Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Fake News Edition | On the Media BROOKE GLADSTONE: Drawing a distinction between fake and real news is going to be hard for those Facebook and Google employees tasked with bird dogging offending sites, but it shouldn’t be so hard for you, the consumer. Melissa Zimdars, professor of communication and media at Merrimack College, has made a list of more than a hundred problematic news sites, along with tips for sorting out the truthful from the troublesome. She got into the fake news sorting racket after a hot tip. MELISSA ZIMDARS: Someone alerted me to the fact that when you searched for the popular vote on Google, the first Google news item that came up was a fake news website saying that Hillary Clinton lost the popular vote. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. MELISSA ZIMDARS: And that's when I was like, yeah, we need to teach our students [LAUGHS] how to navigate this. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Tell me what the reaction’s been to the doc? BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you’re getting trolled. MELISSA ZIMDARS: Majorly trolled, yes.
How to choose your news - Damon Brown | TED-Ed How the media landscape has changed Media visionary Clay Shirky gave a TED Talk on how the media landscape has changed. “The moment we’re living through, the moment our historical generation is living through, is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” In other words, the amount of information we are capable of capturing is unprecedented. As a result, we need new techniques to filter through the information and need to work much harder than previous generation to better understand our world. Watch Clay Shirky’s fascinating media discussion on TED-Ed. Understanding social media The TED Book “Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed with Documenting Our Lives Online” discusses the challenges of social media turning every day folks into journalists. You can read an excerpt of Our Virtual Shadow on the TED blog. Journalism can be much more than reporting.
External Resources | Northstar Digital Literacy This page includes a variety of publicly available learning resources that may support additional practice with Northstar standards. These resources were not created by Northstar. Since we now offer online learning modules and a comprehensive classroom curriculum, this list of external resources is not being actively maintained by our team. We have developed 1:1 Digital Literacy Skills Volunteer Tutor Plans, resources to support volunteer tutors working with learners one-on-one. Please note, we now provide comprehensive classroom curricula for each assessment, which have been created by Northstar - these curricula are available only through Northstar testing locations. In the resources below, note that links to a text resource, links to a media resource, and links to an activity resource. Back to List Basic Computer Skills 1 Distinguish between different types of devices (tablets, desktop and laptop computers) 10 Access and control audio output features (volume, mute, speakers and headphones)
Introducing This Is Fake, Slate’s tool for stopping fake news on Facebook. One of the more extreme symptoms of media dysfunction in the past several months has been the ascendance of “fake news”—fabricated news stories that purport to be factual. The phenomenon is not altogether novel, but the scale at which it is now being produced and consumed is unprecedented. A BuzzFeed data analysis found that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump, that Hillary Clinton was implicated in the murder of an FBI agent, that Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS, all received more Facebook engagement than the most popular news stories from established outlets such as the New York Times and CNN. Made-up stories with a liberal slant made the rounds as well, although the evidence suggests they propagated less widely. At a time when trust in the media is at an all-time low and political polarization is intensifying, fake news is hardly the only pox afflicting our democracy. How It Works What Counts as Fake So how do we decide which stories count as fake?
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
Using NS During COVID-19 | News | Northstar Digital Literacy March 18, 2020 Updated 7/16/20 with information on 1:1 Digital Literacy Skills Volunteer Tutor Plans. Testing locations: as the COVID-19 situation progresses, we are aware that the ways in which testing locations use Northstar may well change. Here is some information that may help: We have developed Northstar best practices to allow interested testing locations to continue proctoring Northstar assessments by doing so remotely. Given widespread organization shutdowns, you may want to transition your learners to Northstar Online Learning (NSOL) if you have not already done so. Please let us know the challenges you are facing, and we will help as best we can.
Study: Students show ‘troubling’ lack of news literacy skills — News Literacy Project A new report from the Stanford History Education Group has found little change in high school students’ ability to evaluate information online since 2016, when SHEG researchers released the results of a similar study. This skill set — dubbed “civic online reasoning” by Stanford researchers — consists of the ability to recognize advertising, including branded content; to evaluate claims and evidence presented online; and to correctly distinguish between reliable and untrustworthy websites and other sources of information. (The executive summary of the 2016 study summed up “young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet” in one word: “bleak” — and the executive summary of the latest report acknowledged that “the results — if they can be summarized in a word — are troubling.”) For the latest findings, SHEG partnered with Gibson Consulting, an education research group, to assess 3,446 high school students from 16 school districts in 14 states.
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. 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? There are a number of issues at play in the case of Our Virginia, but there’s no question that evaluating sources is an important part of the research process and doesn’t just apply to Internet sources. 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 Distinguishing Between Information Resources Social Media News Articles Magazine Articles Bias