Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to lesson three of gaining support for a cause.

I'm Ben and this lesson is all about the credibility of sources.

Now, all you'll need for this lesson is your computer and a web browser.

And other than that, you need to clear away any distractions that you might have, whether that be a mobile phone or a TV off in the background.

So if you can find a nice quiet place to work and when you're ready, let's get started.

Okay, so in this lesson, you will check digital content for credibility and trustworthiness, and then we're going to use techniques to be able to check if a source is trustworthy.

So let's get started.

Now, I have a question for you first of all, so let me just move on to this slide, so my question is, who can add information to webpages? Is it A, anybody who wants to? Is it B, only people who have been approved by an authorised person such as the government or an internet service provider? Or is it C, anybody, as long as they have the technical knowhow, for example, being able to programme websites and knowing how to set up a web server.

Okay, so hopefully it got an answer when you had now.

So think about, is it A, B or C? I'd like to shout out an answer to me after three.

So A, B or C, so three, two, one, is? it's A.

Now who got A? You might've thought C because maybe to post information to a webpage, you need to know a little bit about how to maybe make or code websites or at least have the technical know how to publish a website and own a web server.

So that's actually not the case, the answer is anybody who wants to.

I'm sure maybe you have even posted stuff on the internet.

For example, have you ever posted something to a social media platform? That's an example of posting something to the internet that anybody might be able to read.

So if that is the case, what implications does this have for the credibility of information that you might come across on the internet? And what I'm trying to say that is if anybody can post information on the internet, anybody who wants to, does that mean that we can believe and trust everything that we read on the internet? Now, the answer hopefully is screaming out to you that it's obvious that up to you.

If that's the case, then absolutely not, no, we can't believe everything that we read on the internet if anybody can post things.

But although we know this, what we need is to be equipped with the right skills to be able to help us determine what is valid information and what is not valid information.

So on that note, I have four tips for you on how to do that.

So my first tip, I know you'd like to keep these in your mind because actually we are going to use these tips later on in this lesson.

So one of the techniques we can use when evaluating the trustworthiness of a source is to check the author and the source.

Now it's not uncommon of you to come across it, like a headline grabbing statistic.

And here's one for you on the screen that says, "My study found that people who live in Western Australia "are twice as happy as those who live in Eastern Australia." And that's by Professor Bruce, of the university of East Broughton.

Now, when I read that I'm thinking, well, it's interesting.

I wonder why that's the case on the why people are, who live in Western Australia twice as happy.

But the problem with my thought processes, I've already made an assumption that this information is correct.

So what you can do is do a little bit of searching.

Let's find out about Professor Bruce and let's check the author and the source of information.

So I've done a bit of searching already.

So you understand I have to move to one of my searches where I've searched for the university of East Broughton.

Now, interestingly, I'm finding lots about Sally Broughton, whoever she is, but I'm not finding anything about the university of East Broughton.

You can see there's a university of East Anglia, but that's certainly not the case.

So let me just try and type in Professor Bruce, maybe before it.

If that comes up.

So, no, this Bruce Lankford, there's no Professor Bruce, and there's not the same university.

Yeah, that's a different university as well.

So by doing some very quick search in there, I've been able to find that actually there is no Professor Bruce, and there is no university of East Broughton.

So straight away, I might be able to rule out that this is credible information.

So let's head back over to the slides.

Now, the next tip.

So let's check the alternate source.

My technique number two is, think about why the article was written.

So here's another quote for you.

What about this one? "So computer programmers have found the secret "to the National Lottery "and want you to know how to win every time.

"So enter your email address below, "and we'll send you more details." Now that sounds like a statistic or fact that's just too good to be true.

And often when you read something on the internet, that feels a little bit too good to be true, the chances are, it is just too good to be true.

So I think the key part to this is the motive behind it.

Can you spot what the motive behind that this story is.

When it says, enter your email address below, and we'll send you more details they clearly want to gather your email address, your data, your details, and that's the motive behind it because clearly there's no way to win the national lottery every time.

So all they're trying to do is get your details.

Now that's not the case for all information that you come across on the internet, but having that thought about maybe what was the motivation for somebody to read this? What's it to influence me in any way or to get my opinion or whatever it might be, try and have that in the back of your mind when you read something about maybe why they wrote it.

