A Lesson in CRAP Detection

A Lesson in CRAP Detection

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. Just consider two recent events in the news. Young girls, unable to recognize an online hoax called #CutForBieber, upload bloody photos of self-inflicted wounds to Twitter to show their concern for Justin Bieber’s alleged marijuana use. Meanwhile, 21-year old Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o falls for and carries on a serious relationship with an online girlfriend who doesn’t actually exist. Just last week, while interviewing Te’o about this well-publicized affair, Katie Couric asks him if he’s “technologically challenged.”

Couric asks an important question. If Te’o, Bieber’s fans, or any of us for that matter, can’t evaluate online information well enough to recognize online hoaxes like these when we see them, then yes, we’re technologically challenged.

Perhaps we could all use a lesson in CRAP detection.

At Journey School in Aliso Viejo, CA, we turn to the second chapter of the book, NetSmart: How to Thrive Online (2012) by Stanford University Professor, Howard Rheingold for our Cyber Civics classes on Information Literacy. I like Rheingold’s approach to evaluating online information because there’s not a 13-year old alive whose ears don’t perk up when you start talking about CRAP.

It captures their attention just long enough to allow you to suggest they ask the following questions when evaluating online information:

Currency -

          -How recent is this information?

          -How recently has the website been updated?

Reliability

          -What kind of information is included in the resource?

          -Does the creator provide references or sources for data 

            or quotations?

  Authority          

          -Who is the creator or author? What are their credentials?

          -Who is the publisher or sponsor? Are they reputable?             

Purpose/Point of View -

          - Is this fact or opinion? Is it biased?

          - Is the creator/author trying to sell you something?

Sometimes a scatological acronym is just the thing kids need to help them remember how to be critical thinkers online… and to avoid unnecessary pain and fake girlfriends.

10 Tips for the New Year

If your child is like most, he or she is probably starting out the new year as the proud owner of a new digital device. A gift from you perhaps? If so, don’t let the gift-giving end there. Give the best gift of all: 10 TIPS to help them use their new phone, tablet, PC, laptop, or other digital tool wisely and safely:

1. Set Limits. Talk to your child about how to set appropriate limits for time spent with their digital devices. A good rule of thumb is to keep bedrooms device free at night (after homework) and to ban digital tools from the dinner table.

2. Manage Privacy Settings. If you haven’t already set the privacy settings on your own social networking sites, like Facebook, this is something you and your child can do together.  Decide who can see what they post online and how people can connect with them. Chances are you’ll both learn something in the process.

3. Read Privacy Policies. Yes, these can be long, dull and boring; but Privacy Policies are important to read, so try this: http://bit.ly/N5h14w. It reads privacy policies and user agreement for you and quickly scans them to flag words, statements, and phrases worth your attention.

4. Turn on the “Do Not Track Tool.”  Most Internet browsers have a "Do Not Track" tool to tell sites you don't want cookies installed on your device. In case you didn’t already know this, "cookies" are what websites drop on your computer to track your activities.  You can manage these by tweaking your preferences.

5. Have the Talk (about passwords). According to a Pew Internet Study, 1 in 3 teens have shared a password with a friend. Encourage your child to keep their passwords private and teach them how to make a strong passwords by following simple rules, like combining upper and lower case letters with numbers and symbols (and never include personal info!).  

6. Keep Personal Info Personal and Don’t Chat With or Send Photos to Strangers. The good news is that kids already know this. Research shows that adults actually share personal information more freely online than kids do. So here’s where we can work a little harder to be better online role models.

7. Ask Permission. Requiring your child ask permission before signing up for anything online is a good policy and it goes hand in hand with tip #8.

8. Be Vigilant. Teach your child how to recognize tricks and mechanisms the online world uses to try and access our personal data (like links on emails we don’t recognize). 

9. Respect Age Limits on SNS’s. Data shows that close to half of online teens admit to lying about their age in order to access a website. Just like we teach our kids to be ethical, law-abiding citizens of the offline world, show them how to extend these same behaviors into the online world. And remember that it’s smart to let kids develop the maturity needed to deal with the many ethical decisions that loom in cyberspace.

