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Dr. Tara Zimmerman:
No More Misinformation
​Episode 149 of the Critically Speaking podcast

Dr. Therese Markow (Emeritus Professor, UC San Diego) interviews Tara about misinformation, social noise, and her work teaching young children to detect and avoid misleading information.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

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Tara Zimmerman is an Assistant Professor in the Texas Woman’s University School of Library and Information Studies. She has published research in top-tier library and information science journals and presented her work at national and international conferences. Dr. Zimmerman is currently working on the Awareness and Critical Thinking (ACT) Program: How School Librarians Can Teach Children to Detect and Avoid Misinformation. This project is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services as part of the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Early Career Research Grant. Through this research, Zimmerman’s goal is to develop a K-12 scaffolded curriculum for teaching children about the dangers of misinformation, along with practical critical thinking skills to identify and address it.

Formerly, Tara was a Computing Institute (CI2020) Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded through the National Science Foundation at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her PhD in Information Science at the University of North Texas where she focused on the qualitative study of social media information behavior. She coined the term Social Noise to describe how observation by other people in the social network influences an individual's observable behavior.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Tara was a primary and second school librarian for eight years. Outside of work, she enjoys yoga, collecting great quotes, spending time outdoors, and reading.

Featured in

INFO-Flight

UNT's College of
Information
​
Alumni Newsletter

and in UT Austin's

Good Systems Annual Report

​ Annual Report and

​Contact:     [email protected]
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7605-9429