So that's tip number two, so technique number three is check when the article was written.

So here's another one for you, it says, "A public survey suggest that 90% of people "believe that the sun revolves around the earth." Again, hopefully you're screaming out to and thinking that's not the case, the sun doesn't revolve on the earth, the earth revolves around the sun.

But look when the article was written, it was written 390 BC.

And when the article was actually written, all of a sudden, the article wasn't written in 390 BC, people actually did believe that.

So that's not actually necessarily inaccurate it's inaccurate by modern day standards because our science has developed, as the human race has developed, we understand more things.

So sometimes information and data can become out of date really quickly.

So having an understanding of when something is written, we can maybe formulate an idea in our minds about whether or not it's still valid information.

And my last tip, so we've got three so far, so my fourth tip, is check the facts.

Now the last article was about whether or not the sun revolves around the earth, so we could check that ourselves as well.

So we could say, we could do a quick search on the internet and say, does the sun revolve around the earth? So I've done a search here and I've done that for you.

And very, very quickly we can see just straight away with a search, we can see what actually the earth orbits the sun.

So it's the other way round.

We can check out this information too, cause I'm going to put into place some of the tips that I've showed you already.

Now, again, I just want to believe this straight away because this says the first fact that I've read.

So what I could do is keep scrolling down and have a look are there any other websites out there that confirm this? And if you read any of these articles, we would see that, it is the case that the earth revolves around the sun.

But this brings up an interesting point, 'cause the first article is a Wikipedia article.

Now going back to my point earlier on is that anybody can post information to the internet and Wikipedia is a great example.

So Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia where anybody who wants to, including you can go and update information on a Wikipedia page.

So how do we know if Wikipedia is trustworthy or should we just dismiss anything on Wikipedia because anybody can update the information? Well, the answer to that is no.

So I'm going to show you how we can maybe determine whether or not the article is accurate.

So I'm going to head over to the Wikipedia article that was linked on that web search.

Now, if we read this information, we can see that there's lots of hyperlinks.

Now, these hyperlinks will take you to other pages with inside Wikipedia where we could maybe read a little bit more or so.

These hyperlinks might give you an indication as well.

If you've read some of those to kind of backup or confirm some information that we read on this page.

But I think some key things we can look out here is this view history.

Now, if we click on view history here, we can see when people have made updates to this page.

Now, the more people update a Wikipedia page, the more up to date it is.

So we talked about stuff being out of date, or if we know that people have updated regularly and recently, then we know that page probably isn't up to date, but the more contributors to it, the more contributions we have to a page, and the more recently it is, it's more likely that it's going to be accurate because it's within everyone's interest to make sure it's accurate.

So it's one person side to be a little bit funny and decide to put something inaccurate.

The chances are the community spirit of Wikipedia, if lots of people have gone on, then chances are that they're updating the information with something that's accurate.

And we can see that if we scroll down, there's been lots already so far this year, and I'm recording this video in July.

So I know that's already, someone's updated this page this month, so that's a good thing.

So I'm going to go back.

The other thing we can look at is these little numbers we can see here, and these are references to where they've got the information from.

So we can see a fact, for example, the earth orbits the sun at an average distance of 149.

6 million kilometres.

Then we've got this number here citation.

Now, if we put a mouse over that, you can see this shows you the source of where they've got that from.

So I'm looking at other sources where that data has come from.

And I can click on that and it'll take me to a webpage about that.

So if we scroll down to the bottom of a Wikipedia article, we can see all the references that this is based on.

So again, if you see a Wikipedia article has got one or two references, that may be, we might need to do a little bit more digging to work out whether or not it's valid.

But if we've got an article, that's got lots of references and by maybe credit people that we trust.

So for example, there's some of the information comes from NASA.

I think we can say we probably trust some of the information that comes from NASA.

Then if there's lots of references, then we can probably trust this article is probably valid.

So let's have backyard to the slides.

So taking all of that into account, I would like you to do an activity for me now, and it's called fake news or real news.

Now task one, so you have approximately 10 minutes to write a news article.

