The purpose of this research is to find evidence for the assumption that allowing children to create their own news messages is an effective approach to teach them how to distinguish between reliable news and fake news. Three students of the primary teacher training programme of The Hague University of Applied Sciences developed five lessons concerning fake news and five Kahoot! quizzes for each of those lessons. They taught the lessons they developed under the supervision of a primary school teacher and one of their lecturers from the university. A Friedman test on the scores of the Kahoot! quizzes indicate that the children made progress over the course of the study. In addition, it appears that the children appreciated the lessons and that they have learned how news is created and how fake news can be recognised. The outcomes of this study have prompted a larger, international Erasmus+ project. Schools and libraries in three countries will investigate similar innovative blended-learning approaches for pupils between ages 12 to 15.
MULTIFILE
Lower levels of news use are generally understood to be associated with less political engagement among citizens. But while some people simply have a low preference for news, others avoid the news intentionally. So far little is known about the relationship between active news avoidance and civic engagement in society, a void this study has set out to fill. Based on a four-wave general population panel survey in the Netherlands, conducted between April and July 2020 (N = 1,084) during a crisis situation, this research-in-brief investigates the development of news avoidance and pro-social civic engagement over time. Results suggest that higher news topic avoidance results in higher levels of civic engagement. The study discusses different explanations for why less news can mean more engagement.
DOCUMENT
This study investigates the degree of news avoidance during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands. Based on two panel surveys conducted in the period April–June 2020, this study shows that the increased presence of this behavior, can be explained by negative emotions and feelings the news causes by citizens. Moreover, news avoidance indeed has a positive effect on perceived well-being. These findings point to an acting balance for individual news consumers. In a pandemic such as Covid-19 news consumers need to be informed, but avoiding news is sometimes necessary to stay mentally healthy.
MULTIFILE
-Chatbots are being used at an increasing rate, for instance, for simple Q&A conversations, flight reservations, online shopping and news aggregation. However, users expect to be served as effective and reliable as they were with human-based systems and are unforgiving once the system fails to understand them, engage them or show them human empathy. This problem is more prominent when the technology is used in domains such as health care, where empathy and the ability to give emotional support are most essential during interaction with the person. Empathy, however, is a unique human skill, and conversational agents such as chatbots cannot yet express empathy in nuanced ways to account for its complex nature and quality. This project focuses on designing emotionally supportive conversational agents within the mental health domain. We take a user-centered co-creation approach to focus on the mental health problems of sexual assault victims. This group is chosen specifically, because of the high rate of the sexual assault incidents and its lifetime destructive effects on the victim and the fact that although early intervention and treatment is necessary to prevent future mental health problems, these incidents largely go unreported due to the stigma attached to sexual assault. On the other hand, research shows that people feel more comfortable talking to chatbots about intimate topics since they feel no fear of judgment. We think an emotionally supportive and empathic chatbot specifically designed to encourage self-disclosure among sexual assault victims could help those who remain silent in fear of negative evaluation and empower them to process their experience better and take the necessary steps towards treatment early on.
We produceren en consumeren meer mode dan we nodig hebben, met te veel impact op mens en milieu. Mode aankopen zijn vaak impulsief en worden ter plekke, in de winkel besloten. Daar ligt dus een kans, maar wanneer gaan we als consument vaker voor duurzame mode kiezen, en hoe kunnen duurzame mode retailers ons daartoe verleiden?
In this project, immersive media (XR, VR, AR) are created and tested as a remediation strategy to help improve the experience of existing TV content and reach and engage both new and existing target groups more effectively. In this project, students and alumni from AGM and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) work together under the supervision of the R&D department from the professorship Digital Media Concepts and QUT to develop innovative immersive media products based on existing TV productions from Banijay. Banijay is the largest independent production and distribution company in the world. Banijay will provide the challenges, content and feedback on the students’ progress and skills during the (VIS) project, and will offer the opportunity to work on existing international productions with real expectations and demands, and the opportunity to actually market the concepts the students develop. Several new concepts are now in production stage to be released and tested.
