Reference no: EM132285146

Research and Poster Session Project

Your Task

This project gives you the opportunity to conduct individual research on a unique topic within the area of fake news. You will do research and then prepare a persuasive and informative poster presentation for the class as a means of sharing with your audience, the topic and findings of your research.

Informative poster sessions conform to the needs of the audience. In the case of your poster session it will also present a persuasive argument. This means you need to present the information you discovered in your research (exposition) and also present your own stance or claim or your solution to a problem (persuasive argument about the importance and strength of the facts you discovered and their significance).

Your poster should clearly indicate what you researched, how you researched it, why you researched it and what you have learned that contributes to your knowledge and understanding of the topic you investigated.

Poster Session Writing Strategies
Creating a poster is not as simple as writing out a short essay about your topic and then cutting pieces of it and pasting them to a poster board! Instead, you will need a plan that includes graphics and text to represent information and grasp audience attention.
- Aim for visual impact.
- Condenseinformation to fit on the limited space of the poster.
- Focus in on key points to depict.
- Work with a draft no more than 2 pages long, double-spaced text in 12-point font or use graphics. (You do not need a draft before you create your poster (but it may be a good idea).
- When answering questions and discussing your poster with your audience, fill in details and to explain causal relationships or contrasts, or processes in detail.

Conduct an Organized Investigation
- You are not being asked to write an essay for this assignment.
- Conduct research to gather information.
- Organize it meaningfully using an outline. (Think in terms of chunks of meaningful content).
- It will help to write a draft or at organize your notes in a detailed way.
- Identify your claim and supporting evidence.

Keeping your research and information really organized will help you see the full range of elementsyou can represent on your poster.
Transferring Research and Persuasive Argument to Poster
- Sketch out your poster on paper before you start gluing.
- Select compelling text and graphics from your draft or notesfor the poster.
- Organizeinformation intosmall chunks.
- Organize for the viewer using headings.
- Group ideas, number your points
- Show how one idea is connected to another.
- Create focal points.
- Keep the needs and interests of your audience in mind.
- Create a title for the poster.
- Revise your poster to remove all but the pertinent information.
- Edit carefully.

Members of the class will be split into two groups. Groups will take turns visitingclassmate's posters for 5 minutes or so. Given the short amount of time, the poster can only summarize your findings. Graphics will help convey much information at a glance without the need for explanation. As your classmates visit each poster, they can ask questions. You will need to fill in the details, provide background, and provide detailed explanations. So, keep the poster simple.

Specific Objectives:
- Keep the content simple and clear. You can achieve this by sticking to a small number of key points that you want people to remember after your presentation. Make those ideas very clear and state them concisely.

- Keep visuals interesting and accessible. Your poster should be visually engaging to attract people to view it, but it also needs to be accessible, meaning that people need to be able to make sense of it easily.

Topics to Choose From:

Your work should include an application of concepts learned in the course to an analysis of fake news. Please be sure to click on the FAKE NEWS link on the left navigation panel in Blackboard to learn more about fake news and to help you narrow your topic to one of the following:
1. Fake news
2. Astroturfing
3. Media bias
4. Conspiracy theories
5. Misinformation
6. Disinformation
7. Propaganda
8. Hoax
9. Post-Truth Era
10. Click-bait
11. Echo Chambers
12. Confirmation Bias
13. Filter Bubbles

Audience

Your audience for this poster session is other students in your Communications class, who like you, are interested in learning more about what fake news is, how it affects society and how fake news affects the ecology of communication.

Create your poster with the audience in mind. The poster layout should allow reading or flow from left to right and from top to bottom.

Steps:

1. Explore the information on the Fake News link on the Course Blackboard page.

2. Watch this TED Talk on astroturfing and then watch this one on fake news (how it grows in a post-fact world) and this one on fake news and how to protect yourself against it.

3. Read:Fake news. It's complicated. Firstdraftnews.

4. Choose a topic from the list. For instance, one option mightbe to analyze the fake news around climate change or vaccines or genetic modifications of animals and how that has been used to manipulate the public. Another option might be to analyze how confirmation bias acts to cause the public to continue to support political leaders when facts about the leaders should reasonably cause one to expect the public to abandon supporting those politicians.

5. Decide on a central theme, idea, or thesis and how much information to include.

6. Focus your message and what you want people to remember after they have walked away from your poster.

7. Organize.Put key points on the poster and talk about the finer details when people visit your poster. Be sure to share what you did, why you did it and how you did it. Remember, this is not an essay, so your writing style will not be like it is when you write an essay. Your writing needs to be simple, straightforward, concise, and precise.

8. Design the poster. It should be visually interesting with focal points and should include tasteful use of colour. Use of space should be appropriate to the importance of a point. Between 10 and 30% of a poster should be left as white or black space.
- Use easy to read fonts.
- Use headings.
- Use graphics! Make sure that your graphics will grasp viewers' attention and be suited to the point being conveyed.
- Use standard size poster paper: 22 inches by 28 inches. Do not buy larger poster paper.

9. Present to the class in a poster session. When people come by to view your poster, let them look at the poster before you start to talk. Avoid reading your poster. Instead, rely on your knowledge of the topic to fill in the details behind the key points on your poster. Charts, graphs, photographs and charts could be placed on the poster for you to discuss with your viewers.

10. Hand in your draft or organized notes with sources and a .jpeg of the poster on Blackboard prior to the poster session.Both will be needed to calculate your final grade.