Teaching About Fake News

Since 1995, I've been saying the most critical thing we should be teaching students, is information literacy. Specifically, the ability to locate, evaluate, and use online information for problem solving. It has been 25 years of banging my head against a wall, while shouting into the wind, while swimming upstream, with one hand tied behind my back.  Yet, I keep trying, because it is the key to understanding how to handle Fake News.

I've written tens of thousand of words on the subject, most of them have probably been on Facebook.  While looking back on some of my work, I came across the Internet Library, a series of 7 books for middle school libraries back in 1998.

The problem with writing so much is you forget half of the things you wrote. It wasn't until I dug out the volume on Locating and Evaluating Information on the Internet, that I realized I had written about misinformation and the 1996 presidential campaign! Except for a half dozen links that have broken over the past two decades, everything I wrote then could have just as well been written yesterday!

If you are a teacher or parent struggling with how to teach your kids about the whole "Fake News" problem, I would like to introduce you to Web, my computer sidekick. Here, he's helping me tell a story that actually took place during the 1996 presidential election. If you click on the link below, you can download three chapters from the book and use it with your kids or your class.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD CHAPTERS 6-8 OF

LOCATING AND EVALUATING INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET

Note: The books are out of print, but I retain the copyright and am making some content available for free. You can probably find some on Amazon or other sites, but I do not profit from those sales. Use should be for education. No modification or commercial use, please. 

Solid Gold Stupidity

It's amazing how greed equates with stupidity. I'm sure you have seen the ads to purchase a proof solid gold clad coin originally designed to sell for $50, for the amazing low price of $9.95. It is clad in 14 mg of 99.9999% pure gold! If you haven't, take a minute to visit this site and then come back here to do a little math with me.

It sounds impressive and the fact that they run numerous TV ads is testimony to the fact that they are selling like hotcakes, but let's take a look at a few obvious red flags and a few not-so-obvious ones.

Yesterday I went out in the rain "clad" in my rain coat. And this coin is CLAD in 14 mg of gold. That is 14 thousandTHS of a gram. It would take 71 of these coins to make just one gram of gold, and it takes 31 grams to equal a single ounce. (Gold is measured in troy ounces.)

Gold is currently about $1720 an ounce. When you do all the math, you find that the $50 coin you just got at a bargain price of $9.95 (plus shipping) contains a whopping 77 cents worth of gold.

It would appear that you have been overcharged by just a bit, but never fear. If gold ever makes it to $22,360 an ounce you can sell your coin to someone for $9.95 and make your money back (as long as you also charge shipping).

That, my friend is the mathematics of greed and stupidity.

NOTE: I'm no math wizard. I rounded some fractions and may have even made a mistake along the way, which I would be happy to correct, but the bottom line is that if you are buying these coins as an investment, don't do it. I have some beach front property that I can sell you that is a better deal. Just plan on seeing it at low tide.