Navigating Digital Information

The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science The MIT Media Lab already had a reputation for this before Epstein. Its One Laptop per Child project was a notorious failure. Like the food computer, it was based on a faulty premise (laptops aren’t known to actually make a difference in a child’s education), wildly oversold (the laptops were supposed to be powered by hand crank, but a working hand crank was never actually developed, and all models were powered by electrical cord), and built to fulfill donor dreams rather than a demonstrated real-world need. A project for futuristic, bio-inspired design took $125,000 from Epstein and made him a light-up orb as a gift—over objections from students working in the project lab. This lab’s work includes, among truly visionary work like biomanufactured chitin structures, showpiece clothing demos. One set was purported to show how biodesign could help wearers survive harsh conditions on other planets.

News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017 As of August 2017, two-thirds (67%) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62% of U.S. adults reported getting news from social media. While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and nonwhite. This study is based on a survey conducted August 8-21, 2017, with 4,971 U.S. adults who are members of Pew Research Center’s nationally representative American Trends Panel. Plagiarism Quiz 9-10: Master You're a plagiarism expert! Continue writing originally and bolstering ideas with properly cited sources. Tweet how awesome you are and share it with your classmates, friends, or instructors! 7-9: Pro You're a citation pro!

News Literacy - High School The universe of information we live in is a complicated web of messages with a mind-blowing array of sources, biases, and agendas. Help your students develop the mad news literacy skills they need with the resources in our hot-off-the-press News Literacy unit. Designed for the high school classroom, this unit teaches students to recognize high-standards journalism so they can make informed judgments about the information coming at them. Students get practical skills to help them identify and deal with misinformation, bias, opinion, and more.

Extended Essay LibGuides from ICS Inter-Community School Zurich As the extended essay is an important component of the Diploma Programme, and a substantial piece of work, students need to ensure that they understand the expectations of the task and manage their time and workload effectively. The following suggestions are given as guidance to help with the process. Students are strongly recommended to: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone Just as spring arrived last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. His project straddles both operations management and behavioral economics, so Rahimi had a lot of ground to cover. But every time he found the abstract of a relevant paper, he hit a paywall. Although Amirkabir is one of the top research universities in Iran, international sanctions and economic woes have left it with poor access to journals.

Mind Over Media: Analyzing Contemporary Propaganda (URI) This web platform provides an opportunity to explore the subject of contemporary propaganda by hosting thousands of examples of 21st century propaganda from around the world. Users can upload, examine and discuss examples of propaganda from our own daily lives. By examining propaganda, rating its potential impact, and commenting on it, people share their interpretations with others. Lesson plans deepen the learning by offering additional information, structuring discussion activities, and enabling students to demonstrate their learning through multimedia production experiences.

Quote, Unquote Online : Harvard referencing For one author include the author’s family name and date, as above. For two authors include both family names e.g. Smith and Jones (2018) argued … For three or more authors of one work include the first author and ‘et al.’ (meaning ‘and others’ in latin) e.g. A journalist’s guide to cognitive bias (and how to avoid it) For the last few years I’ve been teaching my journalism students a dedicated class on cognitive bias — common ways of thinking that lead journalists (and audiences and sources) to make avoidable mistakes. Journalism is particularly vulnerable to cognitive bias: we regularly make decisions at speed; we have to deal with too much information — or extract meaning where there isn’t enough of it. Each of those situations makes us vulnerable to poor decision-making — and many of the rules that we adhere to as journalists are designed to address that. Some cognitive biases — such as groupthink, prejudice, and confirmation bias (covered in a second post here) — are well-known, but many others are not (there are over 180 of them).