 And welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. An online show covering a variety of library-related activities and topics. Both the broadcast live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But the show is recorded every week, so if you're unable to join us, you can always watch our recordings after the fact at your convenience. They are all listed on our website, and I'll show you where those recordings are at the end of today's show. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think may have interested in any of the topics that we have on the show, any of our upcoming shows, or our archives. Now Encompass Live premiered in January of 2009. So we've been on the air online for quite a long time now. So you will find a lot of our archives are old. Old topics, some previous topics that maybe are no longer up to date. I'm trying to just say, okay. But just look at the dates. Everything has a date on it so you'll be able to see when something was actually originally broadcast so that you can know when that information might be from. We do a variety of things here on Encompass Live. Book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of products and services. Basically anything that may be of interest to libraries, libraries of all types. Public, academic school, anything is available. We do have a Nebraska Library Commission staff sometimes do sessions on topics that we maybe want to share from here. But we do bring in guest speakers and that is what we have for this morning. On the line of us is Erin Painter. Good morning Erin. Good morning. Good morning. And she is from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, the Chris Library. There's a little north of Lincoln here. So she is coming in remotely to join us. I'm in Lincoln. For those of you in Nebraska, you know it's about 45 minutes away from each other. And she is going to tell us about a new program. Actually this is a session that I saw Erin present actually in the spring at our Nebraska Library Association, College and University section spring meeting. And it was actually at that point it was one of their lightning rounds that you did, correct? Yeah, it was about 10 minutes maybe, so quick and dirty. It was very, very quick. But I thought it was very interesting and especially with what's going on in the world today, it was very timely. And I wrote myself a note, ask her if she can expand this to an hour. Only to find out that you had actually already done that. So for our annual conference, so I invited her to come on the show to share it again. So I'm just going to hand over to you to take it away and tell us about how to choose our news. Yes, for sure. Okay, well, welcome to How to Choose Your News. Again, my name is Erin Painter. I'm a reference associate here at UNO Chris Library in Omaha. So in addition to fairly routine library duties, I'm also part of the team that is responsible for most of the comp to library instruction. So as a part of that library instruction, we developed this module concerning bias and fake news. And we also additionally developed a module surrounding information chaining. So what I want to talk about today is how we develop those modules and tweak the modules based on student assessments and our own, you know, collaboration so that they really addressed the needs of our students. And they also scaffolded very well with each other. So first let me tell you a little bit about the kind of demographic of students that we teach and the specific situation we're addressing with these modules. At our university, the second semester freshmen enrolled in comp to spend one week's worth of instruction in the library. During this time, they learn how to use library resources like the databases, the catalog, and physical and digital resources. But they also learn how to evaluate sources for quality. And this prepares them to write a major research paper, which is 8 to 10 pages in length generally. And our student demographic includes a good number of first generation students as well as a strong international student presence. Many of the students have never or rarely undertaken this large of a research project. And some of them have never even been to the library before we actually have this instruction with them and they spend their week in here. So essentially we are dealing with essential novices when it comes to information literacy. So, you know, these are the students that when I'm describing our experiences teaching this module, we mostly teach college freshmen. Although we do have some non-traditional students or those students who waited until their last semester to fulfill the requirement for graduation. Of course we see those. But I like to think that these strategies and the lessons that I'm going to describe can be adapted for just about any age group. And honestly, I don't think it's ever too early or too late to teach people how to be critical consumers of information. And that's essentially our goal with this module. So, every semester there are between 30 to 40 sections of Comp 2. Each section has around 15 to 20 students in it. And the sections occur either three times a week for 50 minutes each time, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Or twice a week, generally Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday, Thursday for 75 minutes for each session. And so we get them for one week's worth of instruction. So two 75-minute sessions or three 50-minute sessions. So it's a timeframe that we get to teach them how to use library resources, but also how to evaluate resources. We initially developed this module at the beginning of the spring semester 2017. So just about a year ago. And this semester, as we all might remember, started right on the heels of the November 2016 campaign cycle and election. And of course, all of the turmoil that came with that time. I know it seems like a lifetime since then, but only a year ago. The idea of fake news, as we know it today, was still fairly novel. So for me, at least, and I think for a lot of us, the election and fallout surrounding quote-unquote fake news and Russian meddling and things