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Why is Fake News so Effective? - Interactive Lesson

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Why is Fake News so Effective? - Interactive Lesson

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Look at the three resources below and determine if you believe them to be reliable sources of information. Vote if you think it is real or fake.

Then move to the next column.

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Topic: Questioning and Assessing validity and accuracy of information

Grade Level: Middle School (6-8 grades)

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BBC: Spaghetti-Harvest in Ticino | Switzerland Tourism

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Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division - dihydrogen monoxide info

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Dihydrogen Monoxide
resources, information, research and more. Dihydrogen
Monoxide is a dangerous chemical. Buy a Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide T-shirt.

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Help Save The ENDANGERED

From EXTINCTION!

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus
(Enhanced from cropped telephoto)

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus ( Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestral aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but given the chance they would prefer resting in pooled water.

An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it,) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development. (Some evolutionary theorists suppose that "arboreal adaptation" is what laid the groundwork in primates for the evolution of the human mind.)

Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it.

Map of estimated tree octopus maximum range, including spawning waters

Tree octopuses have eyesight comparable to humans. Besides allowing them to see their prey and environment, it helps them in inter-octopus relations. Although they are not social animals like us, they display to one-another their emotions through their ability to change the color of their skin: red indicates anger, white fear, while they normally maintain a mottled brown tone to blend in with the background.

The reproductive cycle of the tree octopus is still linked to its roots in the waters of the Puget Sound from where it is thought to have originated. Every year, in Spring, tree octopuses leave their homes in the Olympic National Forest and migrate towards the shore and, eventually, their spawning grounds in Hood Canal. There, they congregate (the only real social time in their lives,) and find mates. After the male has deposited his sperm, he returns to the forests, leaving the female to find an aquatic lair in which to attach her strands of egg-clusters. The female will guard and care for her eggs until they hatch, refusing even to eat, and usually dying from her selflessness. The young will spend the first month or so floating through Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, and as far as North Puget Sound before eventually moving out of the water and beginning their adult lives.

Why It's Endangered

Route 101, separating the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula from Hood Canal

Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, we feel that it should be added since its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch. What few that make it to the Canal are further hampered in their reproduction by the growing problem of pollution from farming and residential run-off. Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory.

The possibility of Pacific Northwest tree octopus extinction is not an unwarranted fear. Other tree octopus species-including the Douglas octopus and the red-ringed madrona sucker-were once abundant throughout the Cascadia region, but have since gone extinct because of threats similar to those faced by paxarbolis, as well as overharvesting by the now-illegal tree octopus trade.

Tree Octopus hat from 1923

The history of the tree octopus trade is a sad one. Their voracious appetite for bird plumes having exhausted all the worthy species of that family, the fashionistas moved on to cephalopodic accoutrements during the early 20th Century. Tree octopuses became prized by the fashion industry as ornamental decorations for hats, leading greedy trappers to wipe out whole populations to feed the vanity of the fashionable rich. While fortunately this practice has been outlawed, its effects still reverberate today as these millinery deprivations brought tree octopus numbers below the critical point where even minor environmental change could cause disaster.

While efforts were made in the past to preserve remaining tree octopus habitat, these were met with resistance by the timber industry, which has traditionally viewed the tree octopus as a nuisance, both because the octopuses favor the valuable, moss-shrouded trees of old growth forests-pitting conservation needs against lucrative sources of lumber-and because octopuses hiding among felled trees often gummed up sawmills and stained pulp vats with their ink.

Traveling sideshow exhibits, such as this one by Glen "Bones" Hartzell from 1942, demonized tree octopuses to the ignorant masses
(Click to enlarge)

These nuisances led many loggers to regard tree octopuses as bad luck, resulting in the pointless killing of octopuses on sight at logging camps in a misguided attempt at eradicating the troublesome species. Anti-octopus sentiment was so strong among loggers that some even began to fear that the octopuses were prone to attacking humans.

These fears were fueled in no small part by gratuitous stories involving tree octopuses harassing lumberjacks and distressing damsels in Northwestern-themed pulp magazines of the 1930-40s and variously "nipping", "entangling", or "suckering the flesh" of the heroes of men's action magazines of the 1950-60s. (The magazine publishers depended on cheap paper made from wood pulp and were glad to contribute to the anti-octopus propaganda campaign of the timber industry.)

To this day, misunderstanding and fear of these gentle creatures can still be found among many old timers, although education campaigns-and special octopus-separators installed at sawmills-have largely halted the practice of tree octopus eradication.

How You Can Help

More Tree Octopus Information

Posters motivate the citizenry to action! Post them!

Tree Octopus FAQs - Frequently asked questions, now with answers.

Tree Octopus Sightings - Includes photos of and behavioral research on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and other tree octopus species.

Tree Octopus In The Media - appearances of tree octopuses, both real and fictional, in the media and popular culture.

Research On Other Tree Octopus Species:

The author of this article and its subsections is Lyle Zapato.
This site is not associated with any school or educational organization,
other than the Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.
Not to be confused with the Pacific Northwest Octopus Tree.

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Information about the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and what you can do to save it.

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National study of high school students’ digital skills paints worrying portrait, Stanford researchers say

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National study of high school students’ digital skills paints worrying portrait, Stanford researchers say

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A new national study by Stanford researchers showing a woeful inability by high schoolers to detect fake news on the internet suggests an urgent need for schools to integrate new tools and curriculum into classrooms that boost students' digital skills, the study's authors say.

In the largest such study undertaken, researchers from Stanford Graduate School of Education devised a challenge for 3,446 American high school students who had been carefully selected to match the demographic makeup of the American population.

