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Exerting Your Expertise and Fighting Fake News
The ABCs: Academic Bases Covered
Before the fun and fascinating activities start, see how they align to key information literacy skills from ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), program learning outcomes, and essential employability skills as defined by the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU). These bundle into the goals for the activities below.
Information Thresholds
Authority is constructed and contextual
Information creation as a process
Research as inquiry
Scholarship as conversation
Associated Standards
Beyond improving basic information literacy and communication skills, the focus on research and writing will assist programs where there is a heavy emphasis on written communication. Some examples include:
Journalism Program Standards 1, 7, and 8: Report on a range of stories in an accurate, detailed, balanced, professional, and timely manner; write and edit complex content for a range of media platforms; publish and broadcast content for a range of media platforms.
Advertising ~ Copywriting Program Standard 3: Identify and select creative writing techniques relevant and applicable to various media.
Health Information Management Program Standards 1 and 5: Keep current with relevant local, national, and global health care and health information management issues, trends, technologies and standards to support health information management systems and processes and guide professional development; Contribute to the development, implementation and evaluation of health information management practices, policies and processes to support client care, organizational goals, operation, and regulatory compliance.
Tourism Program Standard 7: Keep current with tourism trends and issues, and interdependent relationships in the broader tourism industry sectors to improve work performance and guide career development.
Essential Employability Skills
Communicate clearly, concisely and correctly in the written, spoken, and visual form that fulfills the purpose and meets the needs of the audience.
Locate, select, organize, and document information using appropriate technology and information systems.
Analyze, evaluate, and apply relevant information from a variety of sources.
Show respect for the diverse opinions, values, belief systems, and contributions of others.
Goals
Learners will develop and demonstrate skills to:
acknowledge they are developing their own authoritative voices in a particular area and recognize the responsibilities this entails, including seeking accuracy and reliability, respecting intellectual property, and participating in communities of practice;
understand the increasingly social nature of the information ecosystem where authorities actively connect with one another and sources develop over time;
recognize the implications of information formats that contain static or dynamic information;
monitor gathered information and assess for gaps or weaknesses;
contribute to scholarly conversation at an appropriate level, such as local online community, guided discussion, undergraduate research journal, conference presentation/poster session;
critically evaluate contributions made by others in participatory information environments;
understand the responsibility that comes with entering the conversation through participatory channels;
value user-generated content and evaluate contributions made by others.
Check in Before You Dive In
There are many concepts orbiting and connected to the phrase ‘fake news’. Make sure you have an understanding of the hurdles facing people keen to know the truth.
Assignment Details
Synopsis
Finding information is no longer a challenge; everyone is inundated with information. Today’s challenge is carefully consuming and critically thinking about the information to determine if it is trustworthy for your purposes.
Anchorman Ron Burgundy reporting on the impact of fake news
Setting the Scene
Excerpted from The Telegraph: Technology Intelligence
Titcomb, J., & Carson, J. (2018, May 9). Fake news: what exactly is it – and how can you spot it? Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/fake-news-exactly-has-really-had-influence/
“Fake news” was not a term many people used 18 months ago, but it is now seen as one of the greatest threats to democracy, free debate, and the Western order.
As well as being a favourite term of Donald Trump, it was also named 2017’s word of the year, raising tensions between nations, and may lead to regulation of social media.
And yet, nobody can agree on what it is, how much of a problem it is, and what to do about it. Here’s everything you need to know.
The origins of fake news
Governments and powerful individuals have used information as a weapon for millennia, to boost their support and quash dissidence.
Octavian famously used a campaign of disinformation to aid his victory over Marc Anthony in the final war of the Roman Republic. In its aftermath, he changed his name to Augustus, and dispatched a flattering and youthful image of himself throughout the Empire, maintaining its use in his old age.
In the 20th century, new forms of mass communication allowed propaganda’s scale and persuasive power to grow, particularly during wartime and in fascist regimes.
This sort of propaganda was largely funded and controlled by governments, but the blatant bias it carried waned as the ideological struggles became less apparent. Added to that, as populations became more used to mass communication, they could more easily see through it.
How did the internet and social media change things?
