How to sort fact from fiction
Year 6 to 10 students, parents, and teachers
Anyone can publish information on the Internet through a myriad of methods; social media, websites, pod- and vodcasts, ebooks, audiobooks, Wikipedia and many other means. So, how do we work out what information we can trust? The students of Mr Allsop’s class worked out an easy to remember acronym in the yet to be published Cyber Whispers - a fake news ghost story*.
R.A.P.P.E.R.
It is all you need to sort fact from fiction. You can apply it to any media piece both off- and online. Let’s see what the individual letters stand for.
R = Reputation - Who created it?
A = Audience - For Whom was it made?
P = Presentation - How (where) does it appear?
P = Purpose - Why was it made?
E = Effect - Who gains and who loses from it being published?
R = Real - How do you know this is true?
If you are serious, and don’t want to pass on to your social network or use mis- or disinformation in your schoolwork, use RAPPER. Then in the final ‘R’ step, compare with other sources, check the publishing date, look for grammatical errors and/or spelling mistakes and poor graphics? If it ticks all your boxes, you have done your homework and you can safely use the information and not contribute to the info junk that pollutes the cyber world.
*Team Savv-i in Cyber Whispers sets out to declutter the Internet, but gets all tangled up with a maniacal ghost who uses the endless possibilities of cyberspace to revive himself. It will be out on December 1st. You can pre-order the (e)book here.
Question: No question this time, but a great fake news game - Get Bad News
Casper Pieters PhD Dip Ed is an author and educator who uses adventure narratives to enliven the ICT curriculum for young people. www.casperpieters.com
