social media; teacher learning and development with social media; the design of social-mediated spaces for learning; and new models for open, public and social scholarship with internet-based technologies.

Dr. Diana Brandon is an alumna of the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. Currently, she is the Distance Learning Coordinator at Charleston Southern University in Charleston, South Carolina. Her research interests include technology integration in both K-12 and higher education and professional development for teachers and faculty members.

Sarah Galvin is a PhD student in the Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. Her research interests surround the intersection of social media and writer identity in adolescent learning. More specifically, she looks at how student authorship differs on social media compared to in the classroom and what implications this might have for writing pedagogy. Formally a public high school English teacher, Sarah’s current practicum project is exploring adolescents’ writer identities across their social media platforms.

Emilia Askari is interested in technology, learning and civic engagement. Emilia is a journalist, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and the mother of two teens. She’s won more than 20 prizes and fellowships and served on the national boards of several professional organizations, including the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Emilia earned a bachelor’s in economics and creative writing form Brown University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia university, and a master’s in information studies from the University of Michigan.

Flyer for the presentation: GreenhowChristine-LiteracyColloquy-Nov13,2018

Link to Video of the Presentation: https://mediaspace.msu.edu/media/t/1_eskhqvir