Assignment & Schedule
For Unit 3, we’re going to circle back to things we discussed at the beginning of the term – how we learn what we know. And we’re going to take a bit farther.
We read an excerpt from Ellen Carillo’s article on the problems with Common Core as applied to reading and analyzing. Her point (it’s on Perusall if you want to look at it again) was that if we only look at what’s in the text without considering the larger context (or who the author is or who the intended audience is), then we’re not really understanding what the piece is about. And that’s dangerous. She goes on to say that this is how “alternative facts” and misinformation have grown since the 2016 election.
But we can make the argument that only looking at things from a single perspective has always been a problem. If we only get our information from one source, or only get our world view from one group of people, that can lead to some unfortunate attitudes and consequences.
So for this now-brief Unit 3 project, we’re going to take a quick dive into the danger of single sources, and use social media to do it.
The assignment: write a 750 word Open Lab post about the danger of getting information from a single source. Due Dec 1.
You can tell a personal story, or talk about a situation that’s happening that you know about, or pretty much any approach. You can use gifs, or images, or videos as well as text. But the main thing is that it needs tell us what the danger is and why it’s dangerous. You can talk about social media, or what’s called the mainstream media, or streaming services, or YouTube, or Facebook, or TikTok, or Instagram, or podcasts…. It’s completely up to you. But you’ll need to focus and really make it connect with us as your audience.
Category: Information Sources
Here’s the whole assignment and schedule:
- In class 11/22: Watch Adichie’s TEDTalk on “The Danger of the Single Story” (below)
- For 11/24: Write a short (150-200 words) OpenLab post where you talk about what you think is important about her talk and what part getting information from a single source plays in what she’s saying. Category: Single Story
- For 12/1: Write your longer (750-word) OpenLab post about single sources of news and information — what’s dangerous about them and why, or what’s not dangerous about that situation. Use images, and links, and whatever else you want to explain what you mean. Category: Information Sources
- For 12/6: Add a short introduction and conclusion to your post. Then copy the whole post over to the Google Drive Unit 3 folder (you can make it a Word doc or Google doc — it’s just so we can see them all together and comment more easily).
- The Introduction — write a couple of sentences about what interested you about the idea of single sources of information.
- The Conclusion — write a few sentences about what you learned from doing this. What do you know now that you didn’t before? What surprised you? What made you angry? What you think you could do about this in your own life?
