Media and Information

Literacy
Quarter 4–Module 7:
Evaluating Multimedia

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 One of the characteristics of the Connected Age is the possibility for immediate feedbacks
of media and information content. Gone are the times when you have to wait for days, weeks or
even months just to get a response from a letter sent. Today, feedbacks can come in a matter of
seconds, and consequently, feedback analysis can be also instantaneous.
Feedbacks are necessary in the communication process. It is the way for the communicator
to assess whether the information is effectively relayed. It assures the attainment of desired
information goals, as well as any unfortunate miscommunication. Lastly, it allows proper
evaluation of the underlying information processes, which serves as the basis for improvement.
For this lesson, you will act as media and information critics. You will assess the credibility
of media content following specific evaluation procedures. In the long run, you are expected to be
critical media and information literates who will never be swayed by undesirable content that
infiltrates different media platforms.

MOST ESSENTIAL LEARNING COMPETENCY

Evaluate a creative multimedia form (living museum, electronic portfolio, others)

OBJECTIVES

After going through this module, you are expected to:

1. Discuss principles in evaluating online content
2. Assess the credibility of online content based on the dimensions of critical evaluation
3. Apply media and information literacy principles in evaluating multimedia form
4. Write a critique paper evaluating a multimedia or online content

Activity 1: How well do you know credibility of information? Check the space that
corresponds to the correct response to the following situations.

You are researching about the recent breakthroughs in Believe Verify It Disregard
science, and you Googled an information that… It It
1. comes from a blogging site.
2. gives an opinion that is different from the majority.
3. is sourced from a reputable institution.
4. shows mathematical errors.
5. comes from an anonymous sender.
6. is posted in a freshly opened social media account.
7. is plagiarized.
8. comes from an identified fake account.
9. is a public opinion.
10. is 15 years old.

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 So, how was the activity? Were you able to list down possible evidence? Perhaps you were
able to include any or all from my personal list, which is practically the significant increase in
number or frequency of the following:
1. Consumers who availed of the product being endorsed
2. Paid advertisements (TV and online commercials) shown during the broadcast or
streaming.
3. Likes, comments, and shares of online content
4. People expressing their reactions about the product or content, whether online or
through other means

You might have been confused in listing down evidence of fake news. If you listed down the
evidences above, then you are correct, but if you listed down counter-reactions, such as “angry”
or “thumbs down” emojis, rants, and counter posts, then you might have defeated the goal of
media trolls, but you have commendably acted as media and information literate individual who
knows how to evaluate content. Congratulations!

Is This Legit?
“Legit ba ‘to? (Is This True)” This must be the first question to ask in evaluating media
content. In the millions of fresh news and information found in the internet every day, not all can
be considered legit, and with the advancements in technology, fake information can look very
authentic in the eyes of unwary netizens. Therefore, it is very much needed to give sound judgment
of media content before we evaluate it further, or we might fall in the same trap that many
unguided people have fallen – continuing the cycle of misinformation and believing what is
supposed to be wrong.
The Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University post some items to consider that can
help determine authenticity of an online content (2020):

1. Location of the source (Where does the content come from?)

Check whether the source is a reliable enough. Be mindful if the content just comes from a
blog-publishing service (blogger.com), from a free and open source, (wikipedia.org) or from any site
you can easily guarantee.

2. Network (Who are the followers of this site?)

Just recently, while monitoring the School’s Division DepEd Tayo FB Page, I notice a ranting
message from another FB page carrying the name of a public elementary school. It can be easily
dismissed as fake because that FB page has only three members, which does not even include the
school’s principal.

3. Content (Can the information be confirmed from other sources?)

While you must be careful with content coming from sources that I have stated in item
number 1, you can still trust them as long as you verify them from other more credible sources. If
the content is constant in many sources, then it is factual. For instance, you can refer to the
references posted at the end of a Wikipedia item as a counter checker.

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 Pictures and other graphics can be verified as well through image verification sites such as
tineye.com. By simply uploading the image or pasting its URL, you can check its origin and which
other websites has used the picture.

4. Contextual updates (Is the content updated or is it lost in time?)

As connectivity progresses, the timeliness of a content also shortens. In research, content

published more than five years ago might not be relevant for current use. Such is a case to case
basis, though. News, current demographics, statistics and scientific discoveries needs constant
updating. However, historical accounts and literary and artistic archives may still be factual.

5. Age (What is the age of the account in question? Be wary of recently created accounts.

Sometimes, when an issue surfaces, new social media accounts surface as well. Most likely,
these are created by other netizens who wish to support or bash the issue. For instance, when a
person gets caught in viral video misbehaving in public, fake accounts of that person gets created,
becoming the hub for bashers who post ranting comments and offensive memes.

