HA Webinar: Teaching online source evaluation: from historical provenance to platform reality

Description

Historical Association webinar series: Historical thinking in a digital world: how history builds digital and media literacy

Presenters: Ben Walsh

A practical session translating classic source analysis into the messy conditions of the web: reposts, screenshots, decontextualised clips, algorithmic feeds, and influencer credibility cues. We’ll explore teachable routines for evaluating online material, building on the Stanford History Education Group’s research on lateral reading (leaving a source to investigate its credibility elsewhere), triangulation across multiple sources, and reverse image search workflows as concepts — even when specific tools vary by school.

The session demonstrates how to build these digital evaluation skills into existing history units without bolting on an ‘extra’ digital literacy lesson. Examples will include ‘Then and Now’ activities comparing historical propaganda with modern misinformation, digital detective lessons using historical methods to verify online claims, and source comparison activities that bridge historical documents and contemporary digital sources.

International examples include civic online reasoning approaches from the US, media verification programmes from the Netherlands and Australia, and digital archive evaluation strategies from Singapore and New Zealand. Participants will leave with classroom-ready routines, assessment rubrics, and strategies for making the transfer from historical to digital source criticism explicit to students.

To use your corporate recording offer on this webinar please fill in this form: https://forms.office.com/e/fGJGBTtzts