Open Your Eyes

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Open Your Eyes: Fake News for Dummies” is a two-year KA2 Erasmus+ project that seeks to improve the digital literacy of adult learners by providing them with tools to identify fake news and fight the spread of disinformation online.

In the New Media Age, we are constantly surrounded by all kinds of information, from political issues to advertisements and marketing, which gets to us with no filter other than our own capacity to critically assess its validity. Biased information appears to be particularly difficult to decode for the less media-literate demographics; while the rates of digital literacy have proved to disregard age or educational level. The Open Your Eyes project targets specifically adult learners and educators and seeks to improve their digital literacy by providing them with tools to identify fake news and fight the spread of disinformation online. 

Some of these needs that have been identified, such as lack of literacy and competences to detect fake news and biased information and lack of digital skills, are intertwined and the project will try to address them by collecting and developing quality materials for adult educators which they will later use for the organisation of “Check IT Out” Labs for adult learners.

The Open Your Eyes project addresses directly a lack of critical thinking skills found in society to read, understand, contrast and evaluate the information as well as the ability to analyse the way you think and present evidence for your ideas, rather than simply accepting personal reasoning as sufficient proof. The project supports improving digital literacy of adult learners which will be implemented through an exploration of news feeds and building up digital source criticism, i.e. the skills of adults/adult learners of identifying the values and principles underlying media texts and discriminating objective from subjective information.

The project is set to deliver two main outputs: 

  1. “Check IT Out” Database: after thorough comparative research, the partners will compile a collection of best practices and initiatives that will enable users to develop a critical approach to news consumption and hopefully trigger their critical sense towards this issue. The research will be conducted in a selection of European countries interested by phenomena such as separatism and rising disinformation, particularly around the time of national and European elections, and will allow future users to design individual strategies to confront disinformation based on what worked best in other countries. 
  2. “Check IT Out” Labs: held by especially-trained adult educators and based on the previously developed database, the Labs target groups of 10+ adult learners in partner countries with the objective of developing their critical and digital skills, bringing them closer to the concept of fake news and ultimately spreading awareness about the topic within their network. 

The data and initiatives collected will remain available on the project website for personal use and future reference.

Follow the activity of the project online:

Visit the website: www.openyoureyes.info/en