Where To Find RWS100 Teaching Resources Orientation Schedule and Powerpoint Syllabus, Assignments and Schedule Main Texts for RWS100 Fall 2018 Teaching Materials for the First Two-Three Weeks  Unit 1: Thompson's "Public Thinking" The Text Background & Links Collected Teaching Materials for Unit 1/Thompson's "Public Thinking" Examples of Public Thinking Unit 2: Strategies & Sources Texts Videos for Day Papers Due & to Introduce the Topic Teaching Materials for Unit 2 Fun with Online Sources Unit 3: Boyd's "Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital Natives?'" Collected Teaching Materials for Unit 3 Background on Boyd & her book Main Text Other Texts that Can be Used for Unit 3  Videos of Boyd and other Writers discussing Digital Natives Are You Smarter than a Stanford Student? Unit 4: Fake News/Evaluating Sources Project Texts and Teaching Materials Debates Analyzing Online Material Shared at House Intelligence Committee Tools and Resources for Evaluating Fake News Sample Web Sites for Analysis Fake News Repositories  Fake Sites with Debunking Guide Sample Fake News Stories from before and after the 2016 Election Digital Literacy Resources - Using Blogs and Hypothesis (Annotation) Using Wordpress Blogs for Homework, Class Discussion and Portfolios Using Hypothesis for Annotation, Social Reading, Peer Review & Feeedback Multimodal Rhetorics Online Versions of Texts That Can be Annotated Using Hypothesis WPA Materials

 

Where To Find RWS100 Teaching Resources

This page is the main resource for RWS100 in fall 2018. It contains a lot of teaching material. If you find it overwhelming, you may wish to focus 
on the main "collection of teaching materials" file for each unit (see Collection of Teaching Materials for unit 1, collection of teaching materials for unit 2,

and Collection of Teaching Materials for unit 3.

 

There is also a "Contribution" page that contains teaching resources created by TAs, and a Homework page where TAs have published
a lot of 100 materials.  You can also take a look at the wiki sites created by several 100 teachers.  These contain teaching material and homework.

 

• Andrew Testa's Teaching Materials for RWS100 and 200 
• RWS100: Scott Bruner's class, Andrea Kade's class, Caro Raedeker's class, and Chris Werry's class

 

Orientation Schedule and Powerpoint

• The orientation will be help in Storm Hall 213. Here is the schedule for the fall 2018 orientation
• Here are the powerpoint slides for fall 2018 orientation 

 

Syllabus, Assignments and Schedule

• Sample MWF syllabus and schedule for RWS100 
• Sample Tue/Thurs syllabus and schedule for RWS100 
• Assignments for RWS100 fall 2018 (reflects new assignment sequence and student learning outcomes)

 

Main Texts for RWS100 Fall 2018

• There is an online course reader (also available as PDF). You can ask your students to print this out, in full or in parts. We suggest you tell them to print the 
  PDF and use Landscape, with 2 pages per piece of paper, so it is only 50 pages long (if they print double sided, it's only 25 pages, thus very inexpensive). 
• Thompson, "Public Thinking" 
• Boyd, "Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital Natives?"
• Social media texts: Tefecki, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” McNamee, “Google and Facebook Terrify me,” and Golumbia’s
  “Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy.”  Word versions of these texts are here. 
• Texts debating campus smoking/vaping policies (Miller, “A Smoker's Plea,”  Shieh, "Smoking ban diminishes on-campus diversity," 
  and Shelbourne, " E-cigs are a risk to everyone, not just the user.") 

 

