Reacting to Fake News

Fake news may have started as a joke, but it quietly became a trusted news contender in 2016.

Saturday Night Live, the Onion and even Snopes have produced fake news for some time. In the context of SNL and the Onion, it's rather easy to detect the fake. When it comes to Snopes, it's harder because they are all about checking facts to debunk fake stories. Yet they've created their own fakes from time to time to keep readers from becoming overly reliant on what the publishers of Snopes say is true.

Here's one example:

The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.

It's not true. But if Snopes says it's true, it must be factual, right? Wrong. Snopes maintains a section of its site for "The Repository of Lost Legends" (TRoLL for short). See http://www.snopes.com/lost/lost.asp. One way to tell it's a fake is to check out a link at the bottom of the article: More information about this page. It's very subtle.

If this story appeared on Facebook, how many readers would take it for a fact? There would not likely be anything labeling it as fake news. 

Fact checking is the only personal solution to avoid being fooled or the victim of a scam.

In the Snopes article, these are just a sample of facts to investigate. 

1. 13 August 1999.  First of all, this is an old date, so it doesn't seem relevant any longer. If a person investigated 13 August 1999 and other major keywords from the story, Mississippi fractions, these results would appear:
• The original Snopes article
• A reprint of the Snopes article claiming the story to be true because it was in Snopes; look at the comments: people are skeptical but not misbelieving.  (more than one reprint that offers the story as true)
• An article that claims Snopes is lying 
• Nothing from Mississippi government
2. There are also many Proper nouns in the fake article that are worth checking out. Here are two:
• senator Cassius de Spain
• Judith Sutpen, chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education committee

There is no record of Judith Sutpen as a chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education committee. The closest coincidence is that she is a character in "Absalom Absalom!" by William Faulkner.  Cassius de Spain is also a character in the same book. A method for coming up with names is starting to emerge--I'd bet Cora Tull and John Sartoris may also be Faulker characters. Suddenly, the story seems manufactured.

Of course, one could also check Mississippi laws.

But it's way easier to react to news like this than to fact check it:

• "It is true and sad, http://www.snopes.com/lost/fraction.htm "
• "The scariest thing about this post is that I still haven't decided if it's satire or not. "
• "wow people are idiots."
• "You know, I could see changing the age at which fractions are taught if it was discovered that a thirteen-year-old understood them more easily than a ten-year-old (or for that matter, a six-year-old faster than a ten-year-old), but I thought the emphasis was supposed to be on more education, not less?"

 And so on.
    

Facts Matter

I recently updated a 21cif MicroModule on Evidence that got me thinking about recent elections in the US. What role did facts actually play?

Election outcomes don't boil down to just a few factors. Not everyone who voted one way or the other did so without weighing pros and cons. In all probability there could have been cases where a vote was cast knowing something about that candidate wasn't 100% satisfactory. For some, evidence to back up claims was critical; for others, not so much.

Throw into this mix Fake News. Titles that appeared include these:

“Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.”
“Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'”
"FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE."
“Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9”
“Just out according to @CNN: “Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country.”

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/11/did-fake-news-on-facebook-send-trump-to-the-white-house/

Whereas none of the headlines can be supported with evidence, did they reinforce or sway voters? Perhaps.

Without evidence, believing something is true gives all the control to the news source.

"If you don't look for evidence you blindly place all your trust in the alleged accuracy of a source. How do you know they are right?"

(Source: http://21cif.com//tutorials/micro/mm/evidence/index.php)

Here's a helpful open source document on evaluating Fake News sites, thanks to Melissa Zimdars: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview

She lists 11 tips:

• Three involve checking the URL of the news source. 
• Three are about lack of author or publisher attribution. 
• Two are about checking other, known sources. 
• One is about the effects of biased writing creating an emotional response. 
• One is about formatting (pay attention to ALL CAPS)
• One is about content that encourages bad Internet etiquette.

Can you think of others? These are worth putting into practice unless you don't think facts matter any more.

Refining and Finding Keywords

The keywords you start with are often not the keywords you need.

A good example of this occurred recently in a summer program I was leading. It wasn't an Information Fluency workshop, but it did give me an opportunity to show some middle schoolers how to find the information they were seeking.

The program was "Lifecycle of a Startup" at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois. Middle school students attend who want to experience being in a startup. We compress the first year of a startup into five days as a simulation game. Most of it is real--they pitch their ideas to real investors in a shark tank experience to raise (simulated) capital to get their business off the ground.

One team was having trouble developing its idea. It was Day Three and they hadn't firmed up what their new product was going to be. They had been toying with the problem of CO2 emissions and wanted to develop an ink that could absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. They just hadn't found a way to do this.

As I watched them search, this was a typical query:

how to remove carbon dioxide from the air using ink

The first article they found was one about using carbon nanoscale fibers to remove CO2 from the air. But since this didn't have anything to do with ink, they moved on, growing frustrated. Fortunately, improvements to search engines allows them to use a long natural language string and get results (it wasn't always that way).

They missed seeing a couple better keywords in the reading which I pointed out: carbon sequestration--the name of the process.

