HBC209 Media Literacy in the Age of Fake News Reflection Journal o1 | SUSS

Reflection Journal (RJ01)

This assignment is worth 10% of the final mark for HBC209 Media Literacy in the Age of Fake News.
The cut-off date for this assignment is Monday, 17 March 2025, 11.55 pm.

Note to Students:

You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the RJ (if applicable), SUSS PI No., Your Name and Submission Date.

Failure to submit your RJ via Canvas TurnItIn will result in an automatic withdrawal from the module.

Identify a case from the past few years where you encountered a piece of online fake news that was AI-generated, containing elements such as a deepfake video, an artificially generated image, or an AI-written article. Take a screengrab of the digital content, which could have come as a social media posting, website content, or mobile message, and reproduce it fully at the start of your Reflections Journal (RJ) assignment.

This assignment will require students to offer reflections in six sections to address a series of interrelated questions that draw upon your learnings across various study units in the module. The RJ is to be submitted as a collective total of six sections.

Reflections Journal Entry 1 (200 words)

• Provide the screengrab and describe the piece of fake news that you have selected, including its immediate source and, if possible, also its actual origin
• Describe your initial response and reaction upon encountering the item

Reflections Journal Entry 2 (200 words)

• Describe how the AI-generated content contributed to the falsehood
• Discuss the specific impact that could be caused by the selected online falsehood

Reflections Journal Entry 3 (200 words)

Discuss the challenges in detecting and debunking AI-generated falsehood.
Explain how this falsehood was eventually publicly debunked

Reflections Journal Entry 4 (200 words)

• Outline the common types of AI tools publicly available, which could be used to create fake news
• Examine the challenges that AI-generated fake news poses against the backdrop of more established or conventional forms of online misinformation

Reflections Journal Entry 5 (200 words)

• Consider what actions governments might need to take to address the threat posed by AI-generated falsehoods
• Identify one recent legislative move that the Singapore government has taken specifically to tackle AI-generated fake content

Reflections Journal Entry 6 (200 words)

• Outline two appropriate steps that content creators planning to use AI tools should take

Student’s Notes

• This assignment requires students to apply concepts from the various study units and seminars in each reflection journal entry, woven around a central topic.
• Students are to provide an academic, reflective writing style with proper structure and formal language. It is not to be a personal journal composed in an informal style, tone, or language.
• This is not a course evaluation but a course assignment. No marks will be provided for sharing personal challenges, describing the course arrangements, or outlining what was learnt without a proper application of the course content onto the questions posed.
• Students are expected to provide references with APA citations, where relevant.
• The word limit for each Reflection Journal entry is 200 words (+/- 20 words).
  Remember to provide the word count at the end of each entry.
• In-text citations and references are excluded from the word count.

Plagiarism & Generative AI

• Copying a citation description from the original author or someone else (without putting it in quotation marks or rewriting it) is considered plagiarism. Attribute all sources properly and consistently, including any AI-generated text (see example below).
• Example of a table detailing the name of the AI tool used, the approach to using the tool (e.g., what prompts were used), the full output provided by the tool, and which part of the output was adapted for the assignment.
• Answers that merely regurgitate or reproduce information from any sources, including generative AI tools, will be significantly marked down. Students should refer to Section 5.2 and Section 3 of the Student Handbook. If there is ample reason to believe that the work is not entirely the student’s own, a viva voce may be held to determine authorship.

Submission

It is strongly recommended that you make an early submission to check the originality report and, if necessary, make amendments to your document for resubmission. Note that the Turnitin report is usually generated immediately after the first submission, however, subsequent reports may take up to one day to generate. Do note that Turnitin will not accept any further submissions AFTER the cut-off time. There is a 12-hour grace period after the cut-off time, which is not an extended deadline but is solely meant for solving any technical problems that you may encounter while attempting to make a submission before the cut-off time. Please email Canvas Support immediately (with relevant screenshots and your assignment attached) and follow up with Canvas Support first thing in the morning to ensure that the problem is resolved before the grace period is over.

One late submission is allowed only if no prior submissions were made before the cut-off time. Do note that the Canvas system will automatically deduct penalty marks for every day that your assignment is late. With this automatic deduction, there will be no need to request for extensions from your tutor because your tutor does not have the mandate to override the Canvas system settings. You will need to form your judgment as to how many marks you are willing to forego for each extra day that you gain to work on your assignment.
Take care to ensure that you upload the correct assignment document to the correct folder of the correct course. Requests to transfer incorrectly uploaded documents to the correct folder will require an official appeal (and an administrative fee).
Backup your assignment at all times. Once you have uploaded your assignment (in Word document format only), retain the Turnitin digital receipt as evidence of a successful submission. View your submission to ensure that the entire document has been uploaded successfully.

Plagiarism and Collusion

The assignment is to be completed on your own. You may discuss the assignment with your coursemates; however, the assignment must be written independently. Do not share your notes, drafts or final assignments with anyone before the marked assignments are returned to you.

Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material so that you can write up your assignment in your own words. Quotations should be used sparingly. Simply citing the source of ‘copied’ chunks of text does not excuse it from plagiarism. Do ensure that any paraphrasing is done appropriately, even if you use text from your work that you have submitted as part of another assignment for the same or another course.
The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as your own, or recycling of contents from your own earlier marked assignment from the same course or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment which is the same or very similar to another student’s). Both are very serious academic offences. Please refer to the Student Handbook on the penalties of plagiarism or collusion. You are strongly advised to submit your assignment early, check the plagiarism report yourself, and if needed, revise and resubmit your assignment before the submission deadline.