Source: Librarians take up arms against fake news | Family | herald-review.com
SEATTLE — Janelle Hagen is a school librarian whose job goes far beyond checking out books. She and many other librarians are equipping students to fight through lies, distortion and trickery to find their way to truth.
Helping students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives has become increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant.
Two University of Washington professors recently announced a new class that will focus on the ways data are misused to mislead the public. Younger students may need guidance even more.
Hagen, the middle-school librarian at Lakeside School in Seattle, said the students she serves are online every day, and they need to be able to figure out what’s trustworthy and what isn’t.
Besides running the library, Hagen said, she teaches a class called “digital life.” She meets with fifth-graders twice a week and with eighth-graders once a week. The classes are a mix of technology and information-literacy skills, but since the presidential election, she’s increased the focus on the latter.”It was because of all of the buzz (about fake news). You can look at the Google analytics, and the search for ‘fake news’ was unprecedented.” she said. “It’s our job as teachers to address what’s going on in the world.”
One Monday morning, her eighth-graders took a group quiz in which they were asked to identify different kinds of information — advertising, publicity, propaganda, news, opinion pieces. They worked on their laptops choosing from multiple options, and their choices showed up on a big screen at the front of the classroom. There was discussion after each question, especially when not everyone got the answer right.
Hagen introduced the new focus to students by showing them the results of a Stanford History Education Group study in which students from college, high school and middle school were tested on their understanding of various types of information.
Most middle-school students were able to distinguish advertisements from news stories, but more than 80 percent confused native advertisements with news stories. Native advertisements are designed to look like news stories, but they carry a label that sets them apart, usually “sponsored content.” That wasn’t enough.
There is a great need for more education in the critical-thinking skills that are part of information literacy.
Remember when many people thought librarians were going to become obsolete because the world of information was migrating to the web? But then we became enthralled by the possibilities of big data, and library schools became information schools, turning out people who could help navigate vast troves of online data. That’s where the discipline was when Hagen graduated from the University of Washington Information School in 2011.
Librarians and libraries are still with us, and those new data skills are increasingly valuable, but an older skill is now rising in importance. Hagen said librarians have always helped people sort fact from fiction, reliable sources from deceptive ones. Usually that happened as students worked on research papers, but now those lessons need to cover daily life.
“It’s a difficult time to work in education because we are seeing what’s happening in the world and how opinions are really first and foremost rather than facts,” Hagen said.
Lakeside’s high-school librarians put up a display in the entrance to their building that offers several tips for spotting fake news. One says: “What’s the evidence?” Underneath a flap there’s more detail: “As you read an article, make sure to see if they have any evidence to back up their claims. Furthermore, research the evidence to see if it is real, made up, or used in a way not intended by its creators.”
Are claims in an article backed up by verifiable facts? Check the authors’ backgrounds to see if they have credibility on the topic they are writing about.
Hagen likes The News Literacy Project, a collaboration between journalists and educators to improve students’ information literacy through lessons in the classroom and its online program Checkology.
Hagen’s eighth-graders use AllSides, a website that rates the bias of news stories and other articles, labeling them according to where they fit on a political spectrum from left to center to right. And it posts multiple versions of major stories and their ratings. Readers can test their own biases on the site.
As the site says, “if you have a pulse, you have a bias.” And Hagen tells her students that even the most honest media have biases, but they also try hard to be fair, and articles must past muster with layers of editors, so a reader or viewer is more likely to get a more reliable version of a given story.
Awareness is the key, she said. And it is. Read, listen, watch with an active, questioning mind.
J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feud with Trump supporters is so bad she’s now fighting some of her fans – The Washington Post
Rowling’s brushes with political controversy are nothing new. She’s just more open about her views now.
Source: J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feud with Trump supporters is so bad she’s now fighting some of her fans – The Washington Post
If there’s any doubt left that we live in divisive political times, know this: Some fans of Harry Potter are burning their copies of the books to protest author J.K. Rowling’s views of the U.S. president. And she’s fighting back on Twitter, insulting those very fans.
