Poynter reports... truthfully, I hope! How would I know? I've never been subjected to corporate-sponsored lie-detection instruction. But I have developed, over more than half a century, my own approach to feeling suspicious, looking closely, thinking, and testing. So the first thing I'd do here is notice who's paying for this and speculate about why.
“Our research has shown that students need help navigating the sea of digital information that they encounter every day. We are excited to embark on this initiative to create classroom-ready materials that will prepare students to confront the challenges of a digital society,” said Sam Wineburg, founder of the Stanford History Education Group and Margaret Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.
Note the opposition between the "sea of... information" and "classroom-ready materials." There is concern that students get on the internet and look all over the place, following their own interests and finding their own paths. They're no longer limited to the packaged information of mainstream media, so let's at least give them packaged materials about how to face life at sea.
Poynter will launch a fact-checking venture in which teens will work with professional journalists to sort out fact vs. fiction on the internet. Poynter’s fact-checking franchise, which includes the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, will collaborate on the project, applying key findings that grew out of Stanford’s research on how teens consume news. The work of the teen fact-checkers to debunk misinformation will be presented on numerous online and social media platforms, and it will be heavily visual, including extensive use of graphics and other creative means to reach teens wherever they are consuming news.
Oh! The teens will be the fact-checkers, and their work will be appropriated into the Poynter fact-checking enterprise. This seems to fit with the way we're relying on teens to instruct us about morality and policy these days.
"At Google.org, we’re focused on developing the next generation of diverse technology creators but we know that coding skills or even digital savviness is not enough,” said Jacquelline Fuller, president of Google.org. “We are thrilled to be working with Poynter, Stanford and the Local Media Association to help equip young people with the skills they need to assess fact from fiction online."
At Google, I assume, they're also focused on deflecting criticism of Google. $3 million is a very cheap way to advertise its concern for the problems it exacerbates — or can be accused of exacerbating — like hosting the Althouse blog, where the commenters are about to say that this new program will be completely slanted to the left.
Posts
57 comments:
Resolving fiction:
There are 3,141 counties in the United States.
Trump won 3,084 of them.
Clinton won 57.
There are 62 counties in New York State.
Trump won 46 of them.
Clinton won 16.
The Electoral College works. Film at 11...
Politifact is one of the most dishonest "fact checkers," abusing its pretense of objectivity to slant its findings favoring Democrats. Taranto has been all over them numerous times, as described here, where he showed how they helped perpetrate the fraud of Obamacare.
Facts are more appealing in the distance.
So is Google Inc admitting that our beloved teenagers have not been taught how to think?
If PolitiFact won a Pulitzer, I'd suggest burning Pulitzer to the ground and salting the ashes.
It doesn't matter where they start out on the political spectrum. Eventually O’Sullivan’s First Law applies:
“All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
This whole hot mess of slippery words only confirms that there is a war going on for our minds ...an Infowar. And Google wants to camoflage its most vulnerable position.
So Google makes a big splash to prove it is against that terrible thing that they are doing 24/7.
Poynter will launch a fact-checking venture in which teens will work with professional journalists to sort out fact vs. fiction on the internet.
Well, there's your problem. This is going to be one more exercise in teaching the kids what to think, not how to think.
Credentialism, not critical thinking! The Enlightenment is doomed, and not by "Fake News" either, but by mollycoddling our children and not coaxing them to actually think.
Fecissimus. First-person plural pluperfect active subjunctive of faciō, etymological root of fact: facio, facere, feci, factus
Use it in a sentence
Quamvis singulos hos coetus vestros libentissime seiunctim coram admisissemus, et ad unumqdemque pro peculiari indole et necessitate verba fecissemus, tamen praeoptavimus omnes simul excipere, quo maius pondus huic colloquio communi tribueremus, eo vel magis quod, hac opportuna oblata occasione, Nobis visum est quaedam exponere, quae ad omnes pertinent religiosos, quotquot sunt per orbem terrarum.
Although We would have most willingly granted separate audiences to each of your Capitular groups, and would have addressed each group in accordance with its proper character and current needs, yet We preferred to receive all of you together. By addressing the various Institutes all at once, We felt that We would thereby give greater weight to Our words, all the more so since this occasion provides Us with the opportunity to set forth matters of importance to all Religious, however many they may be, throughout the world.
Google terms of service.
Journalist schmirnalist. From what I can see those folks don't know whether they're punched or bored.
What a waste of money. All they have to do is tell the kids, if you're confused about something, go to the Althouse comments and those folks will get you straightened out.
Poynter receives $3 million from Google to lead program teaching teens to tell fact from fiction online.
I could see a simple way to make this actually valuable. Have the student's grades depend on the number of ( provably ) false pieces of information that they find in the news, but instead of using the total number of errors found, have it based on minimum( errors on the left, errors on the right ).
That way they couldn't all just pile on Fox News, they would need to balance Fox News errors against MSNBC errors.
As a high school teacher, one of the things that scares me the most is how much kids depend on Google and Wiki.
