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
Entering the Conversation: Digitial Literacy and Fake News
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?
- https://www.acpeds.org/
- https://www.aap.org/en-us/Pages/Default.aspx
Skim this article. What do you think?
Now look at the site's "about" page." What clues make you think credible (or not)?
Fake News/Evaluating Sources Project
Texts and Teaching Materials
Debates
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
Videos and news articles that provide background
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
- 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/
- BlackMattersUS https://blackmattersus.com/
- Consevative Daily Post https://conservativedailypost.com
- 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
- 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
- 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
Fake Sites with Debunking Guide
These fake sites can be used for analysis. They come with model "debunkings."
- Army Sniper Takes Out Neighbor’s Home Intruder From Bedroom Window. Here is how the story was debunked
- 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.
- 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?
- Private Email Server story
- Amnesty Plans Story about how Obama and Clinton are promising amnesty to non-citizens who vote
- Pope Endorsement (copy saved at archive.org. Images missing. Ask students to examine links, esp."About Us"). Story appeared on Facebook feeds like this
- Benton Strategy Group Leaked Report, "Salvage" Plan
- Clinton Adviser Scandal (skim report, but look at the first 10 comments - what are they like?
- Twitter posts by Alex Jones on Podesta "Scandal"
- Now: are protests against Trump staged and full of paid protesters? (retweeted by president Trump)
- 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.
- 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).