like that just really kind of took me by surprise, kind of blindsided me. And I guess I kind of took it for granted that people dug into sources to check for truth or veracity or check their sources. But the ease with which fake news could spread proved that obviously this is frequently not the case. I had similar feelings, and I think I wonder if a lot of that comes from our positions as librarians, because that's what we do. We trust nothing, and we research, and we find citations and primary sources, and it's just ingrained into our heads. And it's difficult when other people are not aware of it. Wait, when we were doing our tech test, you were like, you have 20 tabs open. Yeah, that's how I do things. And I think sometimes we forget that not everybody does that. I mean, obviously they don't, or else this fake news epidemic, I guess, wouldn't be so. It wouldn't exist, yeah. We would all have 20 tabs open. Yeah, it wasn't just concerning for me or our profession, but it was also a concern for the COMP2 instructors. So when we schedule instruction with these classes, we have an outline and activities, you know, a general way that we approach the class. But we can tailor these activities to suit the individual needs of the classes. So when we, in spring 2017, when we began asking instructors specifically what they wanted their students to take away from their week in the library. Of course they said, you know, how to use the databases, how to find sources, how to use all these resources that the library has. But they were starting to express, almost every one of them, starting to express concern that their students didn't understand what fake news was. Or really how to tell if a popular news source could be trusted and used in their research papers. So to kind of address these concerns, our team began tweaking our existing active learning activities and our handouts to address this epidemic of fake news and bias. So going into this, we did have two models in place for students to use to determine if a source was quote unquote good or quote unquote bad. We had the CRAP test and we also had the 5Ws. The CRAP test was developed by librarians, I believe in California and is fairly widely used by teachers and librarians for, you know, teaching information literacy and evaluating resources. CRAP, in case you're not aware, CRAP stands for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. And we had this infographic already made up going into actually the fall of 2016 and was created by one of our librarians here. And it's a really handy handout, if you will, and it definitely helped students when evaluating sources. It asks some pretty straightforward questions, you know, currency, when was it published, relevance, you know, does it relate to your topic, you know, authority who wrote it, is it accurate, and why are they writing it, right? We also had a handout worksheet called the 5Ws. It wasn't in this form at the time, but the 5Ws, of course, is, you know, who, what, when, where, and why. And it's a little, it's pretty similar to the CRAP test and kind of had the same intention of helping students evaluate the sources that they encounter. Some instructors and some students preferred one model over the other, but, but again, they were very similar. The problem was sometimes these fake news articles or extremely biased articles would pass these tests with these students. So it could be a quote-unquote what we might consider as information professionals bad source, but for the student, when they asked these questions about the source, it was passing the test for them. So what we decided to do. That's interesting. Yeah, you would say, I mean, and I think, I think one of the, I don't know things we need to be aware of is and I kind of talk about this and a little bit later that we kind of take for granted some previous knowledge when coming into this, right? That this idea of thinking critically about sources, we take it for granted and these seem like pretty straightforward questions, right? But some tests, for some students, some of these fake articles or biased articles would pass this test for them. And so we felt like we needed to tweak it a little bit. So we decided to tweak the 5Ws to kind of try to prompt students and novice researchers to ask more nuance and probing questions when evaluating these sources in the current news climate. So we kept the crap test as it was, but we modified the 5Ws. The 5Ws test still exists as a worksheet for students to fill out as they're evaluating their articles. But originally it asked pretty straightforward questions like who wrote the article, when was it published, right? Kind of like the crap test. But rather than just asking, you know, who wrote the article, we decided to include questions that prompted students to ask who benefits from this information. Who have you heard discuss this? What are verifiable facts? What does the language tell you about the author's opinion? When would you use this article as evidence? Where does the site get its funding? Where are they getting their evidence? Or why does the article use the language or the images that it does? And why is that relevant? And we added these questions on the worksheet and highlighted them to point out that they were meant to, you know, identify bias as well as quality, right? So when we would introduce the worksheet, we would point out the highlighted questions that were intended to help them determine bias. We also decided that it would be kind of cool to mirror the infographic we already had for the crap test. And so I, you know, edited that infographic and made it the 5Ws so that is it crap or is it biased? And then I created a two-sided PDF that we now print off and then cut down into bookmarks to hand out to the class during the activity. So they can take it with them. It's a little more sturdy. It's not just another piece of paper, right, that they just lose. Some of the instructors here will use the worksheet and the bookmark. I don't always use the worksheet. It depends on the learner. It depends on the class, right? Like, for example, when ESL instructors bring their classes in, I