[apologies for multiples] Inaugural 'Misinformation and Resilience' N&MRC Seminar: Building resilience to misinformation In 2025, the News and Media Research Centre (N&MRC) at the University of Canberra is hosting a Seminar Series focusing on misinformation and resilience. Leading Australian researchers from the communication, computational social, education, and psychological sciences will explore the impact of false information on society, the role humans, media and technology play in spreading it, and strategies for identifying and combatting it. The inaugural seminar – ‘Building resilience to misinformation: Why improving information credibility evaluation is key, but hard to promulgate in Australia’ will be presented by Professor Mathieu O’Neil. Date: Wednesday 12 March 2025 Time: 2-3pm AEDT Where: Online – Zoom For more info and to register please visit: https://bit.ly/4gZEAxt This seminar will discuss the results of a pioneering intervention as well as the factors which hinder information verification from being incorporated into the Australian Curriculum, and possible solutions. Finding credible information plays a key role in democratic decision-making. Despite this being a crucial skill, a 2023 survey found that only 24% of Australian students aged 8-16 had received lessons in the past year to help them judge the credibility of news stories (Notley et al. 2023). When information literacy is on the school curriculum, strategies rely on ‘deep’ critical methods that are ineffective in an online environment where attention is precious, and finite. A greater emphasis on effective information credibility evaluation is needed: the evidence-based ‘lateral reading’ method thus entails departing from one source or claim and cross-checking information using other reliable sources. Lessons applying this method were implemented in ten Australian high school Year 11 groups in 2024. Using findings from pretest and posttest fact-checking activities, as well as teacher-librarian field notes, this seminar will outline (a) to what extent student information processing skills improved and (b) notable implementation issues. Presented by: Mathieu O’Neil (Ph.D.) is Professor of Communication at the News and Media Research Centre in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, and Honorary Associate Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University. He researches information resilience, the political economy of digital commons and online issue diffusion. He co-founded the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks at ANU in 2006 and founded the Digital Commons Policy Council international think tank in 2021. As part of the ACT Education Directorate - University of Canberra Affiliated Schools Research program, he has led two research project which co-designed with teachers and teacher-librarians media and information literacy methods for primary and secondary schools (2022-2023) and high schools (2024-2026). Misinformation and Resilience N&MRC 2025 Seminar Series 12 March 2025 2-3pm AEDT Prof Mathieu O’Neil, UC 9 April 2025 2-3pm AEDT Dr Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, UTS 14 May 2025 2-3pm AEDT Dr Michael Jensen, UC 9 July 2025 2-3pm AEDT Prof Rob Ackland, ANU 13 August 2025 2-3pm AEDT Prof Ulrich Ecker, UWA 10 September 2025 2-3pm AEDT Dr Tim Graham, QUT 8 October 2025 2-3pm AEDT Dr Tanya Notley, WSU 12 November 2-3pm AEDT Dr Momoko Fujita, UC =-=-=