Fake News Antidote: Teaching Kids To Discern Fact From Fiction : NPR Ed By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news — the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people. When The New York Times later asked Welch what he thought when he realized there were no child slaves inside the restaurant, as one fake news story had led him to believe, he responded: "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent." Welch isn't the only one struggling to tell fact from fiction in this digital age. A recent Stanford study found that America's middle, high school and college students are shockingly bad at it, too. "How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends," Wineburg asked on NPR's All Things Considered, "when they've been given no practice in school?" And he's right. "Like a flu in the winter" Hunt teaches U.S. and Virginia government. Cooper labels the story "fiction."
Huge MIT Study of ‘Fake News’: Falsehoods Win on Twitter Ultimately, they found about 126,000 tweets, which, together, had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times. Some linked to “fake” stories hosted on other websites. Some started rumors themselves, either in the text of a tweet or in an attached image. (The team used a special program that could search for words contained within static tweet images.) And some contained true information or linked to it elsewhere. Then they ran a series of analyses, comparing the popularity of the fake rumors with the popularity of the real news. Speaking from MIT this week, Vosoughi gave me an example: There are lots of ways for a tweet to get 10,000 retweets, he said. Meanwhile, someone without many followers sends Tweet B. Tweet A and Tweet B both have the same size audience, but Tweet B has more “depth,” to use Vosoughi’s term. Here’s the thing: Fake news dominates according to both metrics. These results proved robust even when they were checked by humans, not bots.
Identify Bias - How to Evaluate Information Sources - ResearchGuides at New Jersey Institute of Technology Why should we check the bias of information on a web page? Would you trust information unsupported by facts or logical reasoning? A biased author may not pay attention to all the facts or develop a logical argument to support his or her opinions. Bias is when a statement reflects a partiality, preference, or prejudice for or against a person, object, or idea. Much of what you read and hear expresses a bias. What facts has the author omitted? Biased information tries to change your mind, how you think. What are some indicators of bias on a web page? The language of the document is often extreme; statements have all or nothing connotations. You should expect bias on webpages that are dedicated to selling you something. Questions to keep in mind as you seek indicators of bias: What is the author's political point of view? Authored by Lora K.
What does post-truth mean for a philosopher? Image copyright NCH "Post-truth" has come to describe a type of campaigning that has turned the political world upside down. Fuelled by emotive arguments rather than fact-checks, it was a phrase that tried to capture the gut-instinct, anti-establishment politics that swept Donald Trump and Brexit supporters to victory. Oxford Dictionaries made it the word of the year, defining it as where "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief". But what does this new world mean for academics and scientists whose whole purpose is trying to establish objective facts? AC Grayling, public thinker, master of the New College of the Humanities, and Remain campaigner, views the post-truth world with undisguised horror. The philosopher, awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours, warns of the "corruption of intellectual integrity" and damage to "the whole fabric of democracy". Image copyright iStock "It's terribly narcissistic. Image copyright Reuters
Retired Doctor Unearths Lost Leonardo Da Vinci Drawing Worth $16 Million | The Huffington Post Stanford|Welcome to the Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking Welcome to the d.school’s Virtual Crash Course resource page! We know not everyone can make a trip to the d.school to experience how we teach design thinking. So, we created this online version of one of our most frequently sought after learning tools. Using the video, handouts, and facilitation tips below, we will take you step by step through the process of hosting or participating in a 90 minute design challenge. If you choose to participate, in 90 minutes you will be taken through a full design cycle by participating in The Gift-Giving Project. Through this experience we hope you will take away some of the basic principles of Design Thinking and start to adapt them into your personal and professional routines. Below, you will find three sections: Gear Up!
The Psychology Behind Fake News It’s hard to venture online these days—or switch on any cable network—without coming across a heated discussion over “fake news.” Basic facts and figures, ranging from crowd sizes to poll numbers to whether or not it rained, now appear to be under negotiation. For many media consumers, it can feel as if we are living through an entirely new dystopian era, with each news cycle or press conference sending us further down the rabbit hole. But although the term “fake news” reflects our troubled political moment, the phenomenon is nothing new, and neither is the psychology that explains its persistence. “There’s a tendency for people to say, ‘Well, given the social media channels we have now, these things can spread more quickly and have a greater effect than ever before,” says Adam Waytz, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. “There’s an assumption that fake news exacerbates polarization,” Waytz says. The Many Flavors of Truth A Possible Solution
Can Your Students Recognize Bias? 7 Tips for Teaching Media Literacy In today’s environment, media literacy is more important than ever. But the sparse research on the topic shows us that kids really struggle with identifying legitimate sources. This Stanford study found that 82 percent of middle school students couldn’t distinguish between a news story and one labeled as sponsored content. So how can teachers help? 1. Put your students in groups and ask them to discuss the following questions: What is fake news? Just because the terms “fake news” and “news bias” are all over the news media doesn’t mean that your students know what they mean or why they matter. 2. Show your students the website All About Explorers: Christopher Columbus and ask them to locate information about him. 3. Instead of relying on their own knowledge, ask students to cross-check the information they found with a more reliable website. How do you know when a source is reliable? Have students Google whether a source is considered to have a liberal or conservative bias. 4. 5. 6. 7.
How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data. Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. Two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), in their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance.
Prefixes - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary Prefixes are letters which we add to the beginning of a word to make a new word with a different meaning. Prefixes can, for example, create a new word opposite in meaning to the word the prefix is attached to. They can also make a word negative or express relations of time, place or manner. I’m sorry I was unable to attend the meeting. Non-payment of fees could result in a student being asked to leave the course. Has anyone ever really met an extraterrestrial being? The meat was overcooked and quite tasteless. There are no absolute rules for when to use a hyphen or when to write a prefixed word as one whole word (see the examples in the table).