Border Line Cases: Words that decieve
For our main project this semester we wrote fake news articles, using different techniques we learned in class. Our original project was supposed to focus on conspiracy theories and how they become widely known and why people believed them. Our final product for that was going to be a school wide conspiracy about apple "buying" our school and changing it up a lot. We realized that it was going to be incredibly difficult to keep this a secret from everyone for so long since there was so many people involved someone was bound to say something. At this point we decided to shift gears and explore another concept under the conspiracy theory umbrella; Fake news. We did a lot of research to be able to create fake news article so that we could teach people how to spot unreliable news.
Original Conspiracy presentation
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The conspiracy theory my partner and I researched was the moon landing and it being faked. I personally always thought that the moon landing actually happened and it was not faked.
Researching this theory was interesting, so many people were so confident that the famous moon landing was false. In the end I came to the conclusion that the moon landing most likely did happen but I think it´s crazy how there is so much evidence that proves that it could maybe be false and that there definitely is a chance that it has been a fairly well kept secret. On the other hand I find it very unlikely that a secret this big could be kept because clearly many people would have bee involved in the process, and if it was actually fake I can guarantee that someone would have exposed it by now. |
Dr. P's hoax website
To start this project of Dr. P created a website and presented it to us, trying to make the team believe that our school was haunted. Unfortunately, we caught on really quickly. He first thing that made us believe this website was false, was the fact that it was published by weebly. This was strange because it's not often that a reliable news source is published by weebly. We also found it odd that the name of the author happened to be the same as someone Dr. P has worked with, but the picture was someone in a car dealership. We also found a lot of similarities between Dr. P's way of writing and the writing on the website. Long story short we figured it out.
Original hoax story
The original plan for this project was to create a hoax and convince the school of something that is false. To find our final hoax, we got into groups and created a story we could use to trick our peers. My partner and I adopted a story that was suggested by another peer and just made it more elaborate. We wrote about High Tech High becoming your legal parental guardian when you enter this school. To be entirely honest it wasn't a really believable story because I am sure students would be aware if they really did get ¨adopted" by High Tech, but it was certainly fun to write! It was a great way to practice creative writing and it was also a really great way to get us all ¨into" the project.
My story so far
After we found out that our original project plan wasn't going to work we took a journey outside to write and reflect on the parts of the project we did accomplish. I wrote a lot about my initial thoughts and how I felt during the experience we did have with the project.
Winstons police report
When we finally decided that we were going to focus on fake news and how to identify it. We read a short story and analyzed a picture from a fake death were, we had to figure out if the man who died's wife was telling the truth about the accident. In the story Queenie goes out, she invites her friends over for drinks. Queenie gets home and her friends arrive 10 minutes later. Queenie discovers her husband, Arthur dead at the bottom of the stairs. We had to using Queenies statement and the picture provided, if he slipped or was pushed. We did a similar thing for another story, where a man was shot in his home. Using the information we knew about Winston's case, we wrote news reports as if we were detectives. This sounds as if it has nothing to do with our project, but it really helped us a lot with analyzing things. Without this exercise, I think we would have a had a harder time with dissecting articles to make the decision if they are reliable or not.
"The biggest threat to journalism today" essay
After watching a few of Dan Rather's lessons on journalism and hearing what he though the biggest threat to journalism was, we wrote essays sharing what we believe the biggest threat is. I wrote about how without independent journalists, journalism wouldn't be the same. I mainly touched on how without these independent journalists we would never be hear all sides of the story, only what whoever owns the news source wants us to know. I still do agree with that because I feel like it is important to look at all sides of a situation before forming an opinion and that you aren't only believing what is shared out that follows your personal opinion.
Ad campaign for colette
A big part of "fake news" is native advertisement, which is could be sponsored content and is usually used to convince someone of buying something. So to have some practice with this for when we write our own fake news stories, we pretended to make an advertisement for a woman named Colette's vitamin pills. These pills supposedly would make you live to 300 years old. I unfortunately don't have a picture of the advertisement my group created but, what we did was we wrote the number 300 with pills as the zeros and wrote a little statement about how long it would let you live if you took them. One thing we did to make it more "sell-able" was we wrote about them being a limited supply only which typically draw in buyers attention.
Fake news Olympics story
To put our bologna detectors to the test, we made fake news stories to share with the other pod and they created some to share with us. My group and I decided to write about there being fish in Starbucks drinks, as a tribute to the creator since he loved marine life and the logo is a mermaid. I helped my team come up with the layout and the story. We all contributed bits and pieces to the story which is great because it made it be more layered in a way. Some red flags we included were we never added clear sources and the "article" was sponsored by coffee bean, a coffee competitor.
Final news story
Our final product for this project was fake news articles using red flags that we found out were commonly used in false articles. The article I wrote was about how Donald Trump was planning to change the name of the White house, to the Trump house. I was having an incredibly hard time finding a story to write about, but when Dr. P suggested I write about something about a white house name change, I knew I had to do it. Some of the red flags I used in my article are the website is fake, there were no clear sources, and a google search would instantly prove it false. I think that in my drafts the story stayed the same, but my red flags became more believable and it began to look like a real article which was good because we were going to test out our fake news articles with a group of 8th graders. The 8th graders pretty much instantly knew my article wasn't real. The reason why they got it so fast is that the said that if it was really an event that was going to happen, the teacher would have talked about it by now since their class focuses on current events. To revise my article for exhibition after talking to the 8th grader was that I just changed the date of the publishing to make it seem more recent so that it would look like knew information.
Exhibition experience
The vision for the exhibition was for it to be a cafe environment where guests could come in and read our article and snack, while they analyze the articles to find why they shouldn't be trusted. To achieve this we all had to be put into committees and work together to create a great exhibition. I was a part of the editing community, I revised articles and made sure that they were all ready to be presented to our parents, peers, and community members. I also got to staple all the articles together, which sounds like it would be boring, but I thought it was really fun! I was really proud of my work this exhibition and I'm really impressed that we managed to pull off the exhibition and make it look nice. The people I talked to at exhibition did mention how some articles were more realistic than others, and that it did tech them what to look out for when finding their news which is great. I feel like if I was doing this project again I would just make sure to make a real story and change the details to make it fake, rather than completely make it up, because those with a slight bit of truth tended to be the most believable.