MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (Updated with AI Guidance)

Updated edition providing students with hands-on strategies for digital literacy.

The third edition of this best-selling classroom guide helps students understand why digital literacy is a crucial skill for their education, future careers, and participation in democracy. Offering practical guidance for assessing information online, this guide provides students with the tools to locate reliable sources among the clickbait and viral videos that pervade the web. The guide's hands-on activities, germane readings, and lesson plans give students strategies for reading and analyzing data visualizations; finding and evaluating credible sources; learning how to spot fake news; fact-checking; crafting a research question; effectively conducting searches on Google and on library catalogs and databases; finding peer-reviewed publications; evaluating primary sources; and understanding disinformation and misinformation, filter bubbles, propaganda, and satire in a variety of sources--including websites, social media posts, infographics, videos, and more, on platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

New to the third edition:

- a chapter on generative AI (GenAI), including information on how GenAI is trained, uses of GenAI tools, GenAI-powered search engines, prompting GenAI, and evaluating GenAI output

- a consideration of ethical issues related to GenAI, including impacts on the environment and on intellectual property, privacy, and bias in searches

- a discussion of GenAI and plagiarism

- an updated discussion of deepfakes, fake headlines, and other forms of misinformation

- student exercises on using GenAI

- a lesson plan that invites students to reflect on the benefits and limitations of using GenAI to support their reading practices

Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English and writing coordinator at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Radical Case for Teaching Skim Reading in First-Year Writing (2025), The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021), Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018), and Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2015).