IN-PERSON: Applying Education

Abstract

We experience a shift in the media landscape as dramatic as the transition from oral to written storytelling. Over the last decade, the hybridization of information and entertainment into infotainment in legacy and social media, including innovations, from Adobe’s Voco to Deep Fakes, are escalating the challenge to uphold ethical principles of media creation and consumption. Now, no audiovisual media can be trusted as authentic. So, audiences must be able to decode the real from the dramatized has led to a crisis in media literacy education. A vaccine against Fake News is a Canadian web-based tool that addresses the prevalence of media that purports to be fact-based, coupled with the growing inability by media consumers to decipher fact from fiction on social media and other content aggregators. This tool will help students understand and explore the ways in which editors and directors manipulate facts in building ‘story.’ Borrowing from real-world narrative building and editing strategies used by media creators, students will explore various filmmaking techniques through written, video, and audio texts. By pulling the curtain back and revealing key storytelling techniques, and through their own hands-on video editing, A vaccine against Fake News offers students the ability to assess media critically and to develop a greater ability to separate fact from fiction. The project will equip students with an awareness of their own relationship to story, the way stories are constructed in non-fiction media, and the tactics used that prioritize story over factual reality. The result is an innovative, open access and experiential resource for the teaching of media literacy in High Schools across North America.