I suggested they query: carbon sequestration ink

I'm not sure the students had ever heard of sequestration before, but it's an effective term to query. Would they have used it on their own? Doubtful. But students should be encouraged to look for better terms in the results, even (especially) if the words aren't familiar. 

This produced a link to some Google Scholar articles which opened doors to what they were looking for. Of course, the girls had to skim the articles to see if they were relevant. Another search term popped out of the first article: reduced carbon-footprint concrete.

The girls eventually found a connection between what makes concrete absorb CO2 and what could be added to ink. It took persistence. They changed their idea to carbon sequestering paint, since that covers more surface area.

See if you can find the compound or chemical that may be added to paint to suck CO2 out of the air.

The High Cost of Trust

Trusting information turned tragic when Wei Zexi, from Shaanxi province in China, died on April 12 after undergoing experimental medical treatment promoted on Baidu, the Chinese search equivalent of Google.

The typical hasty grab for digital information is seldom so terminal, but the common denominator is a failure to investigate.  What's different in Wei's case is that Baidu is criticized for failing to investigate the claims made by the advertisers it promoted in search results.

So, who's to blame? A search engine for failing to vet its advertisements? A student for believing information provided by a search engine?

It's always a problem of what or whom to trust. It cannot be assumed a search engine can be trusted, even if the ads at the top of the page are paid by a hospital. It should be interesting how the case will be resolved in China. Breaking Baidu's search engine monopoly, which has been suggested, isn't necessarily an answer. Training searchers to investigate the information for themselves is a more responsible and trustworthy solution.

Start investigating here

Information Fluency Investigative Challenges

New Tutorial Challenges

Hone your Fluency Skills.

Yesterday I led a workshop at the ICE Conference in St. Charles, IL for teachers, administrators and librarians on the topic of Internet Search Challenges: Google and Beyond.

The themes included competencies on which fluency depends, challenges that require these competencies, search strategies and techniques, how to use challenges with individuals and groups. We never were able to try all the Challenges during the 2.5 hour workshop--even though we never took a break. I shouldn't be surprised: 47 tutorial challenges were created for the workshop.

The tutorials are grouped into three categories: Locate, Evaluate and Cite.  Locate is comprised of three sub-categories: Browsing, Querying and Pesky Search Challenges. All these categories are further divided into Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced Challenges. Elementary is suitable for young and new searchers (no matter what grade), Intermediate builds on those skills and Advanced represents skills high schoolers should possess before entering college (and beyond).

So what I told the participants, I'm telling readers of this blog: try out the challenges for yourself. Use them with individuals and groups. Experiment with them. Think about what works and could work better. I'd love to get your feedback.

Here's where to go to get started: http://21cif.com/tutorials/challenge/challenge-directory.html

An aside:  The Internet went down 10 minutes prior to the start of the workshop and didn't come back for a while. You might imagine it's hard to teach Internet skills without the Internet. We actually filled the first hour offline with a discussion about what skills are needed at what grade levels, when to introduce skills, and how to teach students pre-Internet skills without the Internet. When you think about the Digital Information Fluency model, the first two questions ("What am I searching for?" and "Where will I search?") happen before touching a computer. So being offline didn't slow us down and was still productive.

Declining Information Literacy

The following article captures what could be happening when it is assumed students who are savvy using digital devices are also able to "manage and process information."

Students smart on phones but going backwards in computer literacy

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/students-smart-on-phones-but-going-backwards-in-computer-literacy-20151116-gkzwjd.html#ixzz3rhBXYItL
Follow us: @canberratimes on Twitter | CanberraTimes on Facebook

For example, the article claims:

"Year 6 students were asked to search a website to find appropriate material, format a document, crop an image and create a short slide show.  Students in Year 10 were asked to design an online survey, use software to add two new levels to an online game and create a short animated video.

"By Year 10, just 52 per cent of Australian students were assessed as able to reach or exceed the  proficient standard."

This represents a significant decline in this measure since 2011.

Better search engines aren't necessarily helping. Test your students' abilities. Here are some flash-based resources on the Information Fluency site for doing that:

Click Here

Search Challenges

Evaluation Challenges

Ethical Use Challenges

See also:

Evaluation Challenges (WSI)

Squishy Boolean

This is an interesting concept that affects every searcher who uses a highly developed search engine--and probably others as well.

As the original blog states, Squishy Boolean represents a loss of user control:

"what we now have in most search systems is squishy boolean imposed upon us whether we want it or not, and often there is no way of finding out what algorithms have been used."

Read the rest here: https://thelibrarycauldron.wordpress.com/2015/11/02/squishy-boolean/

I doubt if most users of Google, etc. would choose to return to a state where control is completely in the hands of the searcher. That would require a lot of work and thinking (and no time-saving). If one of Google's tacit objectives is to make searching as 'brainless' as possible, algorithms are the solution. Therefore, the search algorithm quickly does its work, although no one knows for sure (other than Google employees with a high level clearance) what's going on behind the SEARCH button.

It would be helpful to some, however, if there was a way to turn off the algorithm. But that would be like going back in time. Control or convenience? One has to dominate.