will definitely use the worksheet because, of course, there's some, you know, language barriers there and communication barriers there. And I want to make sure that they have as many avenues towards understanding, you know, information literacy as possible. So we have the PDF. We have the questions and we tried it out in class. We had a lesson plan called Find the Faker, which was adapted to suit our needs originally from a lesson plan found online. Here are all my passive voice there. Unfortunately, no one remembers where we got the original lesson plan. But when I came into this and was adapting it, we had already adapted it to account for our students' needs at the time. But we then adapted it further to account for fake news. So what we do is divide the class into groups and distribute articles. And at the time it was just three to four articles, but one of which was completely made up. They weren't necessarily about the same subject. They weren't necessarily, you know, that regimented. But the point was Find the Faker. Find the one that was completely made up. So based on this plan, I tweaked it a little bit to account for this environment. And the learning outcome was students should be able to determine the viewpoint and bias of source material. So rather than random articles with a fake one thrown in, I chose articles on the same subject or the same event, and then pulled from popular news sources from the far left, from the far right, from the center, like Associated Press or Reuters, and then one that was completely fake. For the left at the top you can see there, I was pulling from Bipartisan Report, which is not as bipartisan as the name might imply. For the right, the second one you see there, Return to Normalcy, is from The Daily Caller, which is, again, a far right website. And for the center, I pulled from Associated Press because they're pretty obviously reliable for that. And then for completely made up, originally I was using CBSNews.com.co, which we, of course, all know is an indication of a fake site. I have, this semester I have changed, and I'll get to that a little bit later, I've changed where I go for these news sites because bad websites change and they get worse. And so, anyway, I'll go into that a little bit later. But this is what I was using in the spring of 2017, these websites. And so I found four articles on the same topic. The examples I'm using here are about the transgender bathrooms and transgender rights that were very, very current at the time. And I tried to use a topic that was relevant or current or politically charged. And to frame the activity, we touched on kind of what bias means, right, and where we see bias. And most students, through this guided group discussion, were able to identify what bias was, right. It's an opinion, it's your personal ideas, your personal beliefs. And we would get to the conclusion that bias was everywhere. And then we distributed the articles to three to four groups and gave them time to read the articles and discuss it in their groups to decide if the article was left bias, right bias, not bias, or completely fake. This is a picture of one of our instruction labs. And you can see this room is especially conducive to group work. As the students discuss their articles in groups, we circulate around the room, continuing to ask questions to facilitate conversation between the students. And then we came back together as a large group and discussed each article. And we pull it up on the projector and have each group kind of talk about their article and what they found about it, what they found out about it, what they decided together about it. And this activity was fairly successful, even in its infancy in the spring, but we eventually ran into a problem. At the end of the activity in one of the classes, after these classes, we always kind of talk, especially when we're trying new things out, we all talk about what worked, what didn't, how it went in class. And one of my colleagues, you know, when she asked the class at the end of the activity, if there were any thoughts or questions, a student raised their hand and asked, what do you mean by left and right bias? And this really made us kind of realize like I was talking before about, you know, we're taking this knowledge for granted, right? We had kind of assumed too much awareness or knowledge about politically biased language and how it's used or even political beliefs. It also kind of made us wonder how many students didn't ask the question in previous sessions, because, you know, some students don't want to ask questions in class or feel self-conscious about that. And so even if they didn't understand what we meant by left and right bias, maybe they weren't getting the most out of this activity that they could. So we decided we needed to frame the activity a little differently. So what we started doing was beginning the activity not only about, you know, what bias is, opinion or personal beliefs, but also about the vocabulary of political bias. So we started with brainstorming words. This picture is kind of an example of a pretty typical example of the result of this brainstorming session. So we write left on one side of the board and right on the other side. And then we ask questions like, what words do you hear the left use to describe themselves? What words do you hear the right use to describe themselves? How do they describe each other? What are their stances on some hot button issues right now, like abortion or gun control? And sometimes it was hard to get the discussion going. I think partly because some students are a little reluctant to use, you know, the insulting words or the hard words, those that really bias language for fear of, I don't know, making someone angry or setting someone right. It is a lot of difficult topics and you don't know who's in the room and you worry about offending them. Right, exactly. And again, it speaks to that bias, right? We have to set aside our own because we want everyone to just have a discussion about the language and feel comfortable doing that. So what we tend to try to do, you know, as we're starting this conversation