Teaching Materials for the First Two-Three Weeks 

• Overview of first two weeks and unit 1 (Chris). This is a fairly simple, "traditional" plan that moves quickly to unit 1 (it 
  spends 2 weeks introducing rhetoric and argument analysis.)
• First class checklist, plus some activities and handouts for the first few classes 
• A big list of first week activities and texts many teachers have shared. 
• A more ambitious set of opening teaching activities that makes use of multimodal exercises (by the very talented and experienced 
  Jenny Sheppard). This is from a semester where we had more time at the start, so If you use this you should aim to reduce 
  the number of activities so you can still get to the first unit in the third week of class.  
• First day notes for myself
• Short texts often used in the first two weeks to introduce students to rhetorical reading and argument analysis. There are 
  teaching materials for many of these texts on this page, "First Weeks: Introducing Concepts and Applying to Short Texts."
• A pdf presentation that introduces the idea of close reading, rhetorical situation, argument analysis, and appeals. Based on  Bean et al's 
  text Reading Rhetorically this follows the work we do fairly closely and so could be useful.
• A powerpoint explaining key concepts in Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, and introducing students to academic discourse. 
• Textbook selections that provide background for teachers and/or extra teaching ideas for activities such as close reading, annotation, "say-do" 
  charting, identifying the rhetorical situation, locating claims and evidence.  
  Bean et al on annotation, say-do charts, and composing a rhetorical precis.
  Bean et al on the rhetorical situation, and identifying claims, evidence and appeals
  Parfitt on annotation, claims and evidence, the rhetorical situation and into to argument, say-do exercises, and argument analysis.
• Here are the two critical reading strategies I mentioned on Monday: SOAPSTone (the powerpoint explaining it in much more detail than I did)
  & rhetorical situation (the triangle visual that incorporates SOAPSTone elements & helps them organize their strategies)
   

Unit 1: Thompson's "Public Thinking"

The Text

• Excerpts from Clive Thompson's "Public Thinking," chapter 1 of Smarter Than You Think (Penguin Press, 2013.) The excerpts are 
  pages 45 - 61, 66-68, and 77-82. If you are feeling ambitious and would like to use the complete chapter for assignment 1 you can do so.

 

Background & Links

• Clive Thompson's bio (from the site for his book, Smarter Than You Think.)  Thompson's wikipedia page, twitter feed and a new blog and  old blog 
• Video of Thompson discussing some of the claims in his book with Andrew Keen of TechCrunch TV (10 minutes).  Video interview about the book 
  on Huffington Post (12 minutes).  
• Video of Thompson from CBS This Morning show. Short (3.45) 
• IQ Squared debate - Carr, Keen, Weinberger and Bell. This debate could be used to introduce the "conversation" Thomson is joining. 
  Car and Keen are deeply critical of social media, claiming it is damaging literacy, reasoning, deliberation and democracy. The other two participants 
  present positions that are in tune with THompson.  http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/smart-technology-making-us-dumb    
• Animated Book Review--Synopsis of the Argument (7:36), but the bit for "Public Thinking" is approximately a minute long starting around 2 minutes
• Review of the book by Walter Isaacson of the New York Times. A collection of reviews from other sources (selected by the publisher of Thompson's book). 

 

Collected Teaching Materials for Unit 1/Thompson's "Public Thinking"

• Collection of Teaching Materials for unit 1

 

Examples of Public Thinking

Thompson talks about the importance of “public thinking” and “networked” reading and writing of texts. At the end of his chapter he asks, “What tools will 
create new forms of public thinking in the years to come?” His answer is that “as more forms of media become digital, they'll become sites for public 
thinking… Marginalia may become a new type of public thinking, with the smartest remarks from other readers becoming part of how we make sense of a book.” 
Thompson also discusses how reading and writing are becoming “blended,” and quotes literacy theorist Debbie Brandt: “People read in order to generate writing; 
we read from the posture of the writer.”

We can examine some contemporary examples of tools and publishing experiments that embody Thompson's ideas. These may help us understand what Thompson 
is on about, but also determine the extent to which his claims are plausible.

