A few years ago at an ECIS librarian’s conference I heard Joyce Valenza speak about using Twitter as a way to connect students with real world situations. She spoke about the Arab spring and the protests in Egypt and how one of students started to follow a hashtag and found a teenager tweeting from within the protest movement. It was very powerful learning and connecting for her students. During the same study the students also found some rogue twitter handles that seemed to belong to prominent world leaders but actually were fake accounts. The students and teachers together worked on ways to identify authentic and fake twitter accounts of these leaders.

It is not everyday that we are actively researching about current world events but as a recent article in the Huffington Post pointed out “When a Twitter exchange between Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift can become the subject of national debate, knowing who’s really posting — or who really isn’t – matters” (Fitts, 2015). So when twitter was being used in the classroom to follow a presidential campaign (Journell, Ayers, & Walker Beeson, 2014, p. 53) hopefully the teachers are also guiding their students to ask questions about the validity of the sources of the tweets and to be responsible tweeters themselves.

With more people being able to create content credibility of information found on social networking sites is a real concern. People seek information about medical problems on question sites such as Quora but are the people answering the questions qualified to answer them? Health professionals are discussing ways to ensure medical information found on specific health concerns websites and forums can be trusted. Creating profiles of the contributors is one solution that is being discussed (Hajli, Sims, Featherman, & Love, 2015, p. 248).

Wikipedia the most famous of all crowd sourced encyclopaedia also needs to be treated as an overview or a starting point on a topic rather than a base for serious research (Ghose, 2015). More serious scholars are taking ownership of articles but people still need to check the credibility of the source of the information.

So based on the three articles I read from the module (marked with an asterisk in the reference list below) the two essential take-home messages are when using information found through social media

• Be a skeptic. Ask WHO is posting this information? (“Authenticating Information,” n.d.). Check their credentials, even go as far as to ask are they really who they say they are. Check the basis for the person’s authority (“Evaluating Sources,” 2015).

• Be responsible. Check on the validity information before passing it on. That may put Snopes out of business but it is the right thing to do.

References

Authenticating information. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2016, from http://mediasmarts.ca/internet-mobile/authenticating-information

Evaluating sources. (2015, December 22). Retrieved January 18, 2016, from http://guides.library.jhu.edu/c.php?g=202581&p=1334914

Fitts, A. S. (2015, April 8). It’s easier than ever to impersonate a celebrity online — and we’ve all been duped. Retrieved January 18, 2016, from Huffpost Tech website: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/instagram-celebrity-impersonators_55bbc26be4b0d4f33a02c3d7

*Ghose, T. (2015, August 20). Can you trust wikipedia on science? Retrieved January 18, 2016, from Live Science website: http://www.livescience.com/51926-are-wikipedia-science-pages-trustworthy.html

*Hajli, M. N., Sims, J., Featherman, M., & Love, P. E. (2015). Credibility of information in online communities. Jounral of Strategic Marketing, 23(3), 46-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0965254X.2014.920904

*Journell, W., Ayers, C. A., & Walker Beeson, M. (2014). Tweeting in the classroom: Twitter can be a smart instructional tool that links students with real-time information and connects them to authentic discussions beyond school walls. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(5), 53. Retrieved from Expanded Academic ASAP database.