with these difficult words and these difficult topics, we kind of issue a sort of disclaimer, right? So I tend to say something along the lines of, you know, when we say these words, we're not talking about any one person in this classroom or anywhere else. We're speaking in generalities about groups of people so that we can be aware of this kind of language and what it means. That's just so we can identify the bias, not saying anything good or bad about either side. You know, this is a classroom. We're having a discussion about language so that we can all be more sophisticated consumers of information. And eventually, students would come up with the target words we were looking for and would identify, you know, general positions. Each side takes on some key issues. And you can see on this slide, this is, again, like a prime example of how we visually represent the conversation with the students as we have the conversation. And so then this word bank is something that they can, you know, refer to as they're analyzing their articles. So armed with this word bank, they were then given the articles. Sometimes the class would really get into this conversation and would be saying words faster than I can write them down. Other times they take a little bit of coaxing, you know, every class has its own kind of dynamic. And so sometimes, you know, I'll use the bad words, right, just to kind of get them going. But we always got, you know, something along the lines of what you see here. So then we put the students into the groups and ask them to kind of scan the articles looking for the language being used. We encourage them to read it like they read their own news feeds, right? Do it quickly. See, just look for these words. Look for how is it making you feel initially? What does that say about the article's bias? What does it say about your own bias, right? And this worked much better. And students were more often than not able to accurately identify the bias of their article. We also took the opportunity when we were as a larger group discussing the fake news article, the one that was actually made up to talk about that term, fake news, okay? Fake news as we understand it as sophisticated consumers of information and how the term quote-unquote fake news gets used now. We made it a point to say, you know, fake news for us as we're doing research is something that's actually made up and not based on any verifiable facts. But the way fake news gets used now is to dismiss what very well may be very valid information but it goes against your own beliefs. It goes against your own bias. And so if you dismiss it as fake news, then you don't have to actually address the facts within. And so we tried to take that moment, that teaching moment to identify how we would view fake news as opposed to how it's portrayed now. Let's see. So we would wrap up the activity with steering them to this website that I love called allsides.com. It's a wonderful website. I'll talk about it again later. And what it does is it lists websites and rates them for left and right bias as well as for neutrality. So obviously it's not a comprehensive list because who can do that? But it does have most of the usual suspects. It's got all the mainstream media, but it's also got a lot of websites that I never would have even encountered in my life. So it's a pretty extensive kind of catalog of websites and a catalog of their biases. So introducing them to this site allows them as they're on their own and not in the controlled library environment. If they encounter a popular news site and they have a question about it, this is a really easy resource for them to kind of check themselves if there's that question. Is this a good site? Is this bias? I don't know. I can't tell. They can go to allsides.com and see what they say about it, and it is a reliable source for that. We were always very explicit at the beginning and the end of the activity about why we were doing the activity. This way, as we're doing the activity, we kind of frame the activity, and at the end of it, students are very aware of why this information will be relevant to them. As they conduct their research and as they go through future projects or as they go through life. This is very, very valuable information and these are valuable skills for them to be more critical consumers of information. So that is how the activity kind of evolved over the spring of 2017, and we did receive a lot of positive student feedback. Much of the evolution of the activity, like I think I mentioned before, was student driven and was based on their assessments of the activity. Many students reported that they had no idea how pervasive bias was, and as you can see on that top left post it, if you look at that, they realized they may have been being influenced without realizing it. That one on the top left is actually one of my favorite ones because they actually took the time to draw an emoji. They were also angry, but smiling, I don't know. We got a lot of feedback like that, and we always ask what was awesome about this, what was great about this, what was the most helpful thing, and what would you improve? Having more time being one of the negative feedbacks that we had was they wanted more time. They wanted more time to talk about these things, but we just don't have that time necessarily. One of the things that we heard too was they were super excited about allsides.com, and really, really expressed a lot of enthusiasm about being able to quickly check to see if a new site was biased or not. Not having enough time is hopefully a blessing in disguise that you would hope that they would continue the conversation outside of the class, outside of the specific session, because they had too much to say, and hopefully they'll continue to carry it beyond your specific classroom walls. Planting the seeds, right? Yes, exactly. In one of my classes, I actually had a student who I could tell by the end of the week, she was a very sophisticated consumer of information, and she was very well informed and enthusiastic about it. And her feedback was that she would have rather spent more time in the databases