• Hypothesis is one of many new new tools that experiment with "social reading and writing." Hypothesis enables people to publicly comment on and annotate 
  online texts, and also lets you form groups, and follow people whose annotations you like. Example: if you look at Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” you’ll see 
  a scholar has recorded his response in the margins. (You will need to have added the extension to see this). Political speeches are starting to be publicly 
  annotated by academics. For example, the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom annotated Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic national Convention using Hypothesis.
• The annotation tools “News Genius” and “Rap Genius” let users comment on, explicate, analyze and annotate news stories and music lyrics. Rap genius is used a lot 
  and may be of interest to students.  Consider the following: T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock has been nicely annotated. The line “Do I dare disturb the 
  universe” is discussed, along with the fact that the line was remixed and used by rapper Chuck D. http://genius.com/Ts-eliot-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-annotated 
  If you click on the line the link to Chuck D will appear.   The Genius annotation system is used for fan fiction, creative writers, and many genres of "high" and 
  pop culture.  The literature page is here: http://lit.genius.com/ Consider this annotation of Shelley's "Ozymandias". Note also that users vote on which 
  annotations should be listed at the top, and there is a scoreboard of most popular writers and annotators.  Note also that while fans annotate pop songs, 
  some artists annotate their own songs. Consider the recent hit "Broccoli," by D.R.A.M., which is annotated by the songwriters. Other 
  writers and artists who have annotated texts are here  (you can follow them). 
• Writers comment and annotate their own (and others) texts. Lena Dunham has used Genius to annotate a chapter from her book Not That Kind Of Girl, 
  a collection of essays.
• The Washington Post has posted annotated versions of major speeches by politicians using the annotation tool “News Genius.” They 
  published an annotated version of Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican National Convention and Hilary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
• The magazine platform Medium enables readers to comment on and annotate articles, follow writers and annotators, and reply to comments/annotations. 
  Dana Boyd, one of the authors we will read, has a page on Medium. You can see all the articles she has written and also the notes she has made, and you can follow both. 
  See also this piece, at 1.25:  https://noteworthy.medium.com/sarah-cooper-f8a23893e6a0
• There are many scholarly tools for annotating texts. Some have been developed by writing faculty. For example there is MIT's Annotation Studio, and 
  CMU's Classroom Salon. There is also CommentPress, an open-source plug-in for WordPress developed by folks at the Future of the Book initiative. This tool "aims 
  to turn a document into a conversation (view examples here). Readers can comment on, say, an academic paper before it has gone to press and add insights and 
  questions in the margins of the text." 

 

Unit 2: Strategies & Sources

 

Texts

• Three short texts about campus smoking policies you can use to introduce and scaffold the assignment (Miller, Shieh and Shelbourne)
• Three short texts about the impact social media on thought, politics and social life (McNamee, Tufecki, and Golumbia). We will use these 
  for assignment 2. 
• Optional: you could use Carr's "Is Google making Us Stupid?" instead or in addition to the three short texts on social media. 

 

Videos for Day Papers Due & to Introduce the Topic

• TED Talk, Tufecki, “We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads” https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?language=en  
• Short video about how YouTube encourages radical views. By a Wall St Journal investigative journalist,it is called "How Youtube drives viewers  to the darkest corners of the web." His work is cited by Tufecki  
• Tufecki interview - CBC Canadian Broadcasting Company, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_0lITgn8pE 
• Eli Pariser and the Filter Bubble, http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles. This TED talk is quite famous and supports and illustrates many of the arguments made in the unit 2 texts. 
• Tristan Harris on "Brain Hacking" - 60 Mnutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAMTQZmvPE Harris's ideas are a big part of MacNamee's 
  argument (one of the unit 2 texts).  
• 'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth. (3 minutes long.) Guardian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=62&v=aTxUetlqWmU
• IQ Squared debate - Carr, Keen, Weinberger and Bell. This debate could be used to introduce the larger "conversation."  Carr and Keen are deeply 
  critical of social media, claiming it is damaging literacy, reasoning, deliberation and democracy (they thus echo some claims of unit 2 writers). The other two participants present optimistic positions more in tune with Thompson.  http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/smart-technology-making-us-dumb 

 

 

Teaching Materials for Unit 2

• An overview of classroom activities for unit 2
• A collection of teaching materials for unit 2. Includes handouts, sample prompts, teaching ideas, classroom activities, templates, sample papers.
• Material for teaching assumptions and implications. Uses examples from Miller and Shieh and includes classroom exercises.  
• Evaluating sources - a checklist. Excerpt from Bean et al, Reading Rhetorically 
• Powerpoint on strategies (contains more than you will likely want to use) 
• You can use material on the wiki introducing and teaching rhetorical strategies . You can also use material in the course reader, and excerpts on appeals 
  from Bean et al (Reading Rhetorically, pdf), Weeks and Longaker (Rhetorical Analysis) or chapter 6 on rhetorical analysis in Everything’s an Argument if you wish. 
• A handout on appeals 
• Criteria for evaluating arguments - powerpoint 

 

Fun with Online Sources

1. Examine these two sites. Can you quickly determine if they are credible? Gateway Pundit  Natural News
2. Compare the web sites for two organizations, the American College of Pediatricians, https://www.acpeds.org/, and the American Academy of Pediatrics,
   https://www.aap.org/  Before looking these up, start by examining  the two sites. Which seems more reliable, credible or authoritative, or do
   they both seem reliable, credible and authoritative?
3. Now use your search skills to determine which source seems more reliable. What do you find?  How did you make your determination?
4. National Vaccine Information Center 

 

 

Unit 3: Boyd's "Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital Natives?'"

