Professor Robyn Reid Q&A

Teaching in the MLA since:				2020
Specialty/Area of Research:				Digital Literacy
MLA Courses Taught:				Digital Literacy in the Era of Fake News

 

 

 

 

How many years have you been teaching in the MLA program and what class or classes have you taught?

I have been teaching in the MLA program for 4 years. I teach a class offered in the Fall semester called, Digital Literacy in the Era of Fake News.

 

 

Tell us a little bit about your specialty or area of research?

My specialty is digital literacy. I am a librarian at TCU in the reference and instruction department, which means I teach members of the campus community how to find relevant and credible information for projects and papers.

 

How does your background inform your teaching and scholarship?

As a librarian, it is important to me that people are digitally literate—that they learn how to determine whether the information that they are consuming is credible or not, the value of information and whose voices are most prominent, that they use information ethically and attribute the sources they use, and understand that they are creators of information, and how their contributions affect the information ecosystem. As a teacher, I want my students to learn skills that will help them not just in class, but in their professional and personal lives as well.

 

How do you try to make the material in your class engaging considering most students complete their MLA degree 100% online?

I try to make the material in my class engaging by making the information I use accessible. Most of the articles and book chapters students will read in my class uses language that is easier to understand. I also use a lot of comics, videos, and even a few interactive self-evaluative quizzes outside of the TCU Online Quiz tool to introduce ideas and concepts. All of the content I use for the course is either available through the library, or open access—meaning it is freely available online.

 

 

What are you currently working on that excites you?

One project that I am currently working on that excites me is the TCU Library’s extra credit workshop series for undergraduates. In these workshops, we teach students about how to write a research question, what plagiarism is—and how students can avoid plagiarizing, and how to determine credibility for different sources. Our team has heard anecdotally from other colleges and universities that these types of workshops have really low attendance, but ours are very successful. We have had approximately 400-500 students attend at least one workshop each semester.

 

How do your courses relate to events that your students experience or read about on a day-to-day basis?

My course is highly relevant given current questions about media accuracy, not just in traditional news media, but in social media, online, and now even in photos and film. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more mainstream than it has ever been before, and is going to make it even more difficult for people to determine the credibility of sources. While my course does not teach students how to become experts in detecting false or misleading information, it does give them tools to critically evaluate the information they are using. For the final project in this class, I ask students to write about what they learned about each of the different topics in this class. In this project, several students have told me that they wish that they had taken a course like mine at the beginning of their program.