The internet doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but it should—to give users the skills to separate truth from falsehood so they can distinguish between propaganda and the indisputable and confirmable. And colleges should be the place leading students through this reference book.

That’s the argument of Michael Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, and it isn’t just some “hot take” designed to be provocative. He actually wrote the manual. And he has already convinced more than a dozen colleges to adopt it (and more than 100 college libraries to prominently link to it). Recently, he’s started research in an effort to prove that it works (and can help preserve American democracy).

You have to place your trust somewhere. The ultimate goal is less about teaching kids this or that, but helping people to develop frameworks for trust and where to put your trust, how to build your trust and how to recognize when that trust is being manipulated.

Caulfield is now working with top leaders at 11 colleges and universities to test his teaching approach. The plan is to use a measure of “civic online reasoning” developed by the Stanford History Education Group, a research team that made international headlines late last year when they found that students get low marks in judging the credibility of the info running through their social feeds.

Read the full article on reducing digital polarization by Jeffrey R. Young at EdSurge