This new program will be completely slanted to the left.
The Germans have a word for this.
Jose Duarte has a number of posts on incompetent and/or biased fact checkers. Politifact example: https://medium.com/@ValidScience/bears-guns-and-battlestar-galactica-a287f19e343d
minitrue.google.com
Slanted to the powers that are, as Dan Quayle might put it. “Heavily visual” sounds very teen-appealing. -willie
Scary things can become high school teachers?
(Grammar joke for high school teachers.)
Etienne:
I think your numbers are wrong and it was more like 2600 for Trump and 500 for Clinton.
"At Google.org, we’re focused on developing the next generation of diverse technology creators but we know that coding skills or even digital savviness is not enough..."
Actually, I think it IS enough.
Sausage-makers need to stick with making sausage.
It is enough for me that they simply know the sausage skills needed to make sausage.
Any savviness on their part only needs to be related to making sausage savory.
I do not need diversity of the sausage creators to help me understand the truths about the sausage.
Do not tell me about how I should interpret the sausage.
Make the sausage, then leave me alone.
The Germans have a word for this.
Oh! The teens will be the fact-checkers, and their work will be appropriated into the Poynter fact-checking enterprise.
This is like riding stables getting teens to muck out stalls in exchange for riding lessons.
"... it will be heavily visual, including extensive use of graphics and other creative means to reach teens wherever they are consuming news."
Because teens will only be reached by an extensive use of graphics.
Perhaps the lessons can be taught in a gritty Shooter Video Game.
You are the Battle-Hardened Warrior Ninja Cyborg Journalist, making your way through an Post-Apocalyptic Washington DC.
You must be able to identify Social Justice Warriors from Fake Truth Troops.
At this level you must gather as many Important Anonymous Leaks as possible. And shoot Fake Truth Troops, of course. With your Semi-Automatic Truth Pen.
If you shoot enough Fake Truth Troops with your Semi-Automatic Truth Pen you go to the next level, where you are a Talking Head on a cable news show, where you must be ready with your Obfuscation and Deception Weapons.
Keep clicking those buttons, kids.
The Germans have a word for this.
... where the commenters are about to say that this new program will be completely slanted to the left.
Would you care to bet your pension and Social Security checks that it won’t?
They just want to teach these kids how not to screw up their social credit score.
I have a soft spot in my head for Poynter because they used to host Jim Romanesko's blog; I used to read the Letters section for a glimpse into the Jesuitical world of journalistic ethics. You could always tell how bad a case of journalistic malfeasance was by how poyntedly they would ignore it.
joke of the day: Google = Truth
Critical thinking, which is what they are really talking about, begins when you are a child. Your parents should be the ones to teach it to you. However, often the child learns critical thinking through making bad mistakes and being cruelly tricked by others.
It is much better to be guided through that process by your parents. Unfortunately, many parents today protect their children from thinking, from mistakes and try to be a Godlike personage who will magically smooth out any uncomfortable happenings or icky thoughts.
This is how you get the uninformed, mindless, mush headed, snowflakes of today.
Nice try though. Might get through to a few young. Most will likely be "triggered" because their minds are totally closed.
The Poynter vector shows which way the energy is going.
I agree with those that have pointed out the bias of Politifact and our current crop of "professional journalists", let me also add Poynter to that compromised crowd.
I held Poynter in the highest esteem in my years of newspaper work, was thrilled when my paper flew me over to Florida for workshops with them, etc. And as the Internet grew in this century, I was active on their discussion boards.
Suddenly in 2007, there was a shift, OhMyGoodness they took the Obama pill (PBUH) and never were the same. Suddenly my commenting became radioactive (like bringing up the courageous early reporting on Rev. Wright) and No One (No One!) on those comment boards would Touch my comments, where before there were dynamic discussions.
It was sobering and truly scary for me to witness directly how they simply built a wall of silence.
This whole thing, then, is just more Alt-Liberal control-speak.
Ptewy.
I think most young people, as soon as they're old enough to read Mad Magazine and probably before, realize that advertising is a total crock. What's been a more recent development is the awareness that the news is equally manipulative and misleading. The over the top negativity about Trump is doing more to subvert the credibility of the news media than that of Trump.
The Poynter website says they have acquired PolitiFact.
Here-
https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-expands-fact-checking-franchise-acquiring-politifactcom-0
Big deal. If Democrats say it, it is a fact, if anyone disagrees, it is a lie. There you go, the Poynter institute in one sentence. Where is my three million?
I hope they use Poynter Sisters music for all the background on the informative videos.
Any sincere effort of this kind would start with a course in Basic Logic, as you might have in your first year on college. Finding fallacies is very difficult without that basis for analyzing statements about facts.
Yep! That'll work a TREAT! /sarc
“Our research has shown that students need help navigating the sea of digital information that they encounter every day.