10. Finally, Give the Gift of Gab. Talk to your child. Chances are you’ll learn something from them about how to use your own devices more safely and wisely!

 Lastly, hopefully your child is lucky enough to learn some or all of these lessons in school. If not, why not advocate for digital literacy, cyber civics, and/or digital citizenship classes in your own school? It's a gift we could be giving to all our kids.

Cross-Posted on iKeepSafe Blog

10 Rules for Safe and Respectable Online Behavior (Written by 7th Graders)

                                                                                                    Photo by Nirzhar. Business Portraits

Here’s a question: Who is more apt to post an embarrassing photo online, a 7th grader or his/her parent? If you answered “a 7th grader”… then you’d be wrong. According to a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center called Reputation Management and Social Media, adults share personal information online more freely than kids. And guess what? They’d really like us to stop.

This past year, in our weekly “Cyber Civics” class at Journey School, I asked a roomful of 7th graders to come up with ten rules for “safe and respectable online behavior.” Here is their list:

1. I will not post embarrassing pictures of other people on public sites.
2. I will not post mean comments online.
3. I will not post any personal information about myself online.
4. I will not give out any personal information about my friends.
5. I will not make up fake identities.
6. I will always ask permission before posting pictures of others.
7. I will respect a person’s decision if they do not want a picture or video of themselves posted online.
8. I will think twice (or three times) before putting anything online.
9. I will not pretend to be another person online behind their back.
10. I will not post personal stories about my friends online without their permission.

I think these are terrific rules for all of us, young person and adult alike. After all, as tempting as it is to over share personal information on social networks, like Facebook, following these guidelines not only demonstrates respect for the “digital footprints” of our families and friends, it’s also just plain smart. After all, posting that photo of your family frolicking on the beach in Maui also broadcasts to the world that nobody is at home. That’s not so wise. Don’t believe me? Just ask your 7th grader.

(Btw, in case you were wondering, yes the class gave me permission to post this list and to give out the name of their school!)

Why Wikipedia Works

If you grew up with a row of Encyclopedia Britannica’s lining your bookshelf (alas, the final print edition was published in 2010), using Wikipedia as a source of information seems counterintuitive. After all, is it really possible for a group of random online strangers to know more about a given topic than experts employed by the world’s most venerable institution of knowledge? The answer is yes, sort of.

The secret of Wikipedia is this: groups are remarkably smart. In fact, they are usually smarter than the smartest person in them. Nowhere is this explained better than in the book “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki. He opens the book with a story about British scientist Francis Galton who, in 1906, attended the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition where he watched 800 people attempt to guess the weight of a fat ox. Out of curiosity, Galton set out to figure out the statistical mean of the group’s guesses and discovered that the crowd guessed that the ox weighed 1,197 pounds. It’s actual weight? 1,198 pounds. In other words, the crowd was pretty much spot on. Versions of this experiment have been conducted time and again, with results confirming that the crowd will almost always come up with a better answer than the smartest person in that crowd.

For kids who have never heard of Encyclopedia Britannica and who readily turn to Wikipedia as a quick and easy reference for their schoolwork, learning how Wikipedia works, and understanding its strengths and weaknesses, is an important lesson in 21^st century literacy. So we spent a couple weeks focusing on this topic during our 7^th grade CyberCivics classes at Journey School in Southern California.

We used a lesson from “Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World" from Project New Media Literacies called “Wikipedia: The Group Behind the Screen.” Although designed for students in high school, this lesson was easily adapted for 7th graders as follows:

Every student received a piece of paper with a topic on it, ranging from spaghetti to running shoes. They were asked to list everything they personally knew about that topic. After completing this task, they broke into small groups with other students who had received the same topic. In these small groups students pooled their collective knowledge and corrected each other’s mistakes, finally coming up with a list that turned out to be both more accurate and comprehensive that what they had come up with individually.

Obviously this is a lesson on “collective intelligence” and an excellent student introduction to Wikipedia. A terrific article by scholar Henry Jenkins called, “What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies”, accompanies this free lesson. In his article Jenkins reminds us,  “in a world where many young people are turning to (Wikipedia) as a key source for information, educators need to understand what is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance… it is not enough to construct policies restricting the use of Wikipedia as a source if we don’t help foster the skills young people need in order to critically engage with a site which has become so central to their online lives. ” (p. 14).  Hear, hear.

