BORDERLINE CASES - WORDS THAT DECIVE
The Borderline Cases project was a collaborative project that included Spanish and Humanities. For the humanities portion we analyzed the different ways people can be decided, whether it be conspiracy theories or fake news stories found on social media platforms. Borderline cases was originally a project with the goal of hoaxing the entire school to prove how gullible the people of world could actually be... but that didn't really have a great turn out so we opted for something less controversial and wrote fake news stories.
Down below is the project outline sheet.
Conspiracy Theory Presentation
To first kick off this project we had to chose a popular conspiracy theory, research it, and create a presentation giving evidence on how it could be true and also how it could easily be false.
For my presentation I had first chosen the topic of The Big Bang Theory and at the time I had thought that it could pass as a conspiracy theory but it turned out to be a hard topic to find information about, so instead I decided on doing my presentation about The Titanic and how it sunk. This theory stood out to me the most because it is a story that almost everyone knew about, and the theory was talking about a different way to look at the situation. When I first read the theory I kind of thought that "what this could definitely be true!" but in the end not all of the facts seemed to match up.
The Chula Vista : Unexplained website is a website that Dr.P our Humanities teacher had created to teach us what "Red Flags" to look for while exploring different pages on the internet. Dr.P had used this website on both the A.M class and the P.M classes to see how everyone would react to the webpage, so when we were first assigned to take a look at the website we could definitely tell that it was written by Dr.P and heres how:
-It was a weebly
-It had phrases that Dr. P commonly used
-The "contact page" had the email of one of the teachers that Dr. P used to teach with at High tech High North Country
-The pictures of "ancient art" were from the middle schools art class
-No one had heard of anything that the website talked about
-Some of the links didn't work
-The articles were short
-It was a weebly
-It had phrases that Dr. P commonly used
-The "contact page" had the email of one of the teachers that Dr. P used to teach with at High tech High North Country
-The pictures of "ancient art" were from the middle schools art class
-No one had heard of anything that the website talked about
-Some of the links didn't work
-The articles were short
Original Hoax Story
Horrible Accident in 2011 Caused There to be no Gym at High Tech High?
By ANNA-NICOLE BARREIRO JAN. 23, 2017 A construction worker was killed in (2011?). It was said that a “wire rope” on the site had been tense and traveled fast enough that it sliced through a worker's neck. The accident occurred sometime at the construction site of High Tech Middle Chula Vista; a project based school, where work was being done to create an elementary school, middle school, and, school gym. When he was walking to his site a wire had detached from the school building, the speed it was traveling caused it to slice through his neck killing him from the loss of blood. The unidentified worker, around age 40-47, was dead by the time emergency workers arrived. The “wire rope” was around 2-10 microns in thickness with the tensile strength of ¼” steel cable. There was not that much of an investigation in determining why the wire detached. Their preliminary findings indicated that the cause was from the wire’s attachment not being secure. Some believe that from seeing it was not investigated properly, this was done purposely after finishing the building before moving onto the gym; which is not a required building. This is also because of HTHs “low budget”, but it was concluded to be an accident. This incident resulted of not building the school gym because it was not necessary at the time. But not much information has been said about this to disturb the students and educators. The blueprint designs for the school gym were leaked years after the tragic event, only few have seen them. |
For this mini project we had to write original hoax stories which were the beginnings to our final project. To kick off the mini project we had put up different ideas for hoaxes up on our white board walls and then we got into partnerships with people that wanted to write stories about the same things, I got partnered with Anna Nicole and here is her final Hoax Story for the mini project.
The way we came up with this idea was that a lot of people have wondered why we don't have a school gymnasium, and so then we thought about how the construction of the K-8 school was pretty recent, which kind of gave us the idea to blame the reason of the lack of a gymnasium was for a terrible accident that occurred during the building of the new addition to the campus. Coming up with this idea was pretty complicated, we had to put in a lot of thought to what the accident could be and try not to make it too exaggerated to the point where people will automatically think that it is fake. |
Police Report
This police report was crucial to our final fake news story, so what we did was look at an image and we had to decide whether the person had committed suicide or was murdered. To be able to prove is the person was murdered or if it was suicide we had to have warrants and evidence (reasoning and clues).
Outline
Intro
Jenny Goodheart the local newspaper girl was doing her usual stops, one of her stops was at Winston Peacock's home. Winston Peacock lived on his own and it had been said the he had a fortune tucked away in his home. Usually Winston would come out of his home and wave to Jenny.
