Student Interaction on Disinformation Workshops

Student interaction event series has been implemented in three phases:

Phase 1 - Train the trainer & Preparation: Safety and Risk Management students of Laurea UAS were trained with I2I material and assigned to get prepared using these material and have an active role to carry the messages to their younger counterparts. They made preparations under the supervision of I2I member lecturers from Laurea UAS and also with the support of FaktaBaari and made pre-coordination with the group leaders

Phase 2 – Student – student interaction: In autumn 2023, Laurea UAS carried out student interaction sessions (vaccination workshops) with its Safety and Risk Management students in different educational institutions, mostly in Finnish vocational schools.

Every session is planned with the teacher/group leader of the educational institution and the groups followed the workshops in class, which was conducted via Teams/Zoom.

The aim of the workshops was to clarify the concepts of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation for young adult participants, to give examples of disinformation in the media, to explain the potential of Artificial Intelligence related to disinformation and to encourage critical thinking. Selected I2I tools for tackling disinformation were also presented during the workshops.

The aim was also to activate the audience through various discussion exercises, application of tools presented, and e.g. Kahoot surveys. The teacher of each group acted as a facilitator in the classroom during the discussion exercises.

The teachers of the groups gave good feedback on the lessons and said that they themselves had also learned new things.

The Laurea students took a very active role in these workshops, by producing their own presentation material, using materials and videos from the I2I project, in particular cases from FaktaBaari which is a Finnish fact-checking and digital information literacy service and also part of the I2I project.

The students collected feedback from the audience during the workshops. Most of the feedback was positive: the topic was interesting and important, and many of them were already familiar with it, for example from previous studies. In Finnish education critical media literacy is a strong theme. But they found an opportunity to apply new tools and apply them especially on AI-generated disinformation.

According to feedback, students would have preferred live performances, which would have made the performance easier to follow and the interaction between the performers and the audience easier and smoother. The performers themselves also sometimes found it challenging to maintain the interest of those following the online performance. As a target audience, young people are challenging, especially in distance learning it can be difficult to keep everyone engaged. Interactive exercises like Kahoot and mentimeter were useful in keeping them engaged.

Phase 3 – Student – expert interaction: At the last phase of the work package, partners Beyond the Horizon and Dare to be Grey came together with students in an online international setting as experts and organized together an immunization workshop with an aim of a booster effect on the students. The last step focused on elections theme on the way to the EP elections. Participants were immunized on a selected case study on migration as an example of a hot topic on which we have European wide mass mis/disinformation. The participants gave very good feedback at the end about their learnings, such as stop-think-check tool, being critical on social media, some interesting facts and figures about migration.