Dear friends,

As we line up for our Covid-19 vaccinations, there’s another vaccine we should all be taking – one that will inoculate us against the sort of misinformation that accelerated the spread of coronavirus in the first place.

Public Editor is an online community empowering anyone to improve the news ecosystem, and become a more discerning reader. Our team of volunteers assess each news article’s reasoning, sources, rhetoric, and evidence. Then, Public Editor creates a layer of information over each news article, including an overall 0-100 credibility score and specific labels showing readers where misinformation or mistakes appear in the article. (You can get an idea of what that looks like by clicking here.)

We’d love for you and your students/group to consider joining our team! To make that easy, we’ve developed a curriculum plan which you can use to engage any group in practices of critical thinking, reading, and online engagement. 

By helping us administer a "News Vaccine", you’ll be encouraging more people to take increasing responsibility for the quality of the content they read, share, and like. And with your help, Public Editor’s community will someday grow to include millions of newsreaders and many thousands of volunteers doing their part to ensure that misinformation is always identified wherever it appears. 

The Curriculum Plan below includes brief instructional videos for your students/group, allowing you to lead two 30-45 minute blocks of time (without further planning). Since your students/group have almost certainly considered the misinformation or "fake news" problem, they are likely to enjoy the discussions and the 40 minutes of practice work introducing them to the Public Editor system. (Please feel free to improvise your own discussions about Public Editor, media literacy, or misinformation if you find that our guide does not fit your classroom.) We, of course, will be extremely grateful to learn from your students’ feedback about the system, which we will collect with a 5-10 minute survey at the end of the curriculum.

If you and your students/group have any interest in news literacy, fake news, editorial standards, or the improvement of any of these, we think you’ll enjoy this "News Vaccine.” If nothing else, you will be part of the historic moment when humans begin using the Internet cooperatively to address the age-old challenge of misinformation.

Thank you for taking this shot in the arm,

Nick Adams, Ph.D.

Founder & Chief Scientist, Goodly Labs

Curriculum Plan – The News Vaccine

1. Discuss the fake news problem (8-15 minutes): 

Questions for class:

1. How big is the “fake news” or media misinformation problem?

   • How many people are participating in it or affected by it?

     • ~2 billion amateur “publishers”/”editors” on social media

     • ~4 billion news readers

2. How did the misinformation crisis come about?

   • Fake news as a longstanding phenomenon

   • But, amplified and more polarizing now because so many of us can serve as amateur publishers

3. How does the problem impact our democracy?

   • Consequences of poor information on voters’ abilities to make informed decisions

   • It can erode trust in institutions and each other

4. Who is responsible for the problem? And who can solve it?

   • Media?

   • Social media companies?

   • Social media users?

   • Public?

   • Government?

2. Introduction to a potential solution that empowers public volunteers to take responsibility and (substantially) solve the problem. (10 minutes)

1. Watch: Introduction to the Public Editor collective intelligence system (2 minute video)

2.  Instructor introduces the system:

   • Describe the system as a platform that brings people together with diverse backgrounds to critically analyze and identify particular problems in news articles, which leads to a credibility score for each article vetted by Public Editor users.

   • Optional: Instructor’s impression of the system and how it might be relevant to course content (to do this, we recommend you review the introductory videos and try a task or two before class so you can answer student questions).

3. Introduce Public Editor tasks: (10 minutes)

1. Create an account with Public Editor (use Google Chrome)

2. Watch the specialist training video (3 minutes)

3. Instructor gives an overview of the specialist task(s) that seem most relevant to your classroom and the class watches the training video together. Choices are:

   1. Language Evaluation (this is most relevant for English, civics, social studies, or journalism classrooms)

   2. Evidence Evaluation (this is most relevant for science or research methods classrooms)

   3. Probabilistic Reasoning Evaluation (this is relevant for any classroom, since probabilistic reasoning involves reasoning about language, math, science, and society).

   4. Reasoning Evaluation (this is most relevant for critical thinking, logic, philosophy, psychology, or journalism classes)

4. Have students do 2-5 tasks, depending on how much time you want them to put into it (~15-40 minutes). This can be done either as homework (since individuals tend to work at varying speeds) or in class. Be sure everyone uses Google Chrome.

Language Tasks:

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Languagev1.1/task/4023

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Languagev1.1/task/4024

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Languagev1.1/task/4025

Evidence Task:

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Evidencev1/task/4022

Reasoning Tasks:

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Reasoningv1/task/4027

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Reasoningv1/task/4028

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Reasoningv1/task/4029

Probability Task:

https://pe.goodlylabs.org/project/Covid_Probabilityv1/task/4026

5. Review and Discussion (~20 minutes)

1. What did you notice when doing the tasks? How did the questions make you think differently about the news article?

2. Why is it difficult to distinguish reliable information from misinformation?

3. Why does the internet make misinformation more difficult to manage?

4. How can democratic, crowdsourcing solutions like Public Editor help address the current misinformation crisis?

5. What can we do as individuals to help reduce the spread of misinformation?

6. Could a tool like this be used to tackle other, similar problems?

7. Are there other ways citizens might team up through the internet to make a positive impact?

6. Have students complete Feedback Survey (5-10 minutes)