 

Collected Teaching Materials for Unit 3

• Collection of Teaching Materials for unit 3  (Boyd's "Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital natives?") Contains prompt, handouts, exercises, 
  templates and sample writing.
• A set of texts, research "angles" and topics students can use for assignment 3. 
• A page full of links to texts and sites students could use. 
• Pietera's "Describing Relationships Between Texts" (adapted from Julie Harris' worksheet) and "Putting Texts in Conversation" exercises. 
• Powerpoint that explains the conversation Boyd's text is part of and also gives examples of digital literacy 
• handout and set of exercises that can be used to explore digital literacy skills 

 

Background on Boyd & her book

• Some background on Boyd: her homepage, blog, twitter feed, social bookmarks (on delicious), wikipedia page, MEDIUM page 
  (can see what she has written, annotated, and who she follows)

 

Main Text

• Danah Boyd's "Literacy: Are Today's Youth Digital Natives?" (here are the footnotes for the chapter)  
• An annotated/charted version of Boyd's text (Jamie)
• The text we are reading is a chapter from Boyd's book, It's Complicated: the Social lives of Networked Teens." 
  Boyd has made the text freely available online as a .pdf (what does that tell us about the author and her attitude to her work?)  

 

Other Texts that Can be Used for Unit 3 

• Wineburg and McGrew’s, “Why Students Can’t Google Their Way to Truth 
• Rose-Stockwell’s, “How Your Fear and Outrage are Being Sold for Profit.”
• A collection of Fake News texts, sites and teaching resources. Can be used if you wish to have students examine the implications 
  of fake news for Boyd and Thompson's arguments.   

 

Videos of Boyd and other Writers discussing Digital Natives

• Susan Bennett, “The Dangerous Idea of the Digital Native”  
• Boyd talk to Leo Laporte about how the idea of 'Digital Natives' is a misnomer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0k-Rx4sht8 (4 minutes)
• Boyd talks to UW Comm undergraduate Austin Williams about her book, It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. 12 minutes)
• Marc Prensky (often credited with coining the term “digital natives”) explains digital natives to PBS interviewer on Frontline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGQLTHyRG_g
• Two talks that show how widespread the terms “digital natives” and digital immigrants” are. 
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_9gI0B4nS4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRQdAOrqvGg (shows existence and popularity of the term ‘digital native’)
• Do "Digital Natives" Exist? Idea Channel, PBS Digital Studios. Fun entertaining video that echoes many of Boyd’s claims. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVKBAqjHiE
• Boyd cites Pariser on google, search and "filter bubbles." Here is a TED talk Pariser gave that outlines this argument. 
• Boyd cites the influential work of Tarleton Gillespie on the politics of algorithms.
• This 5 minute interview of Gillespie by an undergraduate spells out some main ideas of his work in an accessible way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cT1i1_Nyd

 

 

Are You Smarter than a Stanford Student?

Use your critical digital literacy skills to determine which of  these two sites seem more credible.

Compare the web sites for two organizations, the American College of Pediatricians, https://www.acpeds.org/,  and the American Academy 
of Pediatrics, https://www.aap.org/  Before googling these sites, start by examining them. Which seems more reliable, credible or 
authoritative, or do they both seem reliable, credible and authoritative? 

Now use your search skills to determine which seems more reliable, 
credible or authoritative. What do you find? (You could consider who links to the sites to help with this). How did you make your determination?

1. https://www.acpeds.org/
2. https://www.aap.org/en-us/Pages/Default.aspx

 

Skim this article. What  do you think?

•  http://www.naturalnews.com/2017-02-12-tinyparticles-from-city-air-invade-peoples-brainsinterfere-with-cognition.html 

 

Now look at the site's "about" page." What clues make you think credible (or not)? 