6. Reliability (Is the source of information reliable?)

What are the factors that determine the reliability of a source? You have to check if it is an
official site for a network (.net), non-profit organization (.org), military (.mil), educational institution
(.edu) and government (.gov), but be careful, because it is still possible for sites to have misleading
suffixes. Be wary of commercial sites (.com). Assess also if the site poses bias. Also consider the
author of the content and doubt anonymously authored content. It pays to Google the name of the
author to check his or her credentials. Even the site’s interface or look matters. If it looks too
amateurish, or if it contains errors in textual and visual content, doubt it. Lastly, check if the site
contains links to other undesirable sites.

Dimensions of Critical Evaluation

Coiro (2017) stressed the need for adolescents to be critical in viewing online information,
having noticed that more students are concerned with content relevance than content credibility.
This is alarming because doing so, students become agents in spreading fake news, a concept
which media scholars have categorized into two: misinformation or “false information which is
unintentionally disseminated on online platforms”, and disinformation or “information intended
to convince online users to favor a group or individual political perspective” (Quilinguing, 2019). If
fake news goes viral, it becomes relevant information, which, when left unguarded, becomes false
truths.
However, critical evaluation is not solely a spot-the-error procedure. It is meant to find the
value of a certain content and how this value can affect the user. Do you still recall the activity
where I gave you ten songs to choose from? These songs may be good –brilliantly written by
composers, wonderfully interpreted by musicians and singers, and perfectly mastered by sound
engineers – but if its message does not touch you, it will just be another untouched option in the
playlist. Remember, it takes a lover to love a love song.
Filtering content may be seen as a massive endeavor, but this is not impossible if critical
evaluation is done right at the very start by the information user. Coiro (2017) presents four
dimensions of critical evaluation:

Relevance:
the information’s level of importance to a particular purpose or explicitly stated
need for that information

Accuracy:
the extent to which information contains factual and updated details that can be
verified by consulting alternative and/or primary sources
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 Bias/Perspective:
the position or slant toward which an author shapes information

Reliability:
the information’s level of trustworthiness based on information about the author
and the publishing body

A 4-Step Test
Closely related to Coiro’s dimensions of critical evaluation is Caulfield’s four-step test in
evaluating content. You’ll find this relatable to the filtering process, as it comes in a synonymous
acronym: SIFT. The following material is lifted from Caulfield’s website, hapgood.us (2019).

SIFT (The Four Moves)

JUNE 19, 2019 / MIKECAULFIELD

So if long lists of things to think about only make things worse, how do we get better at
sorting truth from fiction and everything in-between?
Our solution is to give students and others a short list of things to do when looking at a
source, and hook each of those things to one or two highly effective web techniques. We call the
“things to do” moves and there are four of them:

Stop

The first move is the simplest. STOP reminds you of two things.
First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether
you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and
the website is. If you don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re
looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.
Second, after you begin to use the other moves it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole,
going off on tangents only distantly related to your original task. If you feel yourself getting
overwhelmed in your fact-checking efforts, STOP and take a second to remember your purpose. If
you just want to repost, read an interesting story, or get a high-level explanation of a concept, it’s
probably good enough to find out whether the publication is reputable. If you are doing deep
research of your own, you may want to chase down individual claims in a newspaper article and
independently verify them.
Please keep in mind that both sorts of investigations are equally useful. Quick and shallow
investigations will form most of what we do on the web. We get quicker with the simple stuff in
part so we can spend more time on the stuff that matters to us. But in either case, stopping
periodically and reevaluating our reaction or search strategy is key.

Investigate the source

We’ll go into this move more on the next page. But idea here is that you want to know what
you’re reading before you read it.
Now, you don’t have to do a Pulitzer prize-winning investigation into a source before you
engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics by a Nobel prize-winning economist, you
should know that before you read it. Conversely, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits
of milk consumption that was put out by the dairy industry, you want to know that as well.
This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t
be trusted. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of
what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you
decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and
trustworthiness.

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Find trusted coverage

Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care
about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if
it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement.
In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for
trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. If you get an article that says koalas have just been
declared extinct from the Save the Koalas Foundation, your best bet might not be to investigate
the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly,
to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases, we
encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth,
or maybe just more varied. In lesson two we’ll show you some techniques to do this sort of thing
very quickly.
Do you have to agree with the consensus once you find it? Absolutely not! But
understanding the context and history of a claim will help you better evaluate it and form a starting
point for future investigation.

Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of
a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What
was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the
caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a
research finding — but you’re not certain if the cited research paper really said that.
In these cases, we’ll have you trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you
can see it in its original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

It’s about Recontextualizing

There’s a theme that runs through all of these moves: they are about reconstructing the
necessary context to read, view, or listen to digital content effectively.
One piece of context is who the speaker or publisher is. What’s their expertise? What’s their
agenda? What’s their record of fairness or accuracy? So we investigate the source. Just as when
you hear a rumor you want to know who the source is before reacting, when you encounter
something on the web you need the same sort of context.
When it comes to claims, a key piece of context includes whether they are broadly accepted
or rejected or something in-between. By scanning for other coverage you can see what the expert
consensus is on a claim, learn the history around it, and ultimately land on a better source.