It’s interesting really, that so many educators still perceive Wikipedia negatively. Roy Rosenzweig, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, conducted an analysis of Wikipedia for The Journal of American History, and though he found the quality of its information inconsistent, he also found that overall Wikipedia is as accurate or more accurate than traditional encyclopedias. In fact, a number of studies, including the landmark early study by the journal Nature, have also found Wikipedia to be as, if not more, reliable and statistically accurate than a traditional encyclopedia.

Of course, if you were a 7th grader, you’d already know this, as did the ones I posed the following question to:

“Which do you think is more reliable: Wikipedia or the old-fashioned encyclopedia?

Their answers?

“Wikipedia, because everything is up-to-date and constantly checked. The old-fashioned encyclopedia is outdated.”

“I think Wikipedia is more reliable because it’s by people like you and me.”

"Wikipedia, because it gets corrected all the time.”

"Wikipedia, because thousands of people are smarter than one person. "

There you have it.  These students, who many consider to be the first of a new generation that has truly grown up in a hyper mediated culture, instinctively know what scholar Pierre Levy wrote before they were even born: “Collective intelligence exploits the potential of network culture to allow many different minds operating in many different contexts to work together to solve problems that are more challenging than any of them could master as individuals.” In such a world, he tells us, "nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any member knows is available to the group as a whole at a moment’s notice" (as cited by Jenkins, p. 22).

That’s not to say that students should be taught to take Wikipedia, or any media source for that matter, at face value. Now, more than ever, young people need to be taught to call on their critical thinking skills to engage in what Harold Rheingold calls “crap detection” - a way to evaluate a source based on the following criteria: Currency, Reliability, Authority and Purpose/Point of View.

This is one of the many reasons why it’s so important to find time for cyber civics, media literacy, digital citizenship, information literacy, or whatever you care to call it, in school. To be a functioning citizen of our new digital world, it’s no longer enough to give the right answer on a bubble test. It requires being able to find and/or produce credible information that everyone can share. Because we are why Wikipedia works.

References

Clinton, K., et al. "Wikipedia: The Group Behind the Screen." Retrieved from http://newmedialiteracies.org/VI_E_Wikipedia_Our_Space.pdf

Jenkins, H. (2007). "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies." Retrieved from

Lesson and Article: Wikipedia: The Group Behind the Screen

http://newmedialiteracies.org/VI_E_Wikipedia_Our_Space.pdf

Levy, Pierre (1997). Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum).

Surowiecki , James (2004). The Wisdom of the Crowd. New York: Random House.

Making Fair Use Fun

Classroom lessons about "copyright" and "fair use" usually rank up there on the fun meter right next to “algebraic equations” and “dangling participles.” Even saying the words “fair use,” especially in front of class full of 7^th graders, is sure to make their eyes glaze over.  

However, what I learned teaching this lesson (using Common Sense Media’s Digital Literacy and Citizenship curriculum) can be best summed up as a mathematical equation:  

Relevant + Relatable = Fun

Here’s the relevant part. For most of us, it’s difficult to get a real sense of appreciation for copyright law is until we've created a piece of work we feel is worthy of protection. In other words, it helps to have a little skin in the game. To create this relevancy the class was told that the Happy Birthday song they’ve been singing for years is actually protected by copyright law (yes, it’s true, so if you plan to perform the song in public or include it in a movie, get out your checkbook). So, following the curricular advice of the Common Sense Media unit Respecting Creative Work, the class broke into small groups and created original birthday songs for their teacher.  Here are snippets they shot of their creations.

This lesson became relatable when the students discussed how they would feel if someone sang their song and, a) did not give them credit for it or, b) claimed them as their own. They didn’t like either of these two possible scenarios and were eager for copyright protection of their creative work.

