and presentations that leave me feeling drained and unfulfilled. As I’ve gone through college, I have found myself slowly losing interest in my education and, in turn, taking it for granted. This assignment has changed my perspective entirely, challenging me to let go of my frustrations with academia and instead consider my privilege.
Students were able to not only see their work as having meaning beyond the semester but were also able to better recognize information imbalances, confronting their own information privilege (Booth, 2014).
The course also focused on how power works through historical, material, political, economic, legal, and cultural frameworks culminating in a discussion of trust and information literacy. The students read research on mis- and disinformation online, as well as the intersections of online harassment and “trolling” culture in online spaces (Gray, 2011; Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Phillips, 2015). Students watched misinformation expert Claire Wardle’s 2019 TedTalk, in which she summarized her research-driven solutions for transforming the “internet into a place of trust” (Wardle, 2019). The model she described for creating a healthy information commons is in many ways modeled on that of Wikipedia. Similarly, she argued that understanding the underlying architecture of how online platforms work is central to rebuilding trust of information—pushing healthy skepticism over knee-jerk distrust. As one student commented, “The amount of research that Wikipedians use helps them sift between fake news and true information.” All of this culminated in a key takeaway: understanding how things work is the best way to enact change (focusing on making the world more just and equitable). Or, as Freire (2003) wrote, “To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity” (Freire [1970], p. 47). In addition to the assignment feeling more meaningful than a traditional course paper, it helped students feel more directly invested in the course content itself. This is seen even more clearly in the ways students connected broader course themes about representation, who