Rather than conduct a standard survey, in which students would self-report their media habits and skills, the research team came up with a series of live internet tasks. The results, published online this week in the journal Educational Researcher, highlight what the researchers say is an urgent need to better prepare students for the realities of a world filled with a continual flow of misleading information.

"This study is not an indictment of the students-they did what they've been taught to do-but the study should be troubling to anyone who cares about the future of democracy," said Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford History Education Group and the study's lead author. "We have to train students to be better consumers of information."

In one of the study's tasks, students were shown an anonymously produced video that circulated on Facebook in 2016 claiming to show ballot stuffing during Democratic primary elections and asked to use Internet-enabled computers to determine whether it provided strong evidence of voter fraud.

Students tried, mostly in vain, to discover the truth. Despite access to the internet's powerful search capabilities, just three of the study's more than three thousand participants - less than one tenth of one percent - were able to divine the true source of the video, which actually featured footage of voter fraud in Russia.

In another task, students were asked to vet a website proclaiming to "disseminate factual reports" about climate change. Ninety-six percent failed to discover the publisher's ties to the fossil fuel industry. Overall, the researchers found that students were too easily swayed by relatively weak indicators of credibility-a website's appearance, the characteristics of its domain name, the site's "About" page, or the sheer quantity of information available on a website, irrespective of the quality of that information.

"Regardless of the test, most students fared poorly, and some fared more poorly than others," said Sam Wineburg, the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford, who co-authored the paper. "It presents a concerning picture of American students' ability to figure out who produced a given story, what their biases might have been, and whether the information is reliable. More troubling still is how easy it is for agents of disinformation to produce misleading-or even deliberately false stories-that carry the sheen of truth. Coupled with the instantaneous and global reach of today's social media, it does not bode well for the future of information integrity."

The researchers suggested potential remedies that might right the ship, including teaching students strategies based on what professional fact checkers do--strategies that have been shown in experiments to improve students' digital savvy.

"It would be great if all students knew how to take advantage of the full web and had complete command of advanced skills like Boolean operators, but that's a lot to ask," Wineburg said. "If you want to teach kids to drive a car, first you have to teach them to stop at red lights and not cross double lines, before learning how a catalytic converter works. As the study shows, a lot of these kids aren't stopping at red yet."

It is possible to develop students' digital literacy skills, Wineburg said. Given the risk to our democracy, it will be critical for schools to integrate these skills into all subjects, from history to math, and at every grade level.

"The kids can do it," Wineburg said. "We must help get them there."
The study was funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

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National study of high school students' digital skills paints worrying portrait, Stanford researchers say

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A new national study by Stanford researchers showing a woeful inability by high schoolers to detect fake news on the internet suggests an urgent need for schools to integrate new tools and curriculum into classrooms that boost students' digital skills, the study's authors say.

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How to Evaluate Sources for Reliability - Writing for Kids

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Fact-Checking Tools - Video 1: Verifying Images and Videos

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Visit http://newsliteracy.ca/ for more information and resources.

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Fact-Checking Tools — Video 2: Looking up Claims and Website Owners

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Why do you feel it is important to evaluate websites prior to using them? Provide 3 strategies you have learned to help you evaluate information on the internet.

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News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and are Impacted by the News

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News and America's Kids: How Young People Perceive and are Impacted by the News

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Evaluating Online Resources - Padlet Activity

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Learner IV. B. 3.

Learners gather information appropriate to the task by:

3. Systematically questioning and assessing the validity and accuracy of information.

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9 Common Thinking Biases and how to overcome them. (n.d.). www.inerdrive.co.uk

Common Sense Media for Families. (2017, January). 5 ways to spot fake news [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2AdkNH-kWA

CTRL-F. (2018, May). Fact-checking tools – video 1: verifying images and videos [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eKG9RuqUE4

CTRL-F. (2018, May). Fact-checking tools – video 2: looking up claims and website owners [video]. Youtube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eIfjo1_Ro4&t=1s

Deceptive Detectives. (2017). Common Sense Media. https://www.commonsense.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2021-03/document-cs-education-fakenews-poster-release-lr_0.pdf

Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division. (2023, October). Dihydrogen monoxide - DHMO homepage. https://dhmo.org/

Dombrowski, E. (n.d.). (Dis) trusting statistics: a mini-guide. Oxford Education Blog. http://educationblog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DOMBROWSKI-STATS-MINI-GUIDE.pdf

MySwitzerland. (2013, March). BBC: spaghetti-harvest in Ticino | Switzerland Tourism [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

News and America’s Kids: How Young People Perceive and are Impacted by the News. (2017, March). Commonsensemedia.org.

PBS Learning Media. (2023). Why is fake news so effective? https://lsintspl3.wgbh.org/en-us/lesson/ilcpbn18-il-ilfakenews/?as_guest=True&next=https://klrn.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ilcpbn18-ela-ilfakenews/why-is-fake-news-so-effective/

Social Media TestDrive. (2023). News in social media. https://app.socialmediatestdrive.org/intro/digital-literacy

Stanford Graduate School of Education. (2012, May). National study of high school students’ digital skills paints worrying portrait, Stanford researchers say: researchers charged 3,446 American students with vetting news stories and other digital content. News and Media. https://ed.stanford.edu/news/national-study-high-school-students-digital-skills-paints-worrying-portrait-stanford

Teaching Without Frills. (2018, October). How to evaluate sources for reliability - writing for kids [video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1k8rcYUmbQ

Zapato, L.(2022, May). Help save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus from extinction. zapatopi. https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/