There’s a lot of bad information out there about the recent coronavirus outbreak. At the same time, just tuning out is not an option. Pandemics are serious business. 

What can we do about this? How can we take advantage of the new levels of online engagement of the public with these issues while making sure that engagement is not manipulated by bad actors, or misinformed by error?

So asks digital information literacy expert Mike Caulfield who has created an engaging series of self-paced tutorials designed to help students - and all of us - maintain a critical and questioning mind when confronting news and information about the pandemic. Based on web evaluation heuristics developed in his book Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers , the SIFT method gives us a strategy and resources to combat misinformation about the pandemic and coronavirus. Caulfield has a quick wit and shows off cool little techniques in bite size morsels you can easily share with students.