Media Literacy

International news agency AFP, a BROD partner, has launched a new online course in digital investigation and fact-checking designed to train journalists and journalism students to navigate the growing challenges of disinformation surrounding elections. The course is supported by Google News Initiative. [+]

The brains rush to process the verbal request and once they hear the because clause, they automatically decide that since the phrasing includes a word denoting reason, then there must be a real reason, so they fall short of judging the reason itself. The brain seems to recognise a familiar language pattern and uses its own predictive function when reacting to the situation. [+]

Collection of Training Manuals & Guidebooks for Educators [+]

The straw man fallacy occurs when someone misrepresents or exaggerates another person's argument to make it easier to attack or refute.

Instead of addressing the actual issue or argument, they fight a distorted or oversimplified version of it created by themselves, thereby sidestepping the genuine discussion at hand. [+]

The Appeal to Ignorance fallacy is a logical fallacy in which one asserts that a claim is true because it has not been proven false or, conversely, that a claim is false because it has not been proven true. In essence, it relies on a lack of evidence as evidence in itself. [+]

The non-sequitur fallacy occurs when a conclusion is drawn that does not logically follow from what was said before it. This leads to a disconnect between the premises and the conclusion - the two ideas don't logically link together.

Non sequitur means "does not follow" in Latin. [+]

An appeal to probability fallacy occurs when one assumes that because something could happen, it will inevitably happen. This fallacy overlooks that being possible doesn't make something certain [+]

The Semmelweis effect refers to the tendency for new scientific evidence or innovative knowledge to be rejected or met with scepticism because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. [+]

The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias wherein repetition increases the perceived truthfulness of a statement, regardless of its actual validity. In other words, if an assertion or piece of information is encountered repeatedly, people are more likely to believe it's true, even if they might initially recognize it as false. This phenomenon underscores the power of familiarity - as a statement becomes more familiar, our brains mistake this familiarity for the truth. [+]

Halo effect is an error in reasoning in which an impression about a person that is formed from a single trait or characteristic is allowed to influence multiple judgments or ratings of unrelated factors. [+]

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people overestimate their competence and readily provide confident opinions or advice on a subject they know very little about. This happens because people think the little knowledge they might possess is sufficient, and they want to appear knowledgeable and authoritative. [+]

Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories [+]

We know that people think in contexts which are well defined and which have clear semantic roles, and these thinking contexts are known as frames. For example, a school frame, when invoked, contains: textbooks, desks, whiteboards, teachers and students – these are all objects with a semantic role of their own which dictates their expected behavior or function. Frames are a well-known concept in social sciences which is related to social constructivism. [+]

Chong and Druckman, in the context of media and communications, claim that framing takes two principal formats – equivalency and emphasis frames. Equivalency frames refer to statements which are logically equivalent but phrased differently. Thus, the phrasing causes individuals to alter their preferences [+]

Motivated cognition is an important concept in understanding how we perceive the world and why we tend to assign unrealistically high trust to information received by those close to us and whom we hold in high esteem, and members of groups of which we are also part, as opposed to other people and members of other groups. [+]

Systemic causality (systemic causation), as opposed to direct cause-effect, is not a naturally occurring learning concept, says Prof. George Lakoff, a leading cognitive linguist from the University of California (Berkeley).  [+]

In the context of media and information literacy, understanding the visual elements that can trigger engagement, reaction, and action is crucial. Visual media, whether still images or moving images, have a significant power to evoke emotions, create connections, and provoke thought, often more quickly and viscerally than text.  [+]

Within the domain of media and information literacy (MIL), BROD is gradually adding the resources for educating teachers, librarians and journalists and delivered in Bulgarian and Romanian languages. [+]

120 teachers and 12.000 students from all over Romania will study how to check the information that reaches them and to make informed decisions, for their benefit and their communities, in the project “I Teach Media Literacy! – Media Education and Culture Lab”. [+]