Before the internet, it was much more expensive to distribute information, building up trust took years, and there were much simpler definitions of what constituted news and media, making regulation or self-regulation easier.
But the rise of social media has broken down many of the boundaries that prevented fake news from spreading in democracies. In particular it has allowed anyone to create and disseminate information, especially those that have proven most adept at “gaming” how social networks operate.
Facebook and Twitter allowed people to exchange information on a much greater scale than ever before, while publishing platforms like WordPress allowed anyone to create a dynamic website with ease. In short, the barriers to creating fake news have been undone.
You will be exploring just how easily it would be to spread fake news and your responsibility as a citizen to guard against the spread. For this activity, you will use Wikipedia, an often polarizing resource in education. Some instructors don’t mind students consulting it as long it never darkens a reference list i.e., don’t quote it for an academic paper; you should always find a more ‘suitable’, supporting source to reference. Others recognize that experts are contributing to Wikipedia and although there is biased and damaging information, there is also sound and current information. Worthiness is in the critical eye of the user.
Stephen Colbert, American late night talk show host and comedian, has quite the history with Wikipedia. It is worth searching the history for his coining of “truthiness” and “wikiality”.
“Wikipedia is the first place I go when I’m looking for knowledge… or when I want to create some.”
But even his thinking around Wikimedia seems to have evolved over the decade since he fought his Wikipedia editing wars. Wikipedia itself has also evolved adopting more procedures to ensure more information on Wikipedia is high quality and free from bias.
Getting on the Same Page
Regardless of your personal views of Wikipedia, you will find value in contributing. You might see yourself as adding to a community of experts or saving society from misinformation. Either way, your Wikipedia efforts serve a valuable purpose, beyond completion of this activity.
A few facts about Wikipedia, from Wikipedia itself, just in case you are unfamiliar with how it works:
written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers who write without pay
anyone with Internet access can write and make changes, except in limited cases where editing is restricted to prevent vandalism
there are about 71,000 active contributors working on more than 47,000,000 articles in 299 languages
what remain depends upon whether the content is free of copyright restrictions and contentious material about living people, and whether it fits within Wikipedia’s policies, including being verifiable against a published reliable source, thereby excluding editors’ opinions and beliefs and unreviewed research.
Your Tasks
Take editing Wikipedia for a test drive before tackling a more relevant and important edit. There is an account created for anyone who wants to use it, but you are also free to create | use your own, personal account.
Log in to Wikipedia using the communal account above or your own, personal account.
Search for either your institution’s Wikipedia page or your city | town | village’s Wikipedia entry.
Check out the Review History to get a sense of the changes people have made over time.
Use the Edit tab (upper, right hand corner) to be able to add content or delete misinformation. You can edit using the regular view or go to the source code.
Read through the entry and decide how you could improve the entry. It may be adding more information about a sports team, a student support service, or updating outdated statistics. If you use other information for your edits, don’t forget to cite it.
Save your edits. You will be asked if your edit was a minor change or a more substantial addition or deletion. There is also an option to Watch this page. If you are using your own account, you may choose to check this box, but please don’t check if you are using the communal account.
Return to the page in a week or two and see how the page has evolved and if your edits have remained, been built on, or been removed.
Taming the Wild Wiki | Improving Intelligence on Wikipedia
Log in to Wikipedia using the communal account above or your own, personal account.
Search for an area of interest in your discipline.
Read through the article. Make a decision about how you could improve the information.
Once you have pinpointed how to improve, research the area for improvement. Use a library database to find a journal article or a credible organization’s site that supports the addition you have chosen. For example, maybe: there is a new treatment for a condition; a new company producing a product; a new process for creating X; etc.
Make your addition to the Wikipedia entry and save.
Fill out the form below to detail the changes you made and why.
Export the form; save; and rename.
Return to the Wikipedia entry in a week or two and see how the page has evolved and if your edits have remained, been built on, or been removed.
Just for Fun
Did the headline from Ron Burgundy, Anchorman, catch your attention? Consider using this tool to inject some humour into your own presentations or contributions. Just go to http://www.classtools.net/breakingnews/ and create your own attention-grabbing headlines. While you are there, check out the other tools on offer.