That’s right, one of the most beloved series of books in modern history has now become a political prop. Is nothing safe?
Rowling has been vocal about her feelings concerning President Trump for some time. She has mostly used Trump’s favorite platform, Twitter, to share her criticisms.
These tweets have generated a Facebook page’s worth of headlines. But Rowling’s brushes with political controversy are nothing new.
Rowling is a dedicated progressive. She’s a strong believer in welfare, which she relied on during a particularly rough period in her life. As she said during a 2008 Harvard commencement speech, “An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless … By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.”
More recently, Rowling found herself in the midst of a Twitter battle surrounding Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, referred to as Brexit, which she staunchly opposed.
Much of this now seemingly endless debate was absent during the height of the Harry Potter craze because the author didn’t publicly discuss her views until the publication of the final book in the series. In 2008, a year after “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” hit bookshelves, Rowling gave 1 million pounds to Britain’s Labour Party.
That same year, speaking to El Pais, she said of the U.S. presidential campaign in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were battling for the Democratic nomination: “I want a Democrat in the White House. It seems a pity that Clinton and Obama have to be rivals, because both are extraordinary.”
Anyone who gave the Harry Potter books a close reading likely wouldn’t have been surprised by Rowling’s politics.
Most of the subplots involve the triumph of marginalized peoples, be it the mixed-heritage Hermione, a “mudbl–d,” the poverty-stricken Weasleys, the stigmatized Hagrid (essentially an ex-offender reintroduced to society who can no longer practice magic as a result) or the “lower class” house elf named Dobby (the most obvious analogue to American slavery).
Harry himself, after all, was an orphan and survivor of attempted infanticide.
In his book “Harry Potter and the Millennials,” Anthony Gierzynski wrote that, “the evidence indicates that Harry Potter fans are more open to diversity and are more politically tolerant than nonfans; fans are also less authoritarian, less likely to support the use of deadly force or torture, more politically active, and more likely to have had a negative view of the Bush administration.”
Rowling invites anyone to challenge her.
Once Rowling opened up about her beliefs, it has been a steady stream ever since. And while attacking her own fans might seem like a poor marketing choice, it’s important to note one of the values that Rowling holds most dear: freedom of speech.
“Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures,” she said during the 2016 PEN America Literary Gala at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. “I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine.”
Rowling had already faced some conflict before she publicly expressed her political views. Her Harry Potter books were maligned by some Christian groups, making it one of the most challenged books in 2000, as tracked by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, according to the New York Times.
“The challenges seem to be objecting to occult or supernatural content in the books and are being made largely by traditional Christians who believe the Bible is a literal document,” Virginia Walter, president of the ALA’s Association for Library Service to Children, told the newspaper. “Any exposure to witches or wizards shown in a positive light is anathema to them. Many of these people feel that the books are door-openers to topics that desensitize children to very real evils in the world.”
The outcry didn’t come only from fringe, radical sects of Christianity, either. As noted in the Christian Post, when Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger he condemned the books for their “subtle seductions, which act unnoticed … deeply distort Christianity in the soul before it can grow properly.”
There’s a certain irony to this, considering Rowling has said that Christianity was a great inspiration for the books.
“To me [the religious parallels have] always been obvious,” she said at a 2007 news conference. “But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going.”
There were Christian references throughout the series. When Harry visits his parents’ graves in one book, the headstone reads, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” — an abridged version of 1 Corinthians 15:26.
The graveyard is also the final resting place of headmaster Albus Dumbledore’s mother and sister, whose tombstone bears the inscription, “Where your treasure is, there your heart be also” — a direct quote from Matthew 6:19.
“I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones at Godric’s Hollow, they sum up — they almost epitomize the whole series,” Rowling said at the news conference.
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Tagged as fan feud, J.K. Rowling, Sunday, The Washington Post, Trump