Verified
Caulfield and Wineburg's Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online.
I recently read Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg’s Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (2023). Over the years I’ve used Caulfield’s work on information literacy. Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the PastI (2001) and Why Learn History (When it is Already on Your Phone) (2018) has had a big impact on how I approach teaching history.
While reading this, I thought of the old commercial for Memorex. Back in the day, Memorex made commercials for their tape used in audio recorders. Yes, it was the 70s. While they made several versions of the commercial, the best known featured Ella Fitzgerald breaking a wine glass with her voice followed by a recording of her also breaking a glass. The narrator then asks “is it live or is it Memorex?” The point being that the fidelity of the recording could not be differentiated from her live voice.
This brought home how much the subject of Caulfield and Wineburg’s book is a moving target. We have been living in a world where technology increasingly has the ability to blur the lines between the real and the fake for some time. Digital technology (see the history of Memorex the company for example) and the internet has only made it more difficult. Caulfield and Wineburg’s postscript on large language models point to this shifting landscape. They wrote, “As we were signing off on the final edits to this book, ChatGPT was released. ChatGPT is an interactive application built on a large language model called GPT. If that sentence sounds as incomprehensible to you as something shouted across the starship bridge on a science fiction show, you’re not alone. But this technology will have some long-term implications for how we verify claims, so much so that we thought it worth a postscript.” (215) Their takeaways is that the LLMs will continue the trend of making information “ubiquitous and accessible.” This increases the importance of laterally checking information by opening a new tab and searching. Finally, LLMs increase the temptation for students to let the AI write for them, but that should be resisted. When a student does the research and writing the student has “the knowledge and insights necessary to edit it. You know what ideas you’re trying to express.” (219-20)
One point from their book I would highlight is that some of the checklists used to verify information have lost some of their ability to cut through the noise. For example, in 2023 it is relatively easy to create or buy a slick, professional looking web page. Tools such as Grammarly and spell checking have made it easier to eliminate mistakes. To the point, as of this writing, Grammarly’s landing page says “works smarter with your AI writing partner.” The advice to check the website’s suffix to see if it is a .com, .edu or something else has lost a lot of its power. For example, my website is a .com mostly because when I bought the domain name through Google the tool recommended it. I can assure you I have made zero dollars from it and at the time wondered if I should grab the .edu (as I went down the rabbit hole of thinking I work at a school but I am not a school). However, I stand by the advice that when in doubt, go to your library’s website. Most school libraries have access to an array of databases that will help put you on the right footing.
Caulfield and Wineburg are advocating for SIFT (outlined below, see the book and links for more details). They begin the book with the three contexts, “the context of the source,” “the context of the claim,” and “the context of you.” (10) This a step in the SIFT method (13):
Stop
Investigate the source
Find other coverage, and
Trace the claim, quote or media to the original context
Of course, today we do not get all our information online or in video or text in a digital medium. While they do address video and advertising, I wonder about the vast world of podcasts and audio floating about the internet. We can also read misinformation on good, old-fashioned print. Information literacy used to focus on how to determine if a printed source, such as a book, was reliable. Indeed, academic history developed in the 19th century around the explosion of archives and printed sources.
History brings a couple strengths to this discussion. History is the study of change. It reminds us that the past was not necessarily like today and that tomorrow will not be like today. Academic history values complexity. This can be frustrating if you are looking for THE answer, but embracing the complexity of historical explanations opens the door to a more robust understanding of context. History is great at providing context, both context for the information you are evaluating and your context as the person doing the evaluation. A simpler way to say this is that history helps with the sniff text.
For those of you who have followed the discussion around information literacy and Caulfield and Wineburg’s work, parts of the book will be familiar. They are building on their previous work. Still, they successfully bring it together and update it for readers in 2023. I am sure this will not be the final word on information literacy, but it is a valuable approach to figuring out how to navigate our way on the information superhighway.
Resources:
Memorex with Ella Fitzgerald - "Is It Live, Or . . . " (Commercial, 1976)
Verified with Mike Caulfield on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast
Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - Open Textbook Library
Check, Please! Starter Course Short online SHIFT course.
Hapgood Mike Caulfield’s webpage
Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts
Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), Wineburg
Why Read Why Learn History | Perspectives on History | AHA
SHEG (Stanford History Education Group)