This document provides an agenda and materials for an information literacy workshop. The agenda covers evaluating information on social media and popular media, including fact checking quotes and studies reported in news articles. Participants are encouraged to locate original sources, consider the purpose and content of information, and think critically about evaluating all types of content online. Interactive activities include quizzes to distinguish real from fake news stories and quotes. Overall, the workshop aims to teach skills for verifying information found on the internet.

1. INFORMATION
DETECTIVE:
WHERE DID THAT INFORMATION COME
FROM?
KELLY BENNETT & BONNIE LAFAZAN
BERKELEY COLLEGE LIBRARIES
INFORMATION LITERACY MONTH 2014

2. AGENDA:
• Do you trust your Facebook feed?
• Research in the Popular Media
• Content, Content, Content
• Seeing is Believing?
• Fun with Quotations
• Test Yourself!

4. http://socialtimes.com/watch-social-media-grow-
with-the-real-time-social-web-clock_b11451

5. DO YOU TRUST
YOUR FACEBOOK
FEED?

7. FYI, A SHORT LIST OF SATIRICAL WEBSITES:
The Onion
• The Daily Currant
• The Daily Squib
• Duffel Blog
• Empire News
• The Poke
• ClickHole
• National Report
• The News Nerd
http://realorsatire.com/
The 25 Funniest Times People Thought The Onion Was Real
http://literallyunbelievable.org/

9. “A NEW STUDY HAS
FOUND…”
RESEARCH IN THE POPULAR MEDIA
“Dogs understand humans better than we thought”

10. INTERNET DETECTIVES:
GO FIND THE ORIGINAL STUDY!

12. THE ORIGINAL SOURCE
OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
Animal Cognition, May 2013,
Volume 16, Issue 3, pp 385-394

13. CONTENT, CONTENT,
CONTENT
•News Aggregators
e.g. The Huffington Post
•Blogs
•User-generated
e.g. CNN iReport; Reddit
•Sponsored Content

14. CONTENT, CONTENT,
CONTENT
• Purpose to drive traffic (clicks) to their sites to increase
• Headlines used to evoke emotion

15. CONTENT, CONTENT,
CONTENT

16. SEEING IS BELIEVING?

17. FUN WITH QUOTATIONS!
Who said, “Let them eat cake.”
A. Marie Antoinette
B. Buddy Valastro, the Cake Boss
C. Nobody
There’s no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said this. The closest we can
come is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography, Confessions, written in 1770
(years before Marie Antoinette arrived at Versailles from her native Austria).
In Confessions, he made a reference to a thoughtless princess who, “on being
informed that the country people had no bread, replied, ‘Then let them eat
pastry!’”

18. FUN WITH QUOTATIONS!
What movie contains this quote: “Luke, I am your father.”
A. Star Wars: A New Hope
B. The Empire Strikes Back
C. Neither of these
“No. I am your father.”

19. FUN WITH QUOTATIONS!
Anatomy of a Fake
Quotation

20. Quote
Investigator

22. Be Critical!
Not all Content is Created Equal
Locate & Evaluate the Original
Source of the Information

23. GOING VIRAL: INFORMATION GONE CRAZY!
tinyurl.com/viralinformation
Test your ability to separate internet hoaxes from real news
stories with this presentation from the Berkeley College Online
Library

24. For more links and information, see the Information Detective
LibGuide
http://berkeleycollege.libguides.com/informationdetective