We developed an educational activity for our Introduction to Media Arts and Sciences course “Computing for the Socio-Techno Web”, for students to think critically about the truthfulness of news propagated in social media. This activity utilizes TwitterTrails, a visual tool to analyze Twitter claims, events, and memes. This tool provides views such as a propagation graph of a story’s bursting activity, and co-ReTweeted network. Using a response and reflection form, students are guided through these different facets of a story.

We hope that other educators will further improve and use this activity with their own students.

Learning Goals

We defined the following learning goals for our in-class activity. In particular, we expect that following participation in the activity, students will be able to:

1.  Understand the concepts of rumor spreading, including the extent and mechanisms in which stories propagate over social media.
2.  Read and interpret visualizations that:
   Describe propagation of information over time
3.  Conduct an evidence-based inquiry into the reliability of online information, employing a set of questions to examine who is spreading a story, and when and how was the story propagated
4.  Identify indicators and characteristics that impact reliability including polarization, echo chamber, timing, and Twitters bots.

Activity materials

• We presented the students with an 11-minute short demo on how to use TwitterTrails and we recorded the presentation in a video posted on YouTube.
• Groups of 3-4 students selected randomly two of 12 stories and completed the Activity form.
• Each student at the end completed a Reflection form on their experience investigating the stories.

Feel free to contact us, we would love to hear from you if you want to use our activity materials!