• https://www.naturalnews.com/About.html

 

 

Unit 4: Fake News/Evaluating Sources Project

 

Texts and Teaching Materials

• See the collection of Fake News texts, sites and teaching resources.   
• RWS100 Assignment: Evaluating Online Sources with Fake News (Jacob Hubbard)
• RWS100 Assignment: Analyzing Fake Material Shared at House Intelligence Committee and evaluating Native advertising (Werry) 
• Play the factitious game (could do in class). Asks you to identify whether a story is true or not. Seems set up to show how scrutinizing the source is 
  a key element of evaluation. 

 

Debates

• “Can we solve the problem of fake news?”  (1 hour) Oxford style debate by academics.and journalists. "This was the proposition brought to a lively panel of six experts Wednesday night for a debate hosted by the Daily News Innovation Lab in collaboration with NYC Media Lab." There are two summaries of the debate, one by New York Daily News, and the other by the Columbia Journalism Review.
• NYT Room for Debate: How to Stop the Spread of Fake News
• Beat the Press: Fact vs. Fiction.  WGBH News, Nov 18, 2016. 6 minutes. Panel discusses fake news. Nice overview, stakes out some key positions on what is driving the problem and what some solutions might be.  
• Jon Snow hosts debate on Fake News  (UK)

 

Analyzing Online Material Shared at House Intelligence Committee

November 1, 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a few of the 3,000 political ads published by one troll farm linked to the Russian government between 2015 and 2017. They also identified two popular twitter users named Jenna Abrams and Pamela Moore, as Russian trolls.  They were some of the 2,750 fake Twitter accounts created by employees at the Internet Research Agency, a “troll farm” in  St Petersburg. Their accounts, @Jenn_Abrams and @Pamela_Moore13 have been deleted, but many tweets have been saved and can be accessed on tweetsave.com.

Fourteen sample ads were shared, along with some of the purchasing information for each ad.

Ads and tweets for analysis

• Fourteen ads shared by the House Intelligence Committee. Examine the advertisements and the "metadata" for each one in order to 
  analyze their message, the strategies (verbal and visual) they use. Try to guess at their purpose, the audience they are aiming at, their 
  assumptions, and what they are trying to accomplish.
• A saved copy of some of Jenna Abrams tweets (via tweetsave - you may need a twitter account to use). Some of the tweets can also be 
  see on archive.org  A saved copy of some of Pamela Moore's tweets: https://tweetsave.com/pamela_moore13
  Analyze these tweets and answer the questions bolded above. 

 

Videos and news articles that provide background

• 2 minute CBS video on story. https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/congress-releases-sample-of-russian-ads/
• 1 minute NBC news video on fake twitter user Jenna Abrams  
• http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/31/media/russia-facebook-violence/index.html  
• "Russian troll factory paid US activists to help fund protests during election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/17/russian-troll-factory-activists-protests-us-election
• “How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics.”  Nicholas Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi. October 9, 2017
  https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/technology/russia-election-facebook-ads-rage.html
• This article in the Philadelphia Inquirer provides information on the two twitter users.
• NBC news: "Russian Trolls Duped Global Media And Nearly 40 Celebrities"
• Harvard's Nieman Lab on the Intelligence Committee hearing 
• How Russian trolls lie their way to the top of your news feed https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-twitter-social-media-russian-troll-politics-chaos/
• Stopfake.org  https://www.stopfake.org/en/tag/troll-factories/  One fake story shows an American soldier shooting a Koran.  

 

 

