The top headline on FARK.com this morning (see link above) was categorized as “interesting,” and it caught my attention because I have a 3 year old and a 7 month old who are both very interested in books (for various purposes, including but not limited to hearing stories from them).
But more enticing were the first two words of the FARK reader’s headline, “Not News.” I never thought two words could sound more reasonable. In today’s 24 hour news cycle world, there is so much fluff pushed upon us that is really just not news, that for undiscerning readers, it’s hard to tell what to pay attention to. And when I ask my students to do a beginning research activity, like choosing a topic, and then finding an article about it from a reliable academic resource, and one of them posts this ad that looks like an article, it makes me sigh.
This student does not notice the tiny word at the top of the page because she is not an avid magazine reader like I am, and she doesn’t know that sometimes, ads are intentionally created so that they look like news articles, to get readers to pay attention to them. That is not what is happening in the babies-can-read story linked above, but I wish that that student had said, upon encountering the fake article–“This is not news!” and continued to search for something that was.
Maybe in my next foray into course design, I will build FARK into my introduction unit as a way of teaching important evaluation and critical thinking skills (with a humorous twist).