Mar
2017
fake news
Most students can’t tell fake news from real news, study shows
Posted by Jordan Crook (@jordanrcrook)
Most students can’t tell fake news from real news, study shows
A Stanford study found that the majority of middle school students can’t tell the difference between real news and fake news. In fact, 82 percent couldn’t distinguish between a real news story on a website and a “sponsored content” post.
The WSJ: Of the 8,704 students studied (ranging in age from middle school to college level), four in ten high-school students believed that the region near Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was toxic after seeing an unsourced photo of deformed daisies coupled with a headline about the Japanese area. The photo, keep in mind, had no source or location attribution. Meanwhile, two out of every three middle-schoolers were fooled by an article on financial preparedness penned by a bank executive.
But with 62 percent of U.S. adults getting the majority of their news from social media, the responsibility for this issue also lies with the social media organizations themselves, such as Facebook and Twitter. Both Google and Facebook have made steps toward thwarting the fake news onslaught, including banning fake news organizations from their ad network.
Even in minuscule amounts, fake news has a much greater ability to spread quickly and be consumed by many given the nature of the salacious headlines themselves.
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more on fake news in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news
Plamen Miltenoff
April 4, 2017 at 6:53 pm (7 years ago)Universities can vaccinate against the virus of fake news
Published on: April 1, 2017
http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/quinn-universities-can-vaccinate-against-the-virus-of-fake-news
arlier this year, BBC media editor Amol Rajan asserted that fake news “has become a cancer in the body politic, growing from an isolated but malignant tumour into a raging, mortal threat.”
The remedy for this malady can come from our publicly funded post-secondary institutions. As community-minded, evidence-seeking academics, we must address the virus of untruths.
Authors from Cambridge, Yale and George Mason universities published evidence in the journal Global Challenges showing it is possible to inoculate public attitudes against real-world misinformation.
The majority of students entering Canadian universities are Gen Z — as in students born starting in the mid-1990s. They make up a quarter of the North American population and account for two billion people worldwide. These post-millennials are characterized as educated, collaborative and committed to creating a better world.
Gen Z students embrace technology and seek information from a variety of sources. Post-secondary approaches are shifting to meet the learning styles and needs of this generation. It is a cohort committed to obtaining a practical education — often with an entrepreneurial twist.
One of the most promising approaches to developing independent critical thinking skills is undergraduate research. This is an approach to education that introduces and hones the capacity for evidence-based inquiry. Undergraduate research is part of the vaccine.
For Gen Z students, undergraduate research rooted in contemporary community-based problems, provides fertile ground to meet their desire for learning that results in meaningful social change.
Plamen Miltenoff
April 24, 2017 at 8:15 pm (7 years ago)Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts
December 5, 201612:55 PM ET Wynne Davis
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/05/503581220/fake-or-real-how-to-self-check-the-news-and-get-the-facts
The idea is that people should have a fundamental sense of media literacy. And based on a study recently released by Stanford University researchers, many people don’t.
Pay attention to the domain and URL
Read the “About Us” section
Look at the quotes in a story
Look at who said them
Check the comments
Reverse image search (https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/edit)