However, when the tables were turned and they were asked to create “mashup" posters using copyrighted materials in a manner that would be considered “fair use” (i.e., using a limited amount, adding new meaning/making it original, reworking/using in a different way), they were eager for the opportunity to dig in and reassemble, reuse, repurpose and rework the work of others. However before attacking the stack of magazines with their scissors, I did notice a moment of pause as many wondered how to credit the authors of the works within the pages. In fact, many of them scanned the pages searching for names to credit (even though this is not always necessary in under the parameters of fair use, it is still good manners to give credit when you can).  

In a world where cut, copy and paste have become almost automatic reflexes, all of this is confusing, murky, grey area stuff. Even as a filmmaker, I found I had to refresh myself on the current state of copyright, public domain and fair use as they apply to all the information (seemingly) freely available on the Internet before I could begin to speak about these things with the students.  In fact I’m still feeling badly about the image at the top of this blog that I found used on multiple other blogs, none of which included an attribution (if anyone knows the creator, contact me!). Luckily I found a world of help in a just published chapter (Toward a Pedagogy of Fair Use for Multimedia Composition) in a new book by Renee Hobbs and Katie Donnelly titled Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom.

As Hobbs and Donnelly tell us, “the rise of digital media has contributed to greater levels of awareness and sensitivity because ‘the practice of making one’s own music, movie or essay makes one a more self-conscious user of the cultural artifacts of others,’ as media literacy education is part of a broad practice of learning by doing that ‘makes the entire society more effective readers and writers of their own culture’" (Benkler, p. 299, as cited in Hobbs & Donnelly, 2011, pp. 279-280).

I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. In fact, it got me wondering about members of Congress who, ironically, on the same day as we were experiencing this lesson, were debating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a new bill intended to ban allegedly copyright-infringing websites from the Internet. Critics of the legislation say it would strike at the very core of the sharing, openness, and participation that the Internet represents. In fact, many feel this bill could usher in an era of Internet censorship that will make the critical thinking skills like those practiced in this class a pointless waste of time and these students might as well have been filling in bubbles on some mandated state test. I honestly wish at least some members of Congress had gotten to make their own birthday songs and “mashup” posters when they were in school. At least then I’d feel a whole lot better about their abilities to cast an informed vote on this bill. But I digress…

If these students hadn’t had the experience of creating, documenting and feeling proud of their musical numbers, I don’t think they would have tried so hard, as they did, to find the names of those who created the works used in their “mashup” posters. At the very least I believe they learned a valuable lesson that day… that that the old adage, “what goes around, comes around” carries more meaning now, than ever before. 

How To Incite a 7th Grade Uprising

Photo: Wesley Fryer

Try this… stand in front of a roomful of 12- and 13-year olds and deliver the following news: “Kids, a team of researchers will be coming to your school to monitor your every move. These observers will record where you go (including the restroom, lunch area, playground, etc.), how long you spend there, whom you talk to, and what you do. The results of this research will help your school administrator customize the school to better meet your needs.” As you deliver this news, don’t forget to watch their expressions transform from uninterested to curious to disbelieving and, finally, to outrage!

Okay, by now you see where this is going. There’s no research company. But this lesson on “Privacy” from Common Sense Media’s free online digital media curriculum did get the attention of this class. So when they learned that this infringement on their privacy wasn’t actually going to happen at their school, but was happening every day in a place where they spend more time than in school -- cyberspace -- well, let’s just say they weren’t happy.  In fact, several students summed up their displeasure as follows, “That’s creepy!

It is creepy. In a front page story from last Sunday’s L.A. Times (Watching a Screen? It Watches You Too) Kevin Bankston, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says, “[e]ssentially , each of us is being tailed”. Funny thing is, most of us, like these 7^th graders, really don’t think too much about it. Maybe that’s because the upside of all this surveillance can be rather nice- data collection of our behavior patterns allows companies to target us with customized information, like ads for shoes we like or cars we might be likely to drive. This gathering of our personal data happens so invisibly we scarcely notice it. However, when we stop to scrutinize how it happens and then consider just how much information is mined from our simplest online activities you have to admit it is, well, creepy.

