by Terry Heick
Wish to assist college students be taught to assume critically about ‘pretend information’? A easy, browser-based sport might assist.
What’s Bad News? Bad News is a straightforward software to assist college students perceive ‘pretend information,’ the (trendy?) phenomenon of misinformation and ‘content material as information’ propagated, a minimum of partially, by the rise of digital and social media.
(You may obtain an data sheet about made for educators.)
As an interactive expertise, Bad News helps college students perceive how pretend information works, why it turns into in style, and its central mechanics and tendencies. It then permits gamers to decide on sure pretend information methods, together with emotional appeals, sarcasm, crimson herrings, private assaults, and conspiracy theories.
It additionally introduces the ideas of content material types by permitting gamers to decide on between pretend information memes, photoshopped photographs, or precise ‘content material’ (information tales and articles, and so forth.), with some methods (private assaults) and types (memes) working higher than others relying on the pretend information matter.
Couple this with our The Cognitive Bias Codex: A Visible Of 180+ Cognitive Biases and you might have the beginnings of a crash course in important pondering on-line.
Enjoying Bad News: Strengths And Weaknesses
Whereas I extremely suggest the sport as a instructing software, I gave Bad News a few play-throughs and bumped into a number of areas the expertise may very well be improved–firstly, the ‘ranking’ mechanic that asks customers to price the reliability of sure social media posts.
Whereas it is smart in idea, in apply, it’s unclear precisely what you’re evaluating the reliability of: the social media publish, the consumer who shared the publish, or the framing of the content material within the publish.
It’s additionally not meant to be a full-on learning-about-fake-news simulation, so it’s pretty skinny when it comes to what you’re in a position to really do from a mechanics standpoint–which limits a number of the utility and may go away it feeling a bit like a drawn-out finger wag at social media use usually.
That mentioned, when the sport is at its greatest–letting you select between heinous disinformation ways to be able to acquire ‘credibility’–it’s laborious to not shake your head in disbelief at how little important pondering we apply every day in our lives. And pretend information and social media are perhaps only a microcosm.
The sport is easy sufficient that you just don’t want directions and if gamers make a mistake, it’s brief sufficient to simply begin over. As a type of simulation, it’s harking back to Plague, Inc., a sense strengthened by Bad News builders said mission of ‘vaccinat(ing) the world towards disinformation.”
If you wish to introduce college students to the thought of faux information and the ways utilized by media publishers to alter consumer’s perceptions about information–and in flip, actuality itself–it’s a superb little software to get began.
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