According to a January report from Inside Higher Ed, nearly three in four college students now turn to social media as an important, if not primary, source of news. As algorithm-driven platforms deliver ever more news content, fewer than half of students surveyed thought their universities were robustly training their peers in digital media literacy.
Given social media’s capacity to amplify misinformation, echo chambers and political polarization, the need to train young people in how to digest and cut through the noise of the internet — as well as how to engage with viewpoints and opinions they themselves don’t hold — has never been greater.
One response is a new UC Berkeley course, Openness to Opposing Views, which starts this summer. In addition to explicitly engaging students on how they consume news, it also will address how and why to engage with viewpoints and opinions they don’t share.
The half-semester course is part of the Berkeley Changemaker initiative, a certificate program started by Berkeley’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Conducted asynchronously and entirely online, students will hear the perspectives of over 20 Berkeley faculty members from 14 academic departments, including public health, business, the social sciences and humanities. Each of them will deliver lectures or hold conversations focused on the value and practice of engaging with people who hold potentially oppositional viewpoints.
The course’s designers emphasized the importance of humble inquiry in pursuing collaborative projects and research. “You’ve got to begin with the assumption that you could be wrong, and be willing to entertain a different view,” said Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, a co-designer of the course who is a cultural demographer and executive dean of the College of Letters and Science. “We see that really compellingly in scholarship — peer review, going to a conference, scholarly debate, they’re all grounded in the assumption that through that process we can get better. And engaging with other people is a really productive way of finding where your own errors and biases are.”