Checkdesk for Educators
How journalism schools can use Checkdesk to train critical media and verification skills
By An Xiao Mina
At the 2015 conference for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), we had the honor to join a panel and workshop discussion held by the American Press Institute. With Jane Elizabeth leading the group, we joined a series of other folks working in this space, including the Internet Archive, Hypothesis, and Fiskkit.
I took a look at a particularly interesting issue of virality and verification in China from back in 2012, which I wrote about for 88 Bar. The gist? After Chinese state media censored the nude scenes from Titanic 3D, a satirical account for the reason — that people might reach out and try to touch the screen, thus interrupting viewers in front of them — went viral. So much so, that James Cameron himself cited the joke as fact on the Colbert Report.
Importantly, what was missing from the satirical post was the hashtag #fake news# (on Weibo, hashtags are indicated with hashmarks on both sides), which had originally been part of the original post. As it ricocheted around the Chinese web, it lost that important tag and thus fulfilled Craig Silverman’s Law of Incorrect Tweets (or, in this case, Weibo posts):
Initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted
more than any subsequent correction.
It’s an interesting story because so much of Checkdesk is designed with this in mind: how can users safely share contested media? And as part of our checklog design, we are keen on a clear verification status that helps dampen the risk of others thinking the story contains factual, verified information.
With all that in mind, here’s how educators might apply Checkdesk with their students:
1. Use the show your work ethos to grade students’ contributions.
As important as the verification status is the reason for the status. Checkdesk is designed to allow newsrooms and citizen journalists to show the work behind the status. If the teacher is set up as the editor in chief, they can see all the contributions to research on different reports by each individual student. Teachers can even use the checklog to ask critical questions and encourage critical thinking through the verification notes.
2. Rely on contemporary events.
Contemporary events are more relevant for students and therefore more engaging. And with misinformation increasingly being an issue in daily news, it shouldn’t be difficult to find examples each week. Students can suggest stories they’ve seen going viral in their networks, and add them directly to Checkdesk as reports for verification by their colleagues.
3. Embed the results in a class blog/school paper.
One attendee asked, “Does Checkdesk work with Wordpress?” While we have plans for Wordpress integration at a future date, Checkdesk already allows users to embed the content on other sites. Most classrooms already have a class blog set up, and journalism students might be contributing to an online publication or magazine, and our embeds are designed to complement the existing publication workflow.
4. Use Checkdesk to engage someone in your social network on the topic at hand.
As Silverman’s research shows, incorrect information goes viral more quickly than the corrections that follow. But sharing that incorrect info is still a critical task, especially if you see people in your network sharing it. Can your students use Checkdesk or the reports they’ve written to engage people in their network who’ve shared misinformation? As Craig Silverman noted, there are a number of strategies. Here’s one:
Since Twitter messages flow by in a constant stream, it’s important to repeat your corrections. It’s difficult to say how many corrections are necessary, but one good way to gauge would be to see if the mistaken information is still being retweeted. As long as it’s being passed around, you should be issuing corrections and asking people to RT your correction. Remember that when something is retweeted, it takes on more authority among people and search engines — so your job in issuing a Twitter correction is to get it retweeted as much as possible.
How else do classrooms use Checkdesk? We’d love to hear from you. Document the results and share them with us, and we can feature them on our blog. And stay tuned here for more examples.
If you’re an educator and want to use Checkdesk in your classroom, the project is open source and available on GitHub. Contact Meedan (hello@meedan.com) if you’d like our support in getting you started. There are also excellent open educational resources developed by Birmingham City University around digital media literacy, journalism ethics and verification at http://ArabCitizenMedia.org.