than on this activity, since she already knew how to do all this. But she did also say that she understood that not everyone was as sophisticated as her, which I think we're seeing, right? And so she understood why we did it. But yeah, the most negative information that we got was they wanted more time to discuss or debate, and again, we just don't have time for that. And that's not really our role necessarily for this week, right? We're just trying to get them started and give them some tools. But it was overall very, very positive. Now what? You know, fake news, everyone's talking about it. It's getting to be the summer, and we're all kind of getting a little battle weary with everything that we're seeing and the way this news is getting used. And we really needed to kind of make sure we were still keeping students active in being critical consumers of information. At the same time, over the summer, the director of our department research and instruction services, the instruction librarian and I began doing assessments of a sampling of these papers that are the end product kind of that comp to semester that 8 to 10 page paper. So the three of us read 50 anonymized papers to evaluate how students were accessing and using sources for this research paper. And one thing that we noticed was that rather than clicking on hyperlinks in popular news sources to check and see where the authors were getting evidence, you know how I was talking about earlier I have 20 tabs open at the same time. They weren't doing that. They were stopping their dig at the popular source and frequently biased source. They would have found a good statistic or a fact, but they weren't taking that extra step to get to the primary evidence. And so we decided to incorporate an information chaining activity as a part of this bias activity to demonstrate how one piece of evidence or one event could generate multiple different news stories, exhibiting different biases. Right. They could how how how one event or one news news item can be spun using language and images and things like that. So over the summer of 2017, I kind of developed and test drove with a summer comp to session and information chaining activity as a follow up to that bias exercise. What I did is I used an article that I actually seen used in one of the anonymous papers we read over the summer. So this is, you know, real life, these this level of students accessing these popular sources, a real life, you know, piece of evidence that they think was good, right. And this particular article is from a website called Think Progress. And it's an article about how much fast food prices would rise if the minimum wage were raised to $15 an hour. Think Progress, if you don't know, is kind of a liberal think tank, although it's very, very well respected. And the article itself is well written, doesn't use too much inflammatory language. It doesn't have any real overt bias, right. So it was easy to see why this article would pass the crap test and even the 5Ws because it's not really a bad source. But there's a better source because if you look in that first paragraph, there's a hyperlink that takes you to the evidence they use to generate their story. So in the activity, what I did is I had them all come to this website and ask them to look at that first paragraph and click on that hyperlink and tell me where it went. When they click on the hyperlink, it took them to the article you see there at the top. And we discussed as a class exactly what this is. What is this article? And would come to the conclusion, we came to the conclusion that it was a press release from Purdue University about a study that they had recently published about the cost of raising the minimum wage. I then asked the students to Google the headline from the press release. The second image you see below is the Google search results when you Google the headline. And I pointed out some of the bias language that you can see in the headlines. And, you know, we discussed, again, how one press release generated all of these different news stories. And I asked them to go back to the press release and scroll to the bottom. And at the bottom of the press release page is the title and the abstract of the original study. So, you know, up to this point, we've talked about abstracts, we've talked about academic articles, we've had those discussions already, right? And so, I asked the class of the several things that we've just looked at, what do you think is the best source, right? And generally, by this point, as we've done the activity, but even this first test drive, they came up with the answer, the original study. And so then I capped it off with asking, so how are you going to find the full article? And, of course, they respond at the library. So I had them copy and paste the title of the actual study into our library catalog and boom, there it was, right? Perfect. Nice little bow on top of everything. And so, we would have, you know, kind of a little, I don't know, debriefing. We had a little debriefing about digging into hyperlinks to get to the quote-unquote best source. And the importance of using, and the importance and usefulness of using primary sources in your research paper, because if you're using the primary source, you can put your own spin on it. You can use it in the way that you want to make your argument, right? Instead of just taking someone else's bias for granted. So overall, initially, even in that first test drive, the activity was successful. And many of the students in the summer class reported that they had never thought to click on hyperlinks to check the evidence of news articles they read online, which is absolutely terrifying. Wow. Yeah, that's stunning. I mean, the Internet is full of links. That's what you're supposed to do is click on everything, isn't it? Absolutely. And I eventually, over the semester, I began to compare the hyperlinks to a worksided page or a references page. This is their evidence. So check it, you know? And I think this lack of checking hyperlinks is probably one of the reasons the fake news epidemic is so rampant, right? People just aren't digging. They aren't digging. And oftentimes, they're just reading the headline and sharing without reading the articles. That's a huge thing that people actually admit to, which is stunning. But they just believe the title, the new fast food minimum wage study, is completely wrong. