The University of Washington Information School has named Michael Caulfield, the director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, as an affiliate instructor. Caulfield, who has regularly collaborated with UW’s Center for an Informed Public since its launch in December 2019, will also be a faculty member with the CIP, a multidisciplinary research center with a mission to resist strategic misinformation, promote an informed society, and strengthen democratic discourse.
Beyond his ongoing teaching at WSU Vancouver, Caulfield’s UW appointment will pave the way for additional research and other collaborations with the iSchool and the CIP. Caulfield has been a workshop facilitator for MisinfoDay, an annual misinformation awareness and educational event designed for high school students, teachers and librarians that is organized and co-hosted through a partnership between the CIP and WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.
Caulfield was also a member of the CIP’s research team working as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a nonpartisan coalition of researchers that identified, tracked and responded to mis- and disinformation about voting during the 2020 U.S. elections.
“Mike is an international leader on web literacy. There are few people that have thought as deeply and carefully about this important intervention for misinformation, as Mike has,” said Jevin West, an iSchool associate professor who serves as the CIP’s director. “We are fortunate to have him as a colleague in the center.”
Caulfield has worked with various organizations on digital literacy initiatives to combat mis- and disinformation, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project, the National Writing Project, and CIVIX Canada. He is an awardee of the Rita Allen/RTI Misinformation Solutions Prize and the author of an award-winning textbook, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.
He developed the SIFT method for fact-checking and related classroom instruction modules that have been used in more than a hundred universities and high schools in the U.S. and Canada.
“What is potentially revolutionary about SIFT is that it focuses on making quick judgments. A SIFT fact check can and should take just 30, 60, 90 seconds to evaluate a piece of content,” journalist Charlie Warzel wrote in a February New York Times feature on Caulfield’s work. “The four steps are based on the premise that you often make a better decision with less information than you do with more. Also, spending 15 minutes to determine a single fact in order to decipher a tweet or a piece of news coming from a source you’ve never seen before will often leave you more confused than you were before.”
- RELATED | A year after CIP’s launch, UW-WSU partnership continues to grow (December 2020)
