*Evaluate: Assessing Your Research Process and Findings | The Information Literacy User’s Guide: An Open, Online Textbook Introduction In 2010, a textbook being used in fourth grade classrooms in Virginia became big news for all the wrong reasons. The book, Our Virginia by Joy Masoff, had caught the attention of a parent who was helping her child do her homework, according to an article in The Washington Post. Carol Sheriff was a historian for the College of William and Mary and as she worked with her daughter, she began to notice some glaring historical errors, not the least of which was a passage which described how thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War. Further investigation into the book revealed that, although the author had written textbooks on a variety of subjects, she was not a trained historian. How did a book with errors like these come to be used as part of the curriculum and who was at fault? The Evaluate pillar states that individuals are able to review the research process and compare and evaluate information and data. They understand They are able to Books
IFLA -- Real Solutions to Fake News: How Libraries Help Skip to main content You are here: Home » Activities and Groups » Information Society » News » Real Solutions to Fake News: How Libraries Help Search form 20 August 2017 From the Annual Conference Real Solutions to Fake News: How Libraries Help Русский | Español | Deutsch | 简体中文 | français | العربية Freedoms of access to information and expression online are at risk. For IFLA, neither of these solutions is desirable. IFLA’s infographic has been a big success. The Library of the Finnish Parliament introduced the infographic at the Parliament “Committee of the Future” meeting, and it has featured in a number of articles and essays. In Vietnam, library instructors at the University of Danang used the infographic to impart information literacy classes and share the risks associated with the inability to recognize a piece of news as fake. In Sweden, librarians exhibited translations of the poster in Swedish, English, Arabic, and Romanian at maker party events. List all IFLA news
Critical readers in the (mis)information age | 4C in ELT TYSON SEBURN Did you know that Chicago was the most dangerous city in the US in 2014? I didn’t. I would have thought it was some bigger city, but according to this set of FBI statistics of total murders, I was wrong. But actually, was I? It’s very easy to look at this graph at face value without digging much further into the narrative it presents. As readers, we absorb this information, particularly when it comes from a perceived authority, but do we question it appropriately? Let’s take a closer look at the same information presented in this chart, but with more context. On the right (and “right”) are similar murder stats but put into the context of population. This example of critical reading is fairly benign. Last weekend, I had the pleasure to be invited to Guelph as the plenary speaker for TESL Waterloo-Wellington Conference, a local ELT event at a college about an hour outside Toronto. Is this phenomenon (of fake news, etc) a new thing? Look at this image from Snow White. Water. Highlight video
Fake news: Universities offer tips on how to spot it A year on from his election victory, President Trump's frequently used phrase "fake news" is now common currency. It was even named word of the year by the dictionary publisher Collins. But being aware of fake news does not mean we can always spot it. "Everything gets flattened out on social media," says Dr Philip Seargeant, who lectures in applied linguistics at the Open University. "There are jokes one minute, serious issues the next, and you are getting them from friends. Dr Seargeant says universities are ideally placed to help students and the wider public decide what stories to believe. Universities work hard to build students' critical skills for academic work, but these skills have more relevance than "just checking your references or checking the authority of the information you have when you are writing an essay, exactly the same thing applies to how the news works", he says. Data dangers These ideas strike a chord with Dr Andrew Bell, of Sheffield University's Methods Institute.
Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News Back in 2015, when we published our lesson plan Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources, we had no way of knowing that, a year later, the Oxford Dictionaries would declare “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year; that fake news would play a role in the 2016 presidential election; that it would cause real violence; and that the president-elect of the United States would use the term to condemn mainstream media outlets he opposes. Back then, to convince teachers that the skill was important, we quoted Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project on the “digital naïveté” of the “digital natives” we teach. These days, invented stories created in a “fake news factory”— or by a 23-year-old in need of cash — go viral, while articles from traditional sources like The Times are called “fake news” by those who see them as hostile to their agenda. That, writes Sabrina Tavernise in “As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at the Truth,” leads to an insidious problem:
UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment. It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange. Too strange for a university professor to take seriously. “There was a significant volume of social-media traffic that blamed the Navy SEALs for the bombing,” Starbird told me the other day in her office. Same thing after the mass shooting that killed nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon: a burst of social-media activity calling the massacre a fake, a stage play by “crisis actors” for political purposes. “After every mass shooting, dozens of them, there would be these strange clusters of activity,” Starbird says. “That was a terrible mistake. Starbird sighed.