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Daily signal. That's another good right wing one. The other ones here that are just a study calculates it, which is more of a just objective. Here's just a thing. Go read it yourself, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Just looking at it. And so if somebody feels like raising the minimum wage is bad and they see new fast food minimum wage study is completely wrong, they might just share that, right? Without looking at the study, you know? And certain headlines and titles you want, you tweak these, I assume this is something mentioned, they tweak them to get your attention. Exactly. And clickbait. Yeah, clickbait or even just make the wording more of over the top. Yeah, this is completely wrong. Or, oh my God, the prices are going to skyrocket because of the raising, you know? And then people are going to click on that more often than the produce study calculates. Exactly. This is going to draw an academic sounding, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And again, that's why we ask them to look at like the funding of a site. You know, are they funded by click-throughs, right? Or is it, where are they, why are they publishing this? Why are they using this headline? You know, asking these questions. We really try to get them to be asking those questions as opposed to just blindly receiving information. So because it was so successful over the summer and because we had that kind of feedback that people weren't thinking to click on hyperlinks, we decided to incorporate this activity with the BIAS module as a part of the Comp2 instruction in the fall. So, you know, we do have a lot of ground to cover in the week of library instruction. We can't do everything in a week. And some of the classes meet for 75 minutes, two times a week. But some meet for 50 minutes, three times a week. And the BIAS activity alone that I kind of described earlier when we go through talking about BIAS and talking about language of the left and the right and then going through assessing the articles, this can take up to 45 minutes depending on the group. It can take longer. And so in the 50 minute class sessions, it can be a little tight getting that information chaining activity in. Sometimes what I would do is, you know, the BIAS discussion ran a little long rather than like having them go through the information chaining with me, and having that more in-depth conversation. I'd truncate a little bit and just show that you model the behavior, right? This is what I do. This is what you should do, right? And so then instead of it taking 10 or 15 minutes, it takes more like five. So, I think it's important and I think that it scaffolds really well with the BIAS activity because we've had that conversation about BIAS language. And then so when you get this, you know, Google search result where, you know, new fast food minimum wage is completely wrong that we've had that conversation about BIAS language and they can see, you know, immediately from the headline like, man, I don't want to use that as a source, right? And so they have that context kind of already. Because, again, as it's terrifying that nobody uses, not nobody, but they frequently don't use hyperlinks. We wanted to kind of try to get this information chaining activity to a broader audience. And so we expanded, I expanded it into a workshop as part of our Lunch and Learn undergraduate workshop series. This is a series that's been developed by my colleague Monica Maher over the last several semesters. And the goal is aimed at addressing those specific needs of undergraduate researchers, undergraduate students. They're 30-minute workshops and they are done on Fridays from 12.15 to 12.45. And students bring their lunch if they want and we provide coffee and candy, students love free food. And then we teach them some specific research strategies. And so I extended the activity to span the 30 minutes. I created a PowerPoint and I made sure to kind of do a little more in-depth conversation about the importance of clicking through hyperlinks. And I did frame the activity in the workshop with a discussion about BIAS because it's important to, I think it's important to scaffold it that way. You have to talk about BIAS before you can really talk about digging into these sources and these hyperlinks. And it wasn't nearly as in-depth. That BIAS conversation wasn't nearly as in-depth. It was just more of kind of a framing because again only had half an hour. And then we do the information chaining kind of activity. The workshop itself wasn't very well attended. It was kind of early in the semester. But the students who did attend were very engaged with the activity. And I received a lot of positive feedback from them. And so we do have plans to kind of incorporate, try to do this workshop again in the spring and maybe push it a little more so that more people will come. And more people will become better consumers of information. But we of course are always evolving. We're self-assessed. We give each other feedback. We take student assessment very, very seriously. And we're very active in seeking that feedback from our students so that we can honor their time and we can meet their needs and really maximize that time that they have in the library. We also observe each other teaching and offer feedback. We collaborate with each other after classes to discuss what's working, what's not. And this is how we can kind of tweak and adjust this even mid-semester. Kind of some strategies and activities and framing throughout the semester. Over the fall 2017 semester, so a few issues did come up. One problem we encountered was, and actually, excuse me, I encountered this in class because I didn't think to check my own links. The creator of the .com.co websites passed away. And so those sites are no longer a good resource for finding the