Overview for Instructors (“Misinformation and Biases Infect Social Media, Both Intentionally and Accidentally”)

The essay “Misinformation and Biases Infect Social Media, Both Intentionally and Accidentally” by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer can be found in 88 Open Essays on pages 117-122.

In this article, the authors argue that “three types of bias that make the social media ecosystem vulnerable to both intentional and accidental misinformation.”  The article includes effective graphics, the authors’ own research, and several links to studies that support their position.  Students can relate to social media and may “see” themselves in the text.  In short, the article illustrates the various ways to support a position.  The article includes outside research, the authors’ own research, and graphics.  It may pair well with “Why Do People Fall for Fake News?”

The following instructional activities, assignments, and documents are included for this reading.

 

Course Activities, Assignments, and Documents Goals Addressed
Analyzing and Answering Questions with Multiple Parts: A power point and activity to help the students annotate and analyze the directions for assignments (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)

How to Analyze a Writing Prompt and create a Strong Thesis Statement activity (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)

Understanding the Relationship between the Assignment and the Rubric (will need to be adapted to the directions/assignments for this particular module.)

 GOAL 1: Understanding Academic Writing Assignments
Vocabulary Preview: A list of challenging words and phrases from the text is identified so that students can build knowledge of vocabulary before reading the article.

Reading Process Activity: (1) This activity guides students through the reading process – previewing the article, actively reading and annotating the text, and reflecting on the meaning of the text and the reading process.   Emphasis is placed on using the title, headings, introduction, and conclusion to predict ideas in the text.

    Support activity – Finding Independent Clauses: This activity asks students to locate the independent clauses in sentences taken from the article in order to better understand the main idea of a sentence and how the dependent clauses and phrases relate to it.

Summary and Response Activity: This activity provides a set of guided questions to develop a summary and reading response to the article.  An example is provided to help with developing a response, as well as providing suggestions to start the writing process.

 GOAL 2: Read and understand college-level texts
Recognizing hedging language to express a point of view

Subject-verb agreement error correction activity

Using Noun Clauses to state your position

Finding Independent Clauses asks students to locate the independent clauses in sentences taken from the article in order to better understand the main idea of a sentence and how the dependent clauses and phrases relate to it.

Analyzing Text for Present Perfect asks students to locate present perfect, simple present, and simple past verbs and discuss the author’s choice of tense.

 

 GOAL 3: Develop Sophisticated Grammatical Structures
Vocabulary Preview: A list of challenging words and phrases from the text is identified so that students can build knowledge of vocabulary before reading the article.

Recognizing reporting verbs in the presentation of research findings

Identifying Structure in Argumentative Writing breaks down paragraphs to expose the structure of each one (background, problem, solution) and asks students to identify those three pieces of the remaining paragraphs.

 GOAL 4: Develop Fluency with Academic Vocabulary
Finding Claims and Support in Argumentative Writing shows students how to identify claims and their supporting evidence and then asks students to identify claims and support on their own.  It also asks students to click on the links to supporting evidence and respond to that evidence.

Support activity: Using Noun Clauses to state your position

Distinguishing between properly documented and plagiarized outside sources: Students will evaluate whether the content taken from the article has been used appropriately when documented in a sample student paper.

 GOAL 5: Strategies for Using Evidence in Academic Writing