Note: Howard Rheingold: Check Facts With Crap Detection Resources - DML Central Want to know if someone plagiarizes a speech? Is the content on a website copied from another website? Do those song lyrics sound familiar? Suspecting minds should check. His constantly updated and curated list includes sites that can: instantly verify whether a celebrity is dead or alive;research statements made by politicians and rate their accuracy;allow consumers to file, report and look up scams;offer a user’s guide to finding and evaluating health information on the web;detect forged and altered photos;detect email hoaxes; check the accuracy of historical facts;verify facts and news online; compare articles to a database of other articles and press releases to determine if it is original journalism; and verify how many fake followers a Twitter account has. Rheingold’s guide started as a chapter in his 2012 book, “Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.” The guide is open to all and anyone can comment and offer other resources to add to the list.
Skills and Strategies | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources Video and a related lesson plan from TEDEd. Update: Please also see our new, 2017 lesson, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News _________ How do you know if something you read is true? We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct. 6, and try to answer them with resources from The Times as well as from Edutopia, the Center for News Literacy, TEDEd and the NewseumEd. Although we doubt we need to convince teachers that this skill is important, we like the way Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project frames it in a post for Edutopia. As he points out, every teacher is familiar with “digital natives” and the way they seem to have been born with the ability to use technology. Below, a roundup of tools, questions, activities and case studies we hope can help reduce this digital naïveté. Getting Started: What is News Literacy and Why Do You Need It? Video and a related lesson plan from TEDEd. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Home - Web Page Evaluation: Context and Criteria Context and Criteria [ Context ] ~ [ Evaluation Criteria ] ~ [ Webliography ] Context: The Primary Factor The User Context: The most important factor when evaluating Web sites is your search, your needs. The Web Context: Some of the visual distinctions that signal the nature of content in print sources hold true on the Web as well, although, because the Web encourages wider use of graphics, Web versions of printed works usually contain more graphics and more color than their print counterparts. Evaluation Criteria --- Same as Print? --- Evaluating Web Pages: Questions to Consider. Accuracy Authority Currency Objectivity Coverage --- Evaluating Quality on the Net. Stated criteria for inclusion of information Authority of author or creator Comparability with related sources Stability of information Appropriateness of format Software/hardware/multimedia requirements Webliography Critically Analyzing Information Sources: Ten Things to Look for When You Evaluate an Information Source.
PolitiFact's guide to fake news websites and what they peddle At first look, BostonTribune.com certainly seems a trustworthy source. So does KMT11.com. And ABCNews.com.co. Even 24wpn.com has an official ring to it. But all of these websites peddle bogus stories, either by making up fake news or sharing it from other sources. And it’s not always apparent to readers that’s the case. Since December, we at PolitiFact have been partnering with Facebook to root out fabricated reports shared by social media users. It’s also difficult to determine where these fictional stories come from, and just how they spread across the Internet. Using our experiences, we've been able to create our own fake news almanac. This is by no means a complete list of offenders. Some websites just want you to click on their pages to generate advertising revenue. We’ve broken the websites on our list down into four broad categories, marked by specific aims and methods for generating or sharing fake news. Parody or joke sites Politicono.com is not alone. News imposter sites
We All Teach SEL: Empathy Activities and Tools for Students | Common Sense Education Building SEL (social and emotional learning) skills such as empathy requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but there are tools that can supplement the development of character in the classroom and at home. According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, empathy is: the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. While some tools focus specifically on empathy, the websites and apps that you use daily (in all subjects) can be used to promote perspective taking, too. Why empathy? Classrooms are complex, collaborative, and diverse spaces. Take action Don't be afraid to tackle hard topics as a class -- get students thinking about their similarities and differences. Directly target empathy See our Top Games That Teach Empathy list for more empathy-focused tools. Build empathy in all subjects For ELA classrooms For all classrooms
MediaLit Moments Friday, 19 May 2017 11:06 Beth Thornton In the “olden days,” people primarily relied upon newspapers for their news, and the papers were clearly labeled by section -- “News” “Features” “Opinion.” Through everyday use, newspapers trained their readers to expect the international and national news on the front page, and state and local news in following pages, and to flip through the pages for articles about local heroes or topics of interest like Home and Garden, Sports, or their favorite columnists and Editorials. Today, such labels are abandoned when articles are lifted as links and shared via social media, or when people check YouTube for the latest news, or when people accept their friends’ postings as “news.” When you read your news on Facebook (and many people do!) Ask students to illustrate their understanding of the difference between an editorial and “hard” news. Key Question #1: Who created this message? Core Concept #1: All media messages are constructed. Definitions:
Home - Evaluating resources - Library Guides at UC Berkeley To find out more about an author: Google the author's name or dig deeper in the library's biographical source databases. To find scholarly sources: When searching library article databases, look for a checkbox to narrow your results to Scholarly, Peer Reviewed or Peer Refereed publications. To evaluate a source's critical reception: Check in the library's book and film review databases to get a sense of how a source was received in the popular and scholarly press. To evaluate internet sources: The internet is a great place to find both scholarly and popular sources, but it's especially important to ask questions about authorship and publication when you're evaluating online resources.