Fortunately for this class of 7^th graders (who are hopefully home at this very moment examining their Whyville privacy policies), they get to consider all this in class. Our school, Journey School in Aliso Viejo, CA, has made the bold move of incorporating Common Sense Media’s curriculum into all of its middle school classes. Why does this matter? Because in a few years these students will be able to vote. Maybe they’ll actually pay attention to (and understand) all the privacy-related legislation that continually fails to become law because powerful companies like FaceBook and Google don’t want to relinquish access to our data.  Or maybe they’ll decide they like their information perfectly designed to meet their needs. Either way, at least they’ll be informed citizens of their digital world.

FakeBook? A Lesson on Identity Construction

(Recently posted on Media Psychology Impact)

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: (CC)BrianSolis,
www. briansolis.com, via Wikimedia Commons.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg created quite a stir recently when he suggested that children under the age of 13 should be allowed on Facebook. He argued that since over 7.5 million children younger than 13 are on Facebook anyway, according to a study by Consumer Reports, we might as well let them join legally (rather than lying about their age). He promised that Facebook would “take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe." (Hmmm, I wonder if they’ll be anything like the precautions they take with adults... like those that require constant vigilance over Facebook's changing privacy settings?).

Safety issues aside, are kids younger than 13 really ready for Facebook?  I mean, who among us can’t conjure up a humiliating memory of being made fun of or laughed at by friends, classmates or family after making a silly or socially awkward mistake as a child? Now imagine that same uncomfortable moment played out in the most public of forums and living forever in cyberspace, with potentially vast invisible audiences getting to witness our humiliation. Ouch. That could require years of therapy.

Figuring out whom we are and how to present that self to the world, let alone the virtual world, is the work of adolescence. Both Sigmund Freud and Erik Erickson viewed the years leading up to adolescence as a period of relative calm, or a “latency” stage”, when children are busy developing ego strengths and cognitive skills. “The danger of this stage is an excessive feeling of inadequacy and inferiority” (Erikson, 1963, p. 260). Since opportunities for feeling both inadequate and inferior certainly abound on Facebook, why not give kids a few more years to develop the skills of resiliency on the school playground before setting them loose in the vast landscape of Facebook?

That’s not to say that social networks like Facebook don’t provide a terrific forum for teens, to “write themselves into being” (boyd, 2008, p. 167). There is plenty evidence to suggest that “presenting themselves in different ways online can be a healthy way for young people to explore identities they’d like to ‘try on’, without having to face the consequences of doing so in the offline world. Many young people report feeling they can be more authentic and real online because they don’t have to worry about appearance or other limitation of the offline world” (Common Sense Media, 2011). Stories abound about shy children who blossom socially online and then transfer those positive skills back to their offline worlds.

But even with all its advantages, it’s still a daunting task for teens, or any of us for that matter, to construct and manage our online identities. danah boyd writes about this in Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality (2008) saying that teens are “forced to face the ways in which impression management in networked publics is unlike that which takes place in face-to-face encounters. The technical affordances for defining the situation and presenting oneself are quite different, forcing teens to explicitly articulate their identity, imagine the context in which they are operating, and negotiate the impressions they are conveying with few structures for feedback.

Providing feedback was the work of our 6^th grade CyberCivics class. I teach skills to a class of 6^th graders that will hopefully help them become good digital citizens. Recently these students interviewed one another in order to create “FakeBook” profiles (on construction paper) of their partners (this lesson was adapted from Common Sense Media). When the students presented these profiles to the class, I was prepared for lots of inappropriate stuff to be shared. That was the purpose of the lesson, after all. But I can report that they have heard our warnings about the dangers of over-sharing online loud and clear.

Additionally, I learned, these kids don’t like people knowing where they are or where they live. This aligns with recent research that shows that kids find location-based services, like Foursquare and Facebook Places, kind of creepy. Interestingly, the only inappropriate stories that came up in class were about parents. Evidently we embarrass them by posting too many photos and silly comments about them and their siblings. They’d really like us to stop.

So does that fact that these 12-year olds seemed cyber savvy beyond their years mean that they’re ready for Facebook? Maybe. Hopefully, several months of Cyber Civics lessons have helped. 


Still, I think years well spent on a playground provide the best lessons of all.

References

boyd, danah (2008). “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality” . Retrieved from http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf

Common Sense Media (n.d.). Common sense media education programs. Retrieved from http://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators

Erikson, E.H. (1993). Childhood and society(2^nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.