I am just going to say emphatically that I LOVE the online game Bad News.
I see that it has a ton of potential to be used in my future social studies – and other – classes. For those unfamiliar with it, it is a free online game whose objective is to help its players understand how misinformation and disinformation get perpetuated by social media platforms. It does this by getting the players to take on the task of creating fake news and earning badges that show they have developed the skills that fake news creators use to create their dividing and harmful “news”. The badges include: polarization, conspiracy theories, discrediting, trolling, and invoking emotion. The game employs the inoculation theory – the concept that by exposing players to small doses of common fake news methods, they will understand it and become immune to it.
Recently I watched the Netflix documentary the social dilemma. It outlines how data is continually being gathered on us, and is then through their methods (algorithms and a bunch of stuff I don’t totally get) they keep feeding us what they deem we will like/want etc.
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By putting together both what one learns through watching the movie the Social Dilemma and playing the Bad News Game, it become more understandable why we are seeing increasing polarization. With our opinions, thoughts, beliefs and interpretations of reality being reinforced it understandably becomes increasingly difficult to hear, see or understand another point of view. In fact, we end up not being exposed to opposing ideas and viewpoints except from the perspective that puts them in a negative light by the information that already supports our way of thinking. And with this, our critical thinking skills start to diminish.
In my future classroom, to help assist my students develop their critical thinking skills I think one important step is to help them see how they can be manipulated. I would get them to play ‘The Bad News game’ and watch ‘The Social Dilemma’. I would also have them do a lot of debates in class, so they can look at both sides of an issue and critically analyze BOTH sides. Only then would I prompt them to ‘take a side’ and tell me why they took that perspective.
