Fake news: How students learn to read between the lies

by DONALD HALL, Hechinger Report

We are living in an era of stun­ningly unreliable narration. “Fake news” sites fuel one unsubstantiated conspiracy theory after another, and vigilantes take up arms to redress imaginary crimes. Provocateurs from abroad and opportunists at home seem eager to sow political chaos, through manipulating fictions presented as facts. Despotism and/or social mayhem are the likely outcome of a lie-based storytelling envi­ronment. See Germany in the 1930s or Rwanda in the 1990s for historical proof of that. About the latter, especially, I know all too much. I taught in Rwanda, at its national university, in the mid-1980s and left the coun­try just as the economic situation began to spiral out of control. We are at an especially dangerous point in America today. We, too, are divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines, into camps of globalists and isolationists. Today, however, our “facts” and “fictions” are delivered at a historically unprecedented speed and quantity, through online media and through social networks.

http://hechingerreport.org/fake-news-students-learn-read-lies/

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from Educational Technology http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=23367