Good afternoon, everyone. I have a question for you. Do you think fake news has become a serious problem these days?

This is one of the questions in my survey that I asked 100 people each from Japan and America. These people are all in their 20th and finished their compulsory education.

Let’s take a look at the results.

If you look at these pie charts, you will immediately find out the clear difference between these two countries.

The biggest segment of the American pie chart is the percentage of people who strongly agree and agree. On the other hand, it is obvious that more people in Japan don’t seem to care about this problem.

Why is that? One of the reasons for this is because news literacy is still not widely known in Japan.

While FactCheck, Checkology and many more projects have already been playing a big role in news literacy education in Western countries, Japan is pretty much behind in news literacy education, which leads us to have low awareness of this serious social problem that we have right now.

And lots of us don’t realize or didn’t know the fact that fake news has always been around us until the rise of social media has been causing rapid spreading of fake news.

So how can we improve this situation?

Today, I’d like to present fun educational program to improve the news literacy project mostly for children, which is using educational comics in other word, using “Online News Literacy Comic”.

For today’s presentation, first, I’ll talk about what is Online News Literacy Comic and second, where and how let children to use it.

First, I’ll start by explaining how exactly some of the advantages of educational comics can be connected to the contents of news literacy comics. 

This Online News Literacy Comic can be divided into 2 parts. Basic information and history.

Not only inputting information by reading, but also each topic includes question games and a comment section where you can output what you’ve learnt and check your understanding.

Basic information teaches readers basic or specific words and information for news literacy.

This sounds like textbooks, but comics are structured in a way that makes it fun for kids to learn while the visual cues can help children decode unfamiliar vocabulary and memorize them quickly according to the study.

For example, one of the most important things we must know is the system that provides us information.

Where does the information come from? How do newsrooms work?

But not all the schools can make an opportunity to take students to go on the newsroom trip or invite journalists to have a talk show.

However, comics can take you anywhere which is also one of the advantages educational comics have.

I visited my elementary school library to see if I could find any educational comics about it and I actually found them among more than 500 educational comic books, but as you see, they look very old, so they definitely need to be updated.

I also found out how much students love to read educational comics especially about history, which is the content that Online News Literacy Comic has as well.

The second part of the contents which I think is the most important, is history.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, if we don’t know the damages that caused by fake news, we also don’t know how serious the problem is and how our real life can be affected.

To raise our awareness of this problem, we must learn from the consequences of fake news in the past.

A combination of images and text let children make inferences and synthesize information. Moreover, visual storytelling makes it easier to imagine and see yourself in the story.

Now I’d like to show you an example, since it’s just an example, I made it brief and very short.

Please imagine you’re a junior high school student.

The story is about fake ‘lion on the loose’ tweet after earthquake.

On April 14, year 2016 at around 10 p.m., huge earthquake occurred in Kumamoto.

About 30 minutes after the quake, picture of lion walking on the street with a message says “Kumamoto, there’s a lion on the loose near my house because of the earthquake.” was posted.

The tweet was retweeted at least 20,000 times in an hour. So, who and why do you think post this? The 20-year-old man who was a resident of Kanagawa Prefecture posted the tweet with no other purpose, but he just wanted to shock people who saw the tweet.

And what do you think happened next?

This man was arrested for fraudulent obstruction of business.

The Kumamoto Zoo and Botanical Gardens received more than 100 phone inquiries from frightened residents.

I hope you got an idea of why sharing this kind of stories is important.

You or anyone could’ve been this man or one of the victims of this fake tweet.

Now you realized the consequences of fake news can be more serious than you could’ve ever imagine. At the end of each story, there’re question games and a comment section where you can discuss it with other users.

Next, I’d like to talk about usage of this Online News Literacy Comic to teach children at school in Japan. My idea is to introduce this Online News Literacy Comic to the ICT support system.

The Ministry of Education set a goal to have at least one ICT support staff who is in charge of 4 elementary or junior high schools by 2022. These staff are responsible for maintenance ICT education environment and assisting teachers and students with the ICT education program which of course includes media literacy.

So why not use this Online News Literacy Comic as one of the materials of teaching students about media and news literacy.

I interviewed my junior high school math teacher who is responsible for the ICT program so far. He claimed that as much as they would love to give a proper literacy education, but the reality is, all teachers have a tight schedule 24/7 so it’s almost impossible to take care of extra classes.

The teacher loved my idea and I also believe this is quite realistic way to provide media & news literacy education at school since e-learning is a part of Japanese education now.

To end my presentation, I will sum up our main points.

Educational comics can help children’s reading comprehension such as understanding unfamiliar vocabulary and contents. It makes it possible to get children interested in the topic even if they’re not really willing to learn.

It is also effective to make children imagine themselves in the story so that they’ll get the seriousness of the matter.

Question games will train their way of handling all this information on the web.

Lastly, incorporating the use of this Online News Literacy Comic into ICT support system so that teachers don’t have to carry an extra burden.

Look, I want all children to be aware of the seriousness of this social problem caused by lack of news literacy. I want all children to be interested in this topic, think deeply about it, talk about it with friends, and become a better information sender to build a better web world.

I believe that this Online News Literacy Comic can give a fun and proper education to all children who are going to be thrown into a flood of information in their near future so that they will make the right decision to stand up for truth.

Thank you very much.