fake news articles. And I went to the website and kind of turned it into a teaching moment like, well, if you can't get back to the article, that might not be a good site. Yeah, it's not like some known site like an AP or something that does archive historically everything. Right, exactly. That means maybe you don't want to use that site. I did also, when using the AP article, so I did a bank around one of the subjects I did with the Hurricanes. And I had compiled my bank, my articles very early on in the news cycle. And when you go to AP, the same website, the same link, had a different headline and the students got confused. And so that, again, was a teaching moment. Okay, so this is the Associated Press. They're a news wire. And it's going to adapt and change as the news changes. And then we have a conversation about news wires, which was also really cool. But the guy who came up with the .com.co website, cbsnews.com.co, are now just a bunch of ads. Those websites are just ads and you can't get back to those articles really. That's what tends to happen when things lose their original ownership, yeah. Yes, they just become ad sites. Not that fewer fake news sites is a bad thing, but I had to find new sites to get my fake news from, which is entertaining or frustrating, depending on my mood. But I'm always updating our bank of articles, so what I'll do is take screenshots and then compile them into a PDF file. So then I can share it with my colleagues easily. It's easily stored. And it also allows me to kind of cut out the ads and the title of the website, because we really want them to be thinking about the language and the images being used initially, before they really start digging into the actual website. And I like to cover a variety of subjects. Like, as you can see on this slide, that headline, even hurricanes can be politicized. And in fact, this article is actually from a conspiracy website and it fooled a lot of students. This article itself, because, yeah, because... Hold on. No, I know. It's fake information, but it's buried in biased language. So they would say, oh, it's right biased. And I'm like, well, yes, but also it's also not based in fact, you know. It's the plot of a movie. You've probably seen this movie. You need something, that apocalyptic weather movie? Yeah, 2012. Which is coming on. But, yeah, this one fooled them shockingly enough and terrifyingly enough. It would fool them more often than other fake news articles. Like I said, they would identify the bias, but they couldn't always identify it as fake. But, yeah, covering a variety of subjects also lets us discover things like this, but also choose something appropriate for the group we're teaching. So we only spend a week with them, but we can generally get a pretty good read on the group dynamic. By the time we do this bias activity, because we do it at the end, it's like the last activity of the library instruction. And so some groups you can kind of tell won't be as receptive to more polarizing news, like the transgender bathrooms or... I tend to steer away from abortion because it's just so... I don't want to cliche, right? And also it can be really emotionally charged. So I'll have one like about hurricanes, okay, right? Which is really climate change. So we have, you know, transgender bathrooms, the indictments of, you know, Paul Manafort, etc., some about gun control. But really you can find bias around anything. So it's pretty easy to find some good articles to use for our classes. Some of my favorite go-to sites, although if I need a fresher, I'll just check out allsides.com and look for, you know, far left and far right, and sift through those websites. But my favorite conspiracy site, and it's where I got that hurricane article, is naturalnews.com. It's highly entertaining if you want to check that out just, you know, for fun. It's pretty... It's like making sure you're reading it with an awareness of what you're reading, yes. Exactly, yes. I mean it's just, it's almost worth it just to be like, people read this and believe it and what? It's pretty juicy on the conspiracy fake news front. My favorite right bias news source is National Review, which is a pretty well-known site, but it's not always well-known for its bias. I also use Daily Caller for my right bias news, but it's not as well put together as a site. So National Review is a little more nuanced and a little more challenging for them to figure it out. My favorite left bias news sources are Mother Jones or The Nation. Because again, the bipartisan report, kind of like the CBSnews.com.co sites is really... I don't know what happened there, but it's terrible anymore, and it's pretty easy to tell it's not a good source. So we like to challenge them a little more. And then of course, I rely on the social media press or Reuters for that center line. So that's how we have been teaching this to our students at UNO. This is how we've been addressing this epidemic of fake news. And I think that our lesson plan and materials really could be adapted for any audience. Depending on the articles you use and the way you frame the conversation. Yeah, I was noticing that as you're going through. I was a little concerned, it might not be the right word, but that this would be very much for academic libraries, universities, colleges. But no, you've got this set up that anybody, any library could use it. If a public library or a school library wanted to do a session on this for their students or their patrons, it would work. I just wanted that handout, the one with you did the bookmark or the two-sizer thing, that that would be an awesome thing for everybody to borrow. Yeah, yeah. Actually, my stepmother is the director of the library in Glenwood, Iowa. And I've shared just over coffee and things like that, so what we've been doing and she's like, I'm stealing that. I said, please do. Everybody should know this stuff. I think public libraries, I think school libraries at any level could adapt this, you know, being aware of your population, your patrons, their needs. You can frame all of this and scaffold it in kind of the same way and have maybe those more