Serendipity35

A podcast from Marketplace offered this question: Should kids be taking Fake News 101? My first thought was that they are already getting that class. I based that on my friends who teach in K-12 schools and who have information literacy as part of their curriculum. Validating sources and information has been part of the curriculum for a very long time. It was there when I started teaching almost fifty years ago. Of course, the Internet as a news source is a more recent issue. Has information literacy changed?

The headline says "kids" which suggests K-12 but the "Fake News 101" sounds like an introductory college course. I know that information literacy online and offline was required at a community college I worked at, and validating sources online was part of my social media and communications courses I taught at the undergraduate and graduate level. 

The term "fake news" came into the discussion with President Trump who used it to attack media reports he didn't like and broadly all mainstream media. That isn't something you want to teach. But news that was inaccurate has been around as long as there has been news. I'm sure town criers sometimes called out things that turned out not to be true. 

The term "fake" isn't really the correct term. "Fake" means a thing that is not genuine or a forgery. The news items often being labeled fake in those Trump days were not being singled out because they were not really news. It was news. It generally came from a credible news outlet, such as The New York Times or Washington Post, and in the majority of instances had facts to back it up. 

But, as the podcast points out, from politics to COVID-19, there is a lot of false and inaccurate information on the internet. I would be very reluctant to tell students that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are credible news sources, but we know that many people get their "news" from these places rather than newspapers.

Helen Lee Bouygues was the guest on that podcast and she is the founder and president of the Reboot Foundation, which teaches critical thinking skills to combat fake news. She says we’re just not inclined to second-guess information when it’s flooding our social media feeds.

Some points she makes:

"It’s actually just a natural human reaction to not want to seek challenging views. And then the second point, there have been studies already conducted that if you are pounded by lies about the information, over time you actually do start believing it."

She prefers that rather than just having teachers "give the facts and get to the answer" that teachers and parents of children, especially of younger age, have children challenge what they’re reading on websites."

She is correct that "this is a skill that can be taught, but it’s not something that [is] innate."

Lee Bouygues based is based in France and she says that there is a standard pedagogy to have students writing papers differently. Students are told to "hone in on your own convictions and the way you write a paper is by thinking about opposing views and counter-arguments that will help you better refine your own thinking. So by looking at counter-arguments, you’re actually doing more metacognition also, which is obviously thinking about your own thinking, which is so important for critical thinking."

Certainly, this skill needs to be honed in older students and in entire communities. I taught an undergraduate critical thinking course and was continually surprised at the gaps I saw in my students' ability to do more critical thinking.

Teaching how to question assumptions, reason through logic, separate facts from opinions and emotions, validate sources, and seek out a diversity of thoughts, facts and opinions are life skills that need to be learned and relearned as the world of information changes.

One thing that MOOCs offered was the opportunity to take courses from top universities with famous faculties for free. Then, companies like Coursera and edX decided that a business model might be to offer those prestigious faculty and schools to learners for a fee. The fee would certainly be far less than the tuition at those prestigious schools, but then again you wouldn't be getting all the benefits of being a student at that school, including getting a degree.

Certainly, there are trade-offs, but it still seems like a good deal. Colleges big and small saw the opportunities and learned some things from the MOOC experiments and it did move online learning in some new directions in higher education and even at the secondary school level.

Despite all these global opportunities to learn, I have been reading that an increasing numbers of online students choose to study locally.

The Online College Students annual study for 2019 found that 84% of current and former fully online students either strongly agreed (44%) or agreed (40%) that their "online education was worth the cost and 47% of current fully online students said they planned to take additional courses from their institution after they earn their current degree.

As stated, this comes at a time when "students, parents and politicians seem to be questioning the value of higher education."

Does online learning appear to be a solution or part of the problem?

Another annual study (from Learning House, Wiley Education & Aslanian Research) that surveyed 1500 current or soon-to-be students in fully online academic programs (for undergraduate or graduate degrees, certificates or licensure)includes a section about how online students decided where, what and how to study.

58 percent of them said they had decided what discipline to study before they decided to study online. 63 percent said they had decided to study online because that fit best with their "current work/life responsibilities." Though we sometimes hear that students use online because it is their "preferred way to learn," only 34 percent gave that response.

The convenience factor is certainly a good part of why fully online students are still staying close to home. Though the surveys did not address this, I suspect that some students, though online, want to be able to access services (such as the library and counseling), offices, faculty and perhaps some campus events so that their online life has some real life college experiences too.

In my own experience with online programs, we also discovered that a majority of our online students lived within 50 miles of a campus or service center of the college where they are studying. In the latter survey, 67 percent of respondents were withing 50 miles and that was up from 42 percent just five years ago.