Finally, when evidence is presented with a certain frame — whether a quote or a video or a
scientific finding — sometimes it helps to reconstruct the original context in which the photo was
taken or research claim was made. It can look quite different in context!
In some cases, these techniques will show you claims are outright wrong, or that sources
are legitimately “bad actors” who are trying to deceive you. But in the vast majority of cases they
do something just as important: they reestablish the context that the web so often strips away,
allowing for more fruitful engagement with all digital information.

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 Identify which dimension of critical evaluation is evident in the following statements. Write
relevance, accuracy, bias or reliability

1 Members of the Flat Earth Society claim to believe the Earth is flat. Walking around on
the planet's surface, it looks and feels flat, so they deem all evidence to the contrary,
such as satellite photos of Earth as a sphere, to be fabrications of a "round Earth
conspiracy" orchestrated by NASA and other government agencies. (Wolchover, 2017)
2 It’s hard to claim that “Boys’ Love” (BL) or Yaoi, a genre of fictionalized media that
features homoerotic relationships between male characters, has reached mainstream
Filipino pop culture consciousness. But it also feels inaccurate to say that it hasn’t been
noticed. (Smith, 2020)
3 Outdoor air pollution is a risk to children, especially with growing rates of urbanization
in high-burden pneumonia countries. But indoor air pollution – generated by unclean
fuels for cooking and heating – poses a greater global threat. Indoor pollution contributes
to 62 per cent of air pollution-related child pneumonia deaths. (UNICEF, 2020)
4 Much of the data in this publication was collected before the virus hit many of the
countries featured in this survey, so to a large extent this represents a snapshot of these
historic trends. But to get a sense of what has changed, we repeated key parts of our
survey in six countries (UK, USA, Germany, Spain, South Korea, and Argentina) in early
April. These responses confirm industry data which show increased consumption of
traditional sources of news, especially television, but also some online news sources.
(Newman, 2020)
5 In many ways, the biggest question that emerges from the deployment ban [of Filipino
health workers] is whether health workers are truly human resources that the Philippine
government intends to retain and uphold, or simply like the masks and personal
protective equipment stockpiled in national reserves — important in times of emergency,
yet discarded once used. (Ortiga, 2020)

Write an essay that evaluates any of the following:

• An interactive educational blog of your choice
• A YouTube history or science and technology channel of your choice
For those without internet connection, you may evaluate the following:
• A printed learning material
• A news and public affairs TV program
• An educational TV or radio program

Briefly describe what you have chosen to evaluate. Cite its positive features as well as parts
that need to be improved. Use Coiro’s four dimensions of critical evaluation (Relevance,
Accuracy, Bias/Perspective, and Reliability) and Caufield’s SIFT moves as your basis.
Lastly, write how the content you are evaluating creates an impact on you personally.
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Rubric

4 3 2 1
Thesis Clear, concise, and Relatively clear and Present, but No
Statement effective in too general insufficient in distinguishable
introducing the presenting the thesis
argument argument statement
Introduction Engaging and Satisfactorily gives a Distinguishable, Not present,
contains an preview of the essay although not confusing or
effective hook interesting unclear
enough to hook
the readers
Support Contains sufficient Contains sufficient Lacks Confusing or
and insightful and interesting information to illogical
information to information to support the
support the support the statement; does
statement from statement, but not follow the
cited sources; uncited; follows the prescribed basis
follows the prescribed basis for for evaluation
prescribed basis for evaluation
evaluation
Closing Ends with Ends with insightful Lacks personal Unconcluded
interesting and personal reflection insights in the
insightful personal ending
reflection
Command Exhibits excellent Exhibits satisfactory Exhibits weak Filled with
of chosen grammar, sentence grammar, sentence command of distracting
language structure and structure and variety language errors in
variety with minimal errors expression

Best Practice Checklist

Analyze this list of practices. Only five of these can be considered as best practices in the
light of critical content evaluation. Check these five best practices.

1. Emailing the blogger to confirm the reliability of his/her post

2. Citing Wikipedia as a convenient source of academic information

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3. Using a reverse image search engine to confirm the authenticity
of a picture

4. Liking and sharing a popular social media post

5. Confirming accuracy of information through various websites

6. Considering Creative Commons as a reliable source of accurate

content

7. Searching for data in government websites (.gov)

8. Considering an expert consensus whether an information is

accepted or rejected

9. Looking for the original context of a quote posted in social media

10. Supporting an opinion without looking at the other side of the

issue

GOODLUCK