America @ Worship; How social media is – and isn't – changing American religion.

Infographic on the methods of communication that can be utilized through computing systems and networks.

Alternative facts, fake news, and post-truth have become common terms in the contemporary news industry. Today, social media platforms allow sensational news to “go viral,” crowdsourced news from ordinary people to compete with professional reporting, and public figures in offices as high as the US presidency to bypass established media outlets when sharing news. However, dramatic reporting in daily news coverage predates the smartphone and tablet by over a century. In the late nineteenth century, the news media war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal resulted in the rise of yellow journalism, as each newspaper used sensationalism and manipulated facts to increase sales and attract readers.

This is a remix of a previous source. The link to original source is https://goopenva.org/courses/fake-news-in-the-1890s-yellow-journalism

The original author is Melissa Jacobs

Melissa Jacobs, (2018) Fake News in the 1890s: Yellow Journalism. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/fake-news-in-the-1890s-yellow-journalism/additional-resources#tabs

Students use graph theory to create social graphs for their own social networks and apply what learn to create a graph representing the social dynamics found in a dramatic text. Students then derive meaning based on what they know about the text from the graphs they created. Students learn graph theory vocabulary, as well as engineering applications of graph theory.

Students analyze their social networks using graph theory. They gather data on their own social relationships, either from Facebook interactions or the interactions they have throughout the course of a day, recording it in Microsoft Excel and using Cytoscape (a free, downloadable application) to generate social network graphs that visually illustrate the key persons (nodes) and connections between them (edges). The nodes in the Cytoscape graphs are color-coded and sized according to the importance of the node (in this activity, nodes are people in students' social networks). After the analysis, the graphs are further examined to see what can be learned from the visual representation. Students gain practice with graph theory vocabulary, including node, edge, betweeness centrality and degree on interaction, and learn about a range of engineering applications of graph theory.

Have your students create their profile either online or by hand. These profiles can be used to help decorate a bulletin board or just done for fun.