in-depth conversations, right, in public libraries or in school libraries where we can't have that here because our main goal is use these resources and evaluate them and use them well, please. We can't really get into that debate or get into those deeper conversations, but I think that you can in public libraries and you can even in school libraries, right? And because students, college students aren't the only ones susceptible to this biased or fake news. It's everywhere. And everyone of any age, you know, like I said, you're never too young or too old to figure out how to be a better consumer of information. No matter what side you're on, you can form informed opinions about issues that are based in fact, right? To be able to think for ourselves is very empowering. And I think it's empowering for our students and our patrons to be able to think for themselves, right? To be able to know that they're coming from an informed stance and to know when they're being lied to, to know when they're being deceived, you know? So if anyone wants any of these materials, I'm happy to share lesson plans or the PDFs or news article banks, my email is right there at the end. So if you shoot me an email, I can send you the files. I've got them as PDFs or Word docs. And I will be happy to share this so that you too can steal from us as we all steal from each other and use things and borrow things and adapt it so that more people are getting on board with being informed citizens to form those opinions. Yeah, if there are any questions. Let's get more of them out there and spread this knowledge. Please. Share it with other people who weren't able to attend your sessions. What did you say? Word of mouth or... Spreading the seat, that's what you said something about. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. So awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much, Erin. Does anybody have any questions? Nobody typed anything in during this session, but if you do, you can type it into your GoToWebinar, the question section of your GoToWebinar interface, and I can pass that on to Erin to answer if you have anything right now. We are a little past 11 o'clock, but that's okay. We will go as long as we can. That's okay. We started a few minutes after 10. This is okay. If you have any questions, we'll make sure we stay on so that you can get them answered. Yeah, yeah. But I'll mention while we're waiting to see if anybody does want to type anything in. The recording of this will be done probably later today, and if you're available on our website, I will email all of you that. This presentation, Erin, if you want to send me, I think we're talking about a link or the PowerPoint of it, whichever works for you. Yep, yep. And I will post it along with the... Yeah, whichever works for you, wherever you have it posted or wherever. So that the actual presentation with all the good URLs and everything that you had on there would also be available to everybody. For sure. Yep. Afterwards, no problem. All right. So it doesn't look like anybody is desperately typing anything in. So I suppose we will... I guess we'll officially... We can officially wrap it up for today. You do have Erin's email address there if you do want to contact her with any other questions or comments or thoughts you have. Yeah, do you think it's something later? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Or if you want her advice on how to do one of these sessions at your library, whether it's academic or public or school, wherever, she definitely would be... I'm putting you out there, would be available. More than happy. Yeah. All right. All right. Oh, somebody is typing. Thank you Erin and others for such a great presentation. And then a comment. Where is the emoji of a smiling face? We don't have emoji functionality built into this GoToWebinar software. It's a little too much for that. But that's okay. We get the point. All right. I am going to pull presenter control over to my screen now. Great. So wrap up today. So thank you very much, Erin, for being here with us today and presenting. And thank you everyone for attending. As I said, the session will be posted onto our website. This is our main Encompass Live website, Nebraska.gov. If you Google us, your search engine of choice, we are so far the only thing called that out there. So you should find us. Our current or upcoming shows are here, but right below that is a link to the archives. And this is where at the very top of this list will be the most recent session. So this was last week's show. We've got recording and presentation later today. Today's show will be added to the top of our list there. And everyone who attended today or was registered for today's session will automatically get an email from me letting you know when it is available. So I hope you join us for next week's show, which is the Best New Teen Books of 2017. That would be in the opinion of Sally Snyder, the Library Commissions Coordinator of Children and Young Adult Library Services, and Jill Annas, who is a school librarian at our Grandview Middle School in Elkhorn, Nebraska. So they will have some book talks on new titles specifically for teens that may be using your library, whether it's school or public. So definitely a register for that one. You'll also notice there is a follow-up one in the first session for January 2018. Sally will be with us to talk about children's books. Same idea, but for younger children. So sign up for any of those shows. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. If you click here, we've got our links all over the site. It will pop you over to our Encompass Live Facebook page, where you post notifications of things to keep people up to speed. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show. We have notices of when new shows are coming, when the recordings are being made available. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do give us a like on Facebook and keep up with what we are doing over there. That wraps it up for this morning's show. Thank you very much, everyone, for attending, and we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.