Tools and Resources for Evaluating Fake News

• Fake News Recommendations (Fred Baker and Media Literacy Clearinghouse) 
• How to Spot Fake News (compilation of resources)
• PolitiFact's guide to fake news websites. 
  PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s partners in its hoax-combating program, published a list of 156 “websites where we’ve found deliberately false or fake stories” since 
  beginning the Facebook partnership. The sites are divided into four categories: “Parody or joke sites,” “news impostor sites," and "fake news sites” and “sites that 
  contain some fake news.” The Politifact site is here, and there is a useful story by Nieman Lab on this  effort by Facebook.   
• "A break down of the types of fake content, content creators motivations and how it's being disseminated." First Draft news, a non-profit organization that provides 
  "practical and ethical guidance in how to find, verify and publish content sourced from the social web." 
• The News Literacy Project's "Guide to identifying and evaluating fake news"
• Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. Joyce Valenza. 
• “Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News.”  Katherine Schulten and  Amanda Christy Brown, NYT, JAN. 19, 2017  
• "How News literacy Gets Web Misinformation Wrong," Mike Caulfield.
• "Why Students Can't Google Their Way to the Truth." Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, Education Week, April 16, 2017.  This article contrasts the way "fact checkers" 
  and students evaluate news, and it argues that most students are poorly equipped to do this. The authors led the Stanford News project. They draw on the same 
  distinction Caulfield makes between vertical and horizontal analysis. "If undergraduates read vertically, evaluating online articles as if they were printed news stories, 
  fact-checkers read laterally, jumping off the original page, opening up a new tab, Googling the name of the organization or its president. Dropped in the middle of a 
  forest, hikers know they can't divine their way out by looking at the ground. They use a compass. Similarly, fact-checkers use the vast resources of the Internet to 
  determine where information is coming from before they read it."
• Video showing "how to use Google’s reverse image search to spot fake news" (40 seconds) and longer video (4 mins) by Alex Couros on detecting fake profile images.

 

 

Sample Web Sites for Analysis

 

1. Natural News http://www.naturalnews.com/  and  http://www.naturalnews.com/About.html. 
   “Fluoride and Why You Need to Avoid It.” By Tru Foods Nutrition, Natural News Blogs, August 14, 2017. 
   http://www.naturalnewsblogs.com/fluoride-and-why-you-need-to-avoid-it/ 
   
   
2. BlackMattersUS https://blackmattersus.com/
    
3.  Consevative Daily Post  https://conservativedailypost.com
    
4. Global Research http://www.globalresearch.ca/
   Putin is Taking a Bold Step against Biotech Giant Monsanto
   http://www.globalresearch.ca/putin-is-taking-a-bold-step-against-biotech-giant-monsanto/5526691
   Let’s Save the World – Trump Must Go! http://www.globalresearch.ca/lets-save-the-world-trump-must-go/5603920 
5. Veterans Today http://www.veteranstoday.com/
   
   "Busted: Idlib Gas Attack Fakers Murder 68 Kids in Bus Slaughter" http://www.veteranstoday.com/2017/04/17/busted-idlib-gas-attack-fakers-murder-68-kids-in-bus-slaughter/
   "US Produced Sarin Gas Used in Syria" http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/04/08/296525
   
   
6. Infowars, https://www.infowars.com/
   "Elite Stage Race War to Enslave America"   https://www.infowars.com/exclusive-elite-stage-race-war-to-enslave-america/  
   Antifa Creates Violence To Provoke Alt-Right Into Aggressive Reaction 
   https://www.infowars.com/antifa-creates-violence-to-provoke-alt-right-into-aggressive-reaction/ 

 

 

Fake News Repositories 

• House Intelligence Collection of Facebook Ads During 2016 Election by Russian Propaganda Teams
• Sample Facebook Ads from the 2016 Election Organized by Group (fake liberal, fake conservative, fake Muslim, fake BLM, etc.)   
• The BlackmattersUS site, one of the few remaining web sites created by Russian operatives during the 2016 election. 
  New materials stopped appearing there in mid-2017, but you can find a lot to analyze. You could also use archive.org to loook at how it changed over time. 
• 50 Fake Facebook Ads from the Election (Newsweek) 

 

 

Fake Sites with Debunking Guide

These fake sites can be used for analysis. They come with model "debunkings."

1. Army Sniper Takes Out Neighbor’s Home Intruder From Bedroom Window. Here is how the story was debunked 
2. Over 30,000 scientists say 'Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming' is a complete hoax and science lie. Here is how it was debunked. For Revkin's comments 
   (and similar sites) see this site.
3. Check the "about" link at bottom of global warming story page. http://www.naturalnews.com/About.html It says, "Website Affiliations. Natural News stories 
   are frequently copied and posted by other alternative news organizations, including Infowars.com, DailyPaul.com and a variety of other sites spanning subjects 
   as diverse as the environment, liberty, self-sufficiency and vaccines." The fact that Infowars is a major distributor of the site is a red flag.