Sure, it's totally believable this is analyzing true disinformation instead of enforcing left wing orthodoxy. It's not like left wingers haven't spent the last week freaking out because people recognize the obvious reality that bureaucrats influence government policy. Luckily we can rely on the professionalism of these "scientists" to resist producing propaganda studies to further their political interests. Certainly none would ever produce laughable studies claiming 1 in 5 women on campus are sexually assaulted or that half of all personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills.
PolitiFact is a joke. They rated "if you like your Dr. you can keep your Dr." half true twice before finally deciding it was the Lie of the Year in Dec 2013...conveniently after it mattered (w/r/t passage of the law).
When tobacco companies fund medical research everyone laughs at the research.
When Big Google/Big Ad Server/Big Data funds "truth" research everyone's supposed to be impressed?
I do not understand why people think journalists are any good "fact checking." I can see why journalists might think so (vanity), but why would the people at Google think so highly of journalists?
My 8th grade English teacher did this for us. We had a weekly assignment to analyze several newspaper articles (this was 1973-74, so a lot of big shit was happening). We had to clip out the articles and circle what looked to be facts, quotes, paraphrases, speculation and opinion. Each week, she would select the best couple examples for class discussion. She was a first-year teacher in her early 20's, gorgeous, stacked busting out of button up blouses and showed off her shapely legs in a variety of short to mini skirts. Each week was a contest to do the best news dissection so she would call you up so you could stand close and get a whiff of her perfume.
If only there was a word for believing everything, or most things, you are told and read. Naive? Gullible? Immature? Ignorant? Where's my thesaurus...
-sw
The Germans have a word for this.
Yes. Wiener.
tim in vermont said...
Credentialism, not critical thinking! The Enlightenment is doomed, and not by "Fake News" either, but by mollycoddling our children and not coaxing them to actually think.
Tim got it right, DBQ. This is not an attempt to teach critical thinking or logic, it is an attempt to teach kids that only the correct sources are factual.
Great. They will be teaching children that a woman can have a penis & that a man can become pregnant and bring forth a child from his womb.
"At Google.org, we’re focused on developing the next generation of diverse technology creators but we know that coding skills or even digital savviness is not enough,” said Jacquelline Fuller, president of Google.org.
What an evil, lying whore. I'd like to shove her in front of an Uber.
We all understand your frustration, Jupiter. After 40-years of programming, the best you can do is get some codgers POS Apple working while Jackie Fuller is at a top tier of the most successful venture founded by programmers. Uber is going to have to equal Himmler in a quest to answer the programmer question before google might consider interviewing you.
How about just going back to requiring classes in good old fashioned logic and rhetoric? Oh, I forgot. Logic is a patriarchal white male social construct invented to keep down the oppressed.
...the commenters are about to say that this new program will be completely slanted to the left. Guilty as charged.
And they worked in the magic word, diverse, into their spiel. It's the word that makes everything good.
Howard said...
"We all understand your frustration, Jupiter."
Some do, I doubt you are one of them. I was employed until recently at a top US tech firm, where I watched the PC fascists taking the place over. I was explicitly told that I was a perfect match for a position I would have liked to have, by a man working on the team, but his boss would not even look at the resumes of white males. People were surprisingly vocal on the internal website about how the quest for "diversity" was damaging morale and performance. And HR was beginning to make threatening noises about it. Certain views were not "acceptable". I was not at all surprised by what happened to James Damore at Google, I was only surprised that he was surprised. I got out while the getting was good, to a better-paying job I like better and can do from home. I'm just waiting for the two-year limit to pass so I can sell my stock. 'Cause you can only hire a steady stream of incompetents for so long before the quality of the product starts to suffer.
So, yeah, Google doesn't need to worry about interviewing me.
Pretty soon and they will be piping propaganda straight into the classroom. Like in 1984.
Scary people.
I have a soft spot in my head for Poynter because they used to host Jim Romanesko's blog
Then you must know that Poynter fired Romanesko for "plagiarism" because his hyperlinks often included phrases from the stories he was linking to, and he did not put those phrases in quotation marks. In other words, the Poynter people are dumber than a sack of hammers.
OK Jupiter, my bad. I can understand your frustration.
The problem with leaving the fact checking to teens is the teens don't have the depth of experience to "sense" when something just doesn't feel right. With age comes wisdom, at least for some of us. After being around to see a few swings of the pendulum of popular opinion those of us who are older find we can see a pattern to life's inconsistencies. How is a 17 year old supposed to do that? They haven't even seen the pendulum swing all the way in one direction much less seeing it go back and forth three or four times. Just a thought. Anyone else agree?
My mother taught this sort of discernment to college students pre-Internet. They should give her $3,000,000.
They haven't even seen the pendulum swing all the way in one direction much less seeing it go back and forth three or four times.
I would say I agree completely. On the other hand, some of the loudest commenters here act as though they've never seen the pendulum swing at all, and they are at least as old as I am. So perhaps it has nothing to do with age, and more to do with a propensity to excitability.
The KGB hired Pravda to do the same thing.
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