Some other takeaways:

• "The growing number of schools offering online programs provides students with more options closer to their home. Local schools have greater visibility among employers and others in the community, which is valuable to students."
• More than 80 percent of current and former students agreed that their online program improved their mastery of various "soft skills" such as critical thinking and problem solving, time management, and attention to detail.
• Nearly three in five students age 45 or under said they completed some or most of their course-related activities using mobile devices, while another 17 percent said they would have liked to have gone mobile. NOTE Only 27 percent of students 46 or older said they had completed course work on mobile, and 51 percent said they would not want to.

The past few years, I have gotten back into teaching filmmaking. When I was doing graduate work in media with a focus on film and video, I came to believe that films can be treated as "texts" and that they can be "read" and analyzed, as I had done in my undergraduate studies in literature.

If films can be read like texts, then the language that films use must also have a kind of grammar that can explain its structures.

Roger Ebert used to do "shot at a time" workshop where he would examine a film closely. A film, like a novel, is very controlling. I think a film is even more controlling than a novel. When I read The World According to Garp, I had an idea about how Garp looked. My original sense was he looked like the author, John Irving. But after I saw the film version, Garp became - and still is - Robin Williams. Atticus Finch is Gregory Peck. When you watch a film, you only see what the camera’s eye shows us. The director, editor, cinematographer, actors, set designers, costumers and many others control (and at times manipulate) viewers. 

Knowing about the grammar of film allows you understand how that is done and can give you back some control over the way the film works. Part of the grammar is knowing the reasons why a long shot, medium shot, close up, or an extreme close up was chosen. Studying the language and grammar of the shot, the grammar of the edit will make you consider whether a high angle, a low angle, or eye level is used. Is the camera being objective or subjective? When the camera is subjective, we become one of the characters, and that can be like reading a first-person narrated novel. How does the pace of the edit affect an audience?

Every language teacher talks about composition. Every film teacher talks about the composition of shots and scenes. Look at how the director has arranged actors, objects and lighting.

Besides showing and discussing films, to teach the grammar of film you should really have students make films. Otherwise, you are teaching grammar in isolation. I learned through decades of teaching writing that grammar should be taught along with writing. Teaching grammar in isolation is not only boring, it is not effective.

You can start to teach students to make films on paper. Not every teacher has access to filmmaking gear - although today, many students are carrying a video camera in their pocket that is many times more powerful than the Super8 film cameras and video camcorders I first used in classes when I started teaching. Then and now, I have students use storyboarding as a way to really think about shots and angles and building a scene.

A wonderful "side effect" of teaching how to read a film and make a film is that it fosters critical thinking.  

I recently discovered Pixar in a Box which is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. It allows you to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. The program connects to math, science, computer science, and humanities in very natural ways. The project is a collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and Khan Academy and is sponsored by Disney. 

One part of the Art of Storytelling section is on the grammar of film. 

Basic Shot Types

 

Get Deeper Into This

How To Read a Film

Film Studies

Film Analysis

 

Do you think of social media sites, such as Twitter, as a place for debate? Yes, I know that people argue about things on Twitter and Facebook, but is that what you would consider to be "debate?"

There is a fairly new start-up that has been around for about a year and wants to offer you a place for more civilized debate or discussion than the current angry "discussion" on social media.

The site is Kialo (Esperanto for “reason”) and hopes to prohibit the shouting, rudeness or irrationality that is currently part of the Trumpian Twitterverse that has evolved.

Some have called Kialo an "Internet Unicorn" and "The Utopian Fantasy of Rational Debate On the Web."

You can just read the discussions on topics of the day, and you can take part as a debater.  You may even be designated as a moderator. It is not for commenting on others posts.

It's a nice idea, but I don't see it becoming a huge site on the scale of Facebook or Twitter. I don't think people who are on social media really want debate. They want to say how they feel and they want others to agree with them (as in getting a "Like" for what they have said). And there is a smaller percentage of those people who actually want to argue with strangers. 

And argument is not exactly debate - and many arguments are not a civil "set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong." They are the other kind of argument - when people have opposite views and express it in a a heated or angry way. Did we learn nothing from Monty Python?

I have read that some teachers and professors are using private areas of Kialo for class discussions and exercises in critical thinking and reasoning.

For everyday debaters and for schools and universities, access is free. The site does not carry ads. They say they do not sell data.

Kialo uses the term “claim” rather than "argument" and contributors sometimes not only make a claim but also post counterpoints to their own claim. Of course, a good debater does need to know both sides in order to debate well.