 

Sample Fake News Stories from before and after the 2016 Election

A) What does the story or post say?  B) Does it seem credible? Why or why not? C) How can you tell? What criteria or tools did you use to determine credibility? 
Work through some critical digital literacy exercises.  Start with reverse image searches on the pictures on the stories. Examine who links to the site and where the 
site's links go. Who owns the site - what can you find out?  

1. Private Email Server story
2. Amnesty Plans Story about how Obama and Clinton are promising amnesty to non-citizens who vote
3. Pope Endorsement (copy saved at archive.org. Images missing. Ask students to examine links, esp."About Us").  Story appeared on Facebook feeds like this
4. Benton Strategy Group Leaked Report, "Salvage" Plan 
5. Clinton Adviser Scandal (skim report, but look at the first 10 comments - what are they like? 
6. Twitter posts by Alex Jones on Podesta "Scandal"  
7. Now: are protests against Trump staged and full of paid protesters? (retweeted by president Trump)
8. This timeline of key moments in fake news by the FirstDraftNews organization does a wonderful job tracking fake news stories and has links to key articles.   
9.  The "Pizzagate" story (claims hacked emails show child sex ring operating out of Pizza parlor that hosted dinners for democratic party leaders.) A related
   fake news story led to a twitter war between Jake Tapper of CBS news, and General Flynn's son (and perhaps the strangest interchange ever seen between 
   a chief of staff and a journalist.) David Graham, claims "The 'Comet Pizza' Gunman Provides a Glimpse of a Frightening Future" (The Atlantic Monthly, Dec 5, 2016).   

 

 

Digital Literacy Resources - Using Blogs and Hypothesis (Annotation)

 

Using Wordpress Blogs for Homework, Class Discussion and Portfolios

Some teachers use blogs in class. Some encourage students to read and respond to each others' blog posts and they also discuss 
blog writing in class.  In 100 students will read about blogging as a form of "public thinking" and as a component of digital literacy.

• MODULE: a guide for students explaining how to create blogs using Wordpress  
• Sample student blogs from sections of RWS100 taught by TAs in fall 2016. Scott Bruner, Andrea Kade, and Caro Raedeker's class 

 

Using Hypothesis for Annotation, Social Reading, Peer Review & Feeedback

Annotation tools such as Hypothes.is are used for annotation, bookmarking, peer review and feedback. We have piloted using Hypothes.is for 
A) Individual and group annotation of texts, B) Collaborative reading and analysis of texts, C) Embedding texts in discussion, D) Modeling teacher 
analysis and note-taking, E) Commenting on student writing & peer review F) Examining how scholars annotate texts.

• MODULE: How to use Hypothes.is for annotation, model reading, feedback and peer review in a GE writing class 
• The Hypothesis test group we can use to practice together:  https://hypothes.is/groups/53KQVX1X/rws100f2017  

 

Multimodal Rhetorics

• Handout on multimodal rhetoric concepts and activities

 

 

Online Versions of Texts That Can be Annotated Using Hypothesis

We have created a number of versions of the course texts for annotation with Hypothesis.  You can have your students 
annotate a text that we have created for you, or you can collaborate with other teachers to annotate texts together.
(We can also all annotate the same texts if that is preferable). 

• Group Annotation Pages
• Modules 
• Fold presentation 

 

 

WPA Materials

• The WPA prompt, the WPA rubric, and sample readings used in WPA placement tests in 2018 and 2019.
• A powerpoint on the WPA, handout on the the difference between 8 and 10 (and how to get a 10). You may wish to use this in the final two weeks. It explains why the WPA exists, what is expected,
  how it works, etc.  It also includes some light PR in order to address some of the misinformation that has come to be associated with the WPA. If you use it you will likely want to edit it down to whatever you are comfortable with (and perhaps change the slide design, which is hideous).
• Main WPA site  contains an explanation of the test, sample texts, the scoring criteria, a powerpoint that dissects the WPA, and some instructional videos.  Here's a file of information that I've used for a final unit on the WPA that could work for 100 or 200. It includes info on the WPA, an outline on the lesson plan, sample article, essay and WPA evaluation. Here's an evaluation assignment (students respond to a classmate's essay) that partners with the unit.    
•  More End of Semester Resources & WPA material