Lie Detector

From the end of November to the end of May, ten media literacy workshops were held as part of the “Lie Detector” project in primary and secondary schools in the Braničevo district. The workshops were held in five primary and five secondary schools in Žabari, Aleksandrovac, Ranovac, Veliki Gradište, Kučevo, Petrovac na Mlava and Požarevac. The “Lie Detector” project is jointly implemented by the Association for the Education of Youth and Adults and Boom 93, as part of the “Youth and Democratic Development” project, which is implemented in partnership with the Belgrade Open School and with the support of Sweden. The workshops were organized for students and teachers, and were held by Živojin Ivković, Slobodan Jotić, Petar Pantić and Dušan Radovanović from the Association for the Education of Youth and Adults from Požarevac and Marko Tadić, an expert in social networks at the Boom 93 portal. The workshops for students had two parts. In the first part, students had the opportunity to remind themselves of the basic concepts of media literacy. They talked about what the media is, what information is, how the media is shared, then about different types of disinformation in the media, the importance of checking sources and techniques for identifying fake news. All this was shown to the students through examples from social networks and portals. In the second part of the workshop, the students had a practical task, where they themselves were in the role of those who create news, and had the opportunity to, by creating fake news, think about the purpose with which such news is marketed and the audience it is intended for. This increased their awareness of how important it is to be careful and check what reaches them through different channels. The channel through which students get the most information is social networks, as shown by research, such as the “Alternative Report on the Position and Needs of Youth 2024” of the Youth Umbrella Organization of Serbia, as well as the answers that students gave us through interviews. That is why part of these workshops was dedicated to social networks, how they function, algorithms and how they attract our attention. In addition to students, workshops were also organized for teachers, with whom the importance of media literacy in teaching was discussed and possible approaches and materials that can be used when dealing with this topic in different classes were presented. Below, see the photos and listen to the interviews we did after the workshops of the previous months.