Description

This detailed week-by-week overview of the class serves as a flexible and evolving schedule. It can be easily adapted to meet the specific needs of your students and course objectives.This version has gone through several course iterations at Bates College and produced this result, which has aided in comprehensive learning and understanding for a wide variety of students in the course. 

Course Description: Our world is rife with misinformation. This course is designed to hone digital citizenship skills. It is about “calling bullshit”: spotting, dissecting, and publicly refuting false claims and inferences based on quantitative, statistical, and computational analysis of data. Students explore case studies in policy and science and dissect the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” of bullshit propagation. Examples include election misinformation, interpreting health risk, facial recognition algorithms, and science communication. Students practice visualizing data; interpreting scientific claims; and spotting misinformation, fake news, causal fallacies, and statistical traps. In doing so, the course offers an introduction to programming with R for data analysis and visualization.

Activities are denoted by the following: 

In-class R programming language (R programming skills, RStudio)

Data Camp tutorials for the R programming language

Asynchronous activities to be completed (See Lyceum)

In-class activities

  Calling Bull videos on Youtube

Perusall Readings on Lyceum

Case Studies and Projects - Programming and data visualization skills applied to bullshit exploration

Check-in session, instructor and or attached tutor available to answer questions or check lab reports during scheduled class time.

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