i have been a bit overwhelmed lately (trying to wrap up tasks before summer really kicks in) and i completely missed the best full paper award of ITS 2022 (Farbod Aprin being the first author) where i was a co-author along with H. Ulrich Hoppe. YAY!
#its2022 #digitallearning
The paper discusses the risks that social media’s toxic content may pose for today’s young generation, focusing on how such content (e.g. “fake news”) aims to change opinions based on disinformation or misinformation supporting conspiracy theories.
To battle misinformation and disinformation, we proposed a web-based learning environment that includes a “virtual learning companion”. This companion aims to help learners improve their understanding, awareness, and critical thinking concerning such social media threats. The learning environment itself mimics Instagram and is implemented as a browser plugin that communicates with students via chat. The companion poses knowledge activation questions and answers according to an underlying script. At the same time, the companion offers other sources with the same image identified through Reverse Image Search (RIS) to help learners find the same image in different contexts with different textual descriptions and keywords. The specificity of our own approach lies in the provision of comparative contextual information using images as cues in combination with Reverse Image Search. We see this as a kind of learning from various contexts, which is a new approach to addressing fake news from an educational perspective.
Link to the publication here: https://lnkd.in/ewwrDaZ7
Authors copy on ResearchGate: https://lnkd.in/eC8qgtZS