So just use that as a rough guide to how long you should spend on this activity.

Now what I'd like you to do is to pick a topic that interests you.

And maybe something that you've already got some good knowledge about.

So that might be something that you're studying in school, such as something from your history or geography lessons, or it might just be something that interests you in general.

So what I'd like to do is I would like to write an article based on that topic area, but you're going to decide right now whether or not you're going to make it a real news article or a fake news article.

So if you're going to make it a fake news article, maybe makeup some facts and maybe link it to somebody who doesn't exist.

Like I just showed you there, like our Professor Bruce, from the university of East Broughton.

If it's going to be a real one, maybe try and get some quotes of some real people in there to backup and support what you're saying.

So what we're eventually going to deal with this is you're going to show it to somebody else who maybe you're going to try and see if they can work out whether or not it's a real or a fake news article.

So I'd like to pause this video now and then go back, go over to your worksheet, complete task one and when you're ready, you can restart the video.

So how did you get on with that? So hopefully you've written your article now, and maybe if you've done a fake one, you've done a really great job of trying to make it fake.

If you've done a real one, hopefully it's backed up with lots of facts and creditable information.

So what I'd like to do now is if possible, is I'd like to share this with somebody.

So if you know another classmate who's doing this, maybe you could send it to them somehow.

Or if you've got a parent or carer at home, maybe you could get them to have a look at your article.

So I'd like to give the article and ask them whether or not they think it's a real article or a fake news article.

So see if they can identify which one it is.

So when you're ready for that, then pause this video, ask them to do that.

And then when they've given you that answer, you can unpause and we'll carry on with this lesson.

So how did you get on with that? Hopefully you managed to convince the person reading your article, that either it was a fake or a real news article, depending on how you set out or what you set out to achieve with that.

So it's time to get ourselves involved with the main purpose of this unit, which is gaining support for a cause.

So as it says on the slide here, the aim of the next few lessons is for you to write a blog post that will help you gain support for cause of your choice.

Now I'll introduce you to this idea right at the beginning of lesson one.

So hopefully you've got some kind of idea of a cause that you would like to gain support for.

But we're going to spend the next few minutes just thinking about that and maybe formulating a really firm idea of something that you would like to gain support for.

So I put some suggestions on the screen here.

They might be recycling, maybe something to do with climate change, could be reducing the speed limit on a road near you, it might be a charity, or it might just be a community project or local service that's in danger of closing.

So those ideas that I've given you there, are not things that you have to pick from, but they might prompt some thought process to help you really get a good idea of a really, a really good cause that you'd like to gain support for.

And hopefully it's something that you're passionate about.

So I'd like to pause the video and just have a think about this.

It might be that you want to write down some ideas, it might be that you want to discuss this with somebody else in your house.

So once you've got a firm idea, then you can unpause the video and we'll move on.

So hopefully by now you've got really nice idea.

Something that you feel passionate about, that you can get that support for that cause from anybody who's going to read your blog.

So the first step in our journey towards making the blog is really try to identify the audience.

So who's going to be reading our blog? Who do you want to kind of get to? What kind of people do you want to get to support your course? So if you head over to task two on your worksheets, there you'll find a bunch of categories for audience.

What I'd like you to do is read through these categories and maybe delete the ones that you think don't apply to your blog or your cause that you'd like to gain support for.

But also there are three empty boxes on that worksheet.

And I'd like you to think of maybe three extra categories of audience that you think would be appropriate for your blog, but you can already see on the categories that are on the worksheet already.

So again, I'd like to go ahead and do that, spend about five minutes doing that.

And then once you've done that you can unpause and we'll finish off the lesson.

So that's all for this lesson.

Now I really hope that you feel equipped to be able to look at information on the internet and work out what is credible information and maybe what is information that we shouldn't trust.

So I would also really like to see the work that you've done this lesson.

So if you've made a real or fake news article, please do share that with us.

And if you'd like to please ask your parents or care to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and using the #LearnwithOak.

Now there's a quiz you can do now, which will test your knowledge from the learning that you've done in this lesson and other than that, I look forward to next lesson where we'll start developing your blog even further.

So that's all for me.

So I'll see you then, bye.