Jerry Bernardo gave us a talk about himself....the youngest of 10 children.
It was very interesting how his real interest is in designing engines and machinery for specific purposes starting with his father making him clean engine parts when he was very young.
I often wonder how many people became mechanics and engineers because every weekend fathers had to work on the car. Cars have become more sophisticated today and constant adjustment is neither necessary nor possible.
Jerry moved on into building and we at Rotary Rosebank are forever in his debt for his use of those skills for Rotary projects over the years.
My Rotary
Ann Hope-Bailie has sent every member instuctions on how to register on My Rotary. Almost all of our members are registered but it is very important that we are all on there. Mentors of new members please make sure that your new members are registered. Rotary International is now completely geared to electronic communication and we have to not only be registered but also all our projects etc have to be on my Rotary. This means that the District Governor is able to see what we are doing, what we hope to do and what the status of our membership is at anytime.
This Week
It's the District Governor's visit, an annual event.
We are lucky be visited so early in the year as Jean and her executive will have a separate meeting with him before lunch and will lay out our plans for the year. He will never know if we have managed to achieve them or not!
If the visit was at the end of the year it would be a different story!
Our District Governor is Charles Deiner who is an agricultural consultant specialising in animal production and egg quality. He is a member of the Rotary Club of Middelburg.
School for skeptics by Vanessa Glavinskas
When the BBC offered a quiz titled “Can You Spot the Fake Stories?” I was confident that I would do well. With a master’s degree in journalism, I thought falling for “fake news” only happened to other people. But I was fooled four times on the seven-question quiz.
I’m not the only one who has trouble with this. Even the digitally savvy generation now growing up has a difficult time distinguishing credible content from fake stories. In 2015, Stanford University launched an 18-month study of students in middle school, high school, and college across several states to find out how well they were able to evaluate the information they consume online.
Nearly 8,000 students took part in the study, and the results showed that they were easily duped. Many middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a news story and an ad. College students weren’t able to distinguish a mainstream source from a group promoting a certain point of view. Students often decided if something was credible just by how polished the website looked. The study highlighted a fundamental problem: Today’s students are struggling to differentiate fact from fiction online.
“We’re living in the most overwhelming information landscape in human history,” says Peter Adams, a senior vice president for the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit that aims to add information literacy to middle and high school classrooms across the United States. “It’s confusing because people are consuming information in an aggregated stream, and social media gives things uniformity. A post from a conspiracy theory blog looks the same as a post from the Washington Post.”
To help students learn how to evaluate and verify information, the News Literacy Project launched a virtual classroom called Checkology. One part of the web-based tool allows teachers to present students with news reports, tweets, and other social media posts. The students must determine whether they are credible by looking for a variety of “red flags.”
Jodi Mahoney found Checkology last summer while researching ways to educate her students about fake news. Now she uses it in her classroom, where she teaches students about technology, from email etiquette to basic coding.
“What’s the best way to prevent yourself from spreading misinformation?” she asks a group of sixth-graders at Carl Von Linné Elementary School in Chicago. Eleven-year-old Michael raises his hand. “I think, first you double-check the site where you got it from,” he says. “Then look for clues to see if it’s credible.”
“Good. What kind of clues?” Mahoney encourages the students to start naming them. One student calls out that you want to avoid clickbait. “OK, what’s clickbait?” she asks. The room is quiet. “If you’re not sure, look it up. Let’s Google it.”
The class decides that clickbait is something “designed to get attention or arouse emotion.” The students have learned that’s a red flag because a strong emotional reaction can override your ability to critically evaluate information – a tendency often exploited by people trying to spread misinformation. Next, Mahoney asks them to log in to checkology.org to practice figuring out whether information is fact or fiction.
“Go to module three,” Mahoney instructs. The students put on headphones and log in. A few minutes later, 12-year-old Guadalupe struggles to determine whether a sample Facebook post sharing an article headlined “CDC Issued a Warning – Don’t Get a Flu Shot This Year” is real. She ultimately decides it’s real because the post “gave a lot of facts about the flu” and included a source. She clicks “fact,” and Checkology corrects her. This post was fiction.
“That lesson shows that just looking at it doesn’t give you what you need to know,” Adams explains. “If you don’t go upstream to another source, you can’t know if it’s true or not.”
While the sixth-graders can’t always tell fact from falsehood, Mahoney says she appreciates that Checkology encourages students to be skeptical. “They are so comfortable using the internet that they don’t question it,” she says. She sees it at home too. “My [third-grade] daughter recently told me that the platypus wasn’t a real animal because of a YouTube video she saw.”
After the class completes a module, Mahoney can create a spreadsheet to see how the students did. “The first week, they all scored very low,” she says. “The data showed me that I needed to be concerned.” At that point, her students couldn’t distinguish among types of media: News, entertainment, ads – they all seemed the same to them. After 13 weeks, she says, she’s starting to see students connect the dots, but emphasizes that they need to continue to practice. She adds, “This needs to be taught all the way through college.”
Mahoney included a unit on fake news for her sixth-graders, because that’s when most of her students get a cellphone. “They start getting bombarded with content in fifth, sixth, or seventh grade,” she says. She also wants schools to put more emphasis on teaching news literacy. “We spend a lot of time lecturing kids on what not to do on the internet and how to be safe on the internet,” she says. “Now we need to teach them how to understand the content that’s out there.”
Former teacher Michael Spikes agrees. When he taught media studies and news production to high school students in Washington, D.C., he would tell them, “You can’t be SpongeBob and just absorb. You have to be an active consumer of information.” His mantra: “Where is the evidence?”
If you want to see if you can recognise "Fake News" here's a little game you can try. http://factitious.augamestudio.com/#/ I didn't do so well myself (Peter)
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