Events - Ana
On January 1st of 1932 the newspaper girl, Jenny, did not see Winston Peacock at his usual spot to greet her like every other morning. This seemed odd for Jenny but she assumed he was hungover from New Year's festivities. The next day Jenny still did not see Winston. Not seeing him for two days was very unusual so she peeked into his home through a window. She found Winston’s dead body lying on the floor. He had a gunshot wound to the right side of his head and had a gun in his right hand. His glasses were on the floor next to his body and he was found next the carpet that had been obviously lifted.
EVIDENCE AND WARRANTS
When Winston was found he had a wound on right side of his head. The pen from his desk was on the right side of the paper and the gun was in his right hand as well. You can tell from this evidence, that Winston was right handed. Most people shoot guns with their dominate hand. In this case, Winston was right handed and could have shot himself with his right hand. Another piece of evidence was that the gun in his hand is the one that is missing from the nails holding the other pistol. He took one of the nearest guns, and shot himself.
Evidence & Warrants
On his desk was a small note saying “phone bill…”, Winston also lived alone. Some of the reasons why people commit suicide is because they are having financial issues.
Winston was reputed to have a fortune tucked away somewhere in his house, the carpet was lifted in a certain position that could have not been accidental. This could be evidence that someone was looking for the “fortune” he had hidden and they could have murdered him.
- Intro - Alexandra
- Explanation of Events - Ana
- Evidence & Warrants - Nick
- Evidence & Warrants - Anna Nicole
Intro
Jenny Goodheart the local newspaper girl was doing her usual stops, one of her stops was at Winston Peacock's home. Winston Peacock lived on his own and it had been said the he had a fortune tucked away in his home. Usually Winston would come out of his home and wave to Jenny.
Events - Ana
On January 1st of 1932 the newspaper girl, Jenny, did not see Winston Peacock at his usual spot to greet her like every other morning. This seemed odd for Jenny but she assumed he was hungover from New Year's festivities. The next day Jenny still did not see Winston. Not seeing him for two days was very unusual so she peeked into his home through a window. She found Winston’s dead body lying on the floor. He had a gunshot wound to the right side of his head and had a gun in his right hand. His glasses were on the floor next to his body and he was found next the carpet that had been obviously lifted.
EVIDENCE AND WARRANTS
When Winston was found he had a wound on right side of his head. The pen from his desk was on the right side of the paper and the gun was in his right hand as well. You can tell from this evidence, that Winston was right handed. Most people shoot guns with their dominate hand. In this case, Winston was right handed and could have shot himself with his right hand. Another piece of evidence was that the gun in his hand is the one that is missing from the nails holding the other pistol. He took one of the nearest guns, and shot himself.
Evidence & Warrants
On his desk was a small note saying “phone bill…”, Winston also lived alone. Some of the reasons why people commit suicide is because they are having financial issues.
Winston was reputed to have a fortune tucked away somewhere in his house, the carpet was lifted in a certain position that could have not been accidental. This could be evidence that someone was looking for the “fortune” he had hidden and they could have murdered him.
Colette's Ad Campaign
Me and my Partner Trinity had to create an ad campaign for a women that was trying to advertise her pills that al supposed to extend your life expectancy by 222 years. What we decided to do was write things on the ad that would typical make people want to click on the ad, we also used ingredients in the explanation to try and drag people in.
Fake News Olympics
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What I contributed to this story was trying to add things in to make it look like an actual news story but not really, for example adding in the website name and icons to make it look realistic.
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Final News Story
So when first coming up with a news story I had decided to come up with something that could definitely be true but high-key not really, so I decided to right about the tightness of skinny jeans and how it can endanger your life.
The re flags I had were:
Throughout my multiple drafts I think my paper changed drastically because many people had critiqued it and had helped me out with what I needed to add for it to become a very gullible news story. For one of our last drafts we had decided to share our news stories with the 8th graders at the middle school and they fell for our stories, they completely couldn't tell if they were real or not. The 8th graders definitely had take aways and I feel like they learned a lot from this experiment. |
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Exhibition Night
So the concept for exhibition night was to make the room feel like a coffee shop and we were going to be able to share all of our new tips on how to debunk fake news stories and share it with all of the people who usually fall for the clickable fake news stories/advertisements.
For the entire setup day for exhibition I was very fortunate to get to work on creating a video for us to present about how important how to debunk news stories was, and how a lot of people didn't actually know how to tell the difference between real and fake news stories. |
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