You don’t – or perhaps, you by now do – expect a media outlet, a national, government-funded broadcaster like Canada’s CBC to be in the business of teaching children how to recognize “online misinformation”?
But here we are.
It’s about a “blocky, ultra-popular” game called Reporting 101: Misinformation coming from CBC Kids News, and targeting students from grade 4 to 8. And it is nominally tied to some undoubtedly positive if not key skills, although it may be misinterpreting their actual meaning rather severely: digital literacy, and critical thinking.
To make kids comfortable in participating in some way in the environment of “fearless fight against misinformation,” the program is a Minecraft game, whose goal is to teach them to supposedly distinguish and navigate that minefield (no pun) which apparently hasn’t plagued journalism since there has been journalism – but became an urgent concern a couple of years back.