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Videos: SIFT & Lateral Reading Strategies - verifying credibility in online sources

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Videos: SIFT & Lateral Reading Strategies - verifying credibility in online sources

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Open this padlet to further links from Mike Caulfield and other sources.

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Mike Caulfield (Wash.State) provides a concise description of the SIFT method for identifying credible sources.

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Don’t believe what you see – digging deeper for the truth – Linking Learning

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How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding …

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Produced by Mike Caulfield, gives insight to the research conducted at Stanford that spotlighted glaring deficiencies in students' ability to identify credible sources. (2018, 3:13 min.)

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Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video

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From Wash State Director of Blended Learning, Mike Caulfield, this free online book provides a complete guide and learning activities covering media literacy and strategies (SIFT/Lateral Reading) for identifying credible sources.

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - Simple Book Production

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Videos: Verifying Images & Social Media Posts

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Videos: Verifying Images & Social Media Posts

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Curated videos present techniques to verify authenticity in online images and social media accounts.

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Deepfake Videos & the Spread of Misinformation (padlet)

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Deepfake Videos & the Spread of Misinformation (padlet)

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Explore the technology and social implications of manipulated videos.

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Quick lesson on lateral reading using a troll account on a Twitter feed; presented by Mike Caulfield (WA State Univ.) 2018.

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Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control:

Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is married to a man, yet is denounced as an " Anti-L.G.B.T. f ascist" and a " f ascist l ieutenant " for criticizing identity politics.

This links to explosive tweets that show how civility has declined and - as she points out - everyone is being called a fascist now by liberals. Shocking example cited:

And ...

Linking to things people said on Twitter to prove a broad sociological point is pretty 2016, but the bigger problem is that the account she links to - from the pages of the New York Times - is a troll/hoax account. It's a fake account designed to take in gullible readers and outrage them into spreading classic disinformation, stirring up hate against real antifa, either for political reasons or lulz or some combination of the two.

There are numerous ways you can guess that fact - the name "Official Antifa" being the first hint - but there is also a simple way to check this one: read laterally. So let me show NYT columnists visiting this blog a thirty-second maneuver that can prevent further ridicule and degradation of public discourse by hoax accounts. Here we go. It takes less than thirty seconds so pop your headphones in from the start or you'll miss it:

In this case, we select the Twitter handle, right-click to search on it, click the Google News tab to get a curated set of links/sources, and...

Actually that's it. We're done.

Now it's not always this easy. Sometimes it takes a full minute, or 90 seconds. Occasionally it takes more than that and you have to use different, more complex methods. But it's a pretty short process overall and one that you should be doing with every tweet you share, never mind ones you link to in the national newspaper of record.

We follow Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew's groundbreaking media literacy research and call this technique reading laterally. It's one of the four moves in the free eTextbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, and a core technique in the online media literacy project we're rolling out with the American Democracy Project, the Digital Polarization Initiative. Ninety-second fact-checks, based on new principles, that help students quickly verify and contextualize information.

I know I've written this glibly. Believe me, it's because if I am not glib I'll just get angry. This is work from the major national newspaper of record, not a gullible uncle posting on Facebook. And while Weiss claims to care about the disintegration of public discourse, she demonstrates the exact lack of care and skill that had led to it, allowing herself to be used, easily and fruitfully, by the crudest sort of manipulation.

The book is free. It's about a two hour read. Please read it and stop linking to trolls.

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How To Read Laterally: A Lesson for New York Times Columnists Including But Not Limited to Bari Weiss

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Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is...

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Use this tool to determine an image's original appearance online

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TinEye is an image search and recognition company. We are experts in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning.

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Selected posters and handouts

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5 online lessons introduce the SIFT method of verifying online sources (~30 minutes/lesson). Created by Mike Caulfield

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In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.

Once students have completed the starter course they can move on to any number of additional topical modules we will be rolling out. The topical modules go into more depth on skills, and explore specific social issues around information pollution.

Each lesson has multiple pages and activities. After clicking through to each lesson, you can use the list of links at the bottom of the first page to navigate, or just click through using the "Next up:" link under the main text.

This course is built so that it can easily copied and modified by teachers wishing to customize it. For more information on creating your own custom version, see the Teacher's Notes. The Notes also contain information on Accessibility

Next up: Lesson One: Introduction to SIFT

All Lessons
Lesson One: Introduction to SIFT Lesson Two: Investigate the Source Lesson Three: Further Investigation Lesson Four: Find Trusted Coverage Lesson Five: Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context Note: The canonical version of this course exists at http://lessons.checkplease.cc. The text and media of this site, where possible, is released into the CC-BY, and free for reuse and revision. We ask people copying this course to leave this note intact, so that students and teachers can find their way back to the original (periodically updated) version if necessary. We also ask librarians and reporters to consider linking to the canonical version. As the authors of the original version have not reviewed any other copy's modifications, the text of any site not arrived at through the above link should not be sourced to the original authors.
Development of this website concept funded in part by RTI International and the Rita Allen Foundation via the Misinformation Solutions Forum Prize. Neither organization is responsible for the content of this site.

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In this course, we show you how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons, taking about 30 minutes apiece. The entire online curriculum is two and a half to three hours and is suitable homework for the first week of a college-level module on disinformation or online information literacy, or the first few weeks of a course if assigned with other discipline-focused homework.

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Videos: Verifying Credibility in Online Sources - Skills

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Videos: Verifying Credibility in Online Sources - Skills

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This padlet links to How-to videos for verifying information and website authority.

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University Sites: Media Literacy Instruction

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University Sites: Media Literacy Instruction

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University libraries provide tutorials, guides and extensive resource links to thoroughly explore news literacy and online verification strategies.

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These linked sites provide extensive collections of curated media literacy resources for educators.

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These sites offer complete lesson plans and course sequences; Resources s are free but full access may require registration.

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This weekly newsletter delivers timely examples of misinformation complete with discussion prompts, links, class-ready slide presentations, and activities.

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The Sift is a free weekly newsletter for educators delivered during the school year that offers a rundown of the latest topics in news literacy - including trends and issues in misinformation, social media, artificial intelligence, journalism and press freedom. It provides discussion prompts, teaching ideas, classroom guides and a monthly video series that features professional journalists.

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Videos: Fake News and Misinformation - padlet

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Videos: Fake News and Misinformation - padlet

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Online sites that check the authenticity of facts and claims made in the news.

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Web Literacy: Quizzes, Games, Case Studies (padlet)

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Web Literacy: Quizzes, Games, Case Studies (padlet)

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Challenge your skills at identifying credible online sources

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Different perspectives from a variety of sources on the issue of "fake news" and the ability to discern credible information.