NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F: Co-Designing for Trust: Reimagining Online Information Literacies with Underserved Communities

有问题的信息——不准确或误导性的信息——已经成为对美国民主日益严重的威胁，因为它破坏了公民对公共信息和机构的信任。它通常通过利用个人信仰、情感和身份来实现这一目标，从而引发扩大社会分歧的反应，并鼓励个人积极抵制竞争主张。因此，解决方案需要的不仅仅是向公众提供确定索赔真实性的技能和工具；他们还需要资源来解决问题信息的社会和情感影响。创造这些教育资源需要从根本上重新构想数字素养，以便更好地立足于受问题信息影响最严重的社区的日常现实。该项目将通过在学术机构、社区组织、新闻和事实核查网络、行业、公共图书馆和博物馆、K12学校以及国家非营利组织之间建立深入的合作伙伴关系来解决这一需求，以创建新的教育资源，解决对沟通构成严重威胁的问题信息。这项工作将促进人们了解当地社会、文化和情感背景如何塑造通信系统中的信任。这些知识将为教育资源和平台的开发提供信息，使图书馆员、记者、教育工作者和社区组织者能够对有问题的信息提供全面的、当地情境化的回应。该项目将通过利用参与式设计（PD）来开发这些教育工具，以支持广泛利益相关者之间的融合思维。该项目的核心设想是，通过更好地利用社区内存在的社会文化和情感优势，以及培养批判性推理技能，可以加强数字扫盲干预措施。这不仅需要来自社会科学、计算机和信息科学、新闻和教育的跨学科专业知识，还需要来自社区从业者的不同社会文化观点的整合。项目团队包括代表在现有的问题信息研究中经常被忽视的观点的合作伙伴。这包括在城市和农村人口中开展正式和非正式教育工作的组织，支持黑人、土著和有色人种（BIPOC）社区的数字平等的组织，参与所有年龄段的组织，以及包括记者和技术领导者的组织。这些学术和实践伙伴将开展一系列的七个社区讲习班，这些讲习班将在项目中建立社区所有权，确定设计要求，并确定项目产出的潜在可用性问题。这些见解将在一系列PD会议中用于设计和评估教育工具包原型，以解决BIPOC社区中的问题信息。该项目计划在第二阶段与其他服务不足的社区（包括资源不足的记者、农村公共图书馆员和K12教育工作者）扩大、定制和共同开发这个原型和设计过程。最终，该项目将产生一个可扩展的平台和PD模型，不同的组织可以使用该平台和模型来制作本地定制的数字扫盲工具包。这确保了该平台将继续向新用户扩展，以确保对国家通信生态系统的信任产生长期影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Problematic information—inaccurate or misleading information—has emerged as a growing threat to American democracy since it undermines citizen trust in public information and institutions. It often does so by exploiting personal beliefs, emotions, and identity, thereby triggering responses that expand social divides and encourage individuals to actively resist competing claims. Solutions therefore require more than just providing the public with skills and tools for determining the truthfulness of claims; they also require resources for addressing the social and emotional impacts of problematic information. Creation of these educational resources requires a fundamental reimagining of digital literacy, so that it is better grounded in the everyday realities of the communities most impacted by problematic information. The project will address this need by establishing deep partnerships among academic institutions, community organizations, news and fact checking networks, industry, public libraries and museums, K12 schools, and national non-profits to create new educational resources that address problematic information as a critical threat to communication. The work will advance knowledge about how trust in communication systems is shaped by local social, cultural, and emotional contexts. This knowledge will inform the development of educational resources and platforms to empower librarians, journalists, educators, and community organizers to deliver holistic and locally-contextualized responses to problematic information.The project will develop these educational tools by leveraging participatory design (PD) to support convergence thinking amongst a broad range of stakeholders. At its core, this project posits that digital literacy interventions could be strengthened by better leveraging sociocultural and emotional strengths that exist within communities alongside the cultivation of critical reasoning skills. This requires not only interdisciplinary expertise from across the social sciences, computer and information science, journalism, and education, but also the integration of diverse sociocultural perspectives from community practitioners. The project team includes partners that represent perspectives often overlooked within existing research on problematic information. This includes organizations that perform formal and informal educational work with urban and rural populations, that support digital equity within Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, that engage all age ranges, and that incorporate journalists and technology leaders. These academic and practitioner partners will carry out a series of seven community workshops that will build community ownership in the project, identify design requirements, and identify potential usability concerns for project outputs. These insights will then be used in a series of PD sessions to design and evaluate an educational toolkit prototype for addressing problematic information in BIPOC communities. The project plans to expand, customize, and co-develop this prototype and design process with other underserved communities in Phase II, including under-resourced journalists, rural public librarians, and K12 educators. Ultimately, the project will produce a scalable platform and PD model that diverse organizations can use to produce locally tailored digital literacy toolkits of their own. This ensures that the platform will continue to be scaled out to new users, to ensure long-term impact on trust in national communication ecosystems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.