dy/dan

Fake or Legit

December 5th, 2007 by Dan Meyer

Recognizing how proud Kids These Days are of their digital discernment, of their immunity to audio/visual forgeries, I've pulled together a large set of photos¹, some of which are legitimately bizarre, some of which are artificially bizarre.

You ever have a few minutes free, you fire up the slidedeck and ask them to vote, fake or legit, on each photo. It's fun. I'll plug extraneous gaps with three or four photos and it'll last the semester. Whenever possible, I've included unaltered versions of the forgeries.

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Real plans for real bloggers. Vote dy/dan best new edublog and best individual edublog.

Mostly from Snopes but let me state for the record I didn't take any of these photos. Except one. [back]

13 Comments »

13 Responses to “Fake or Legit”

on 05 Dec 2007 at 7:14 pm1 Scott Elias

These are good fun. What font is that in your .key file? It’s not rendering correctly for me.
on 05 Dec 2007 at 7:37 pm2 dan

Should’ve seen that coming. It’s called Block Berthold and it isn’t free. Helvetica Extra Bold oughtta suffice.
on 05 Dec 2007 at 7:49 pm3 Scott Elias

Got it – thanks.

All of the “FAKE” stamps came out looking like “FAK” since, I’m guessing, the substituted font was a little larger than yours.
on 05 Dec 2007 at 9:10 pm4 fgk

thanks for sharing all your work, and even more the way you think and how you get from point a to b.

i just stumbled across your site, from tmao’s i think, and have been alternating between inspired and feeling inadequate.

i’ve spent years bemoaning the state of powerpoint and what it does to presentations, and serendipitously took the plunge with keynote just this weekend.
on 06 Dec 2007 at 8:29 am5 Christian Long

Why, oh why, oh why will my little laptop (with Microsoft Office 07) NOT open the PPt file? Is there a small animal I can sacrifice to right this wrong?

Love the idea, Dan. Obviously there are 2 take-away’s. One, focusing on the technical ‘skill’ of discerning truths/fakes in visual form. Two, what it means to question (re)source in the first place, and ‘make sense’ of a evolving landscape of ‘truth’.

Both are vital to dem kids and to our collective futures.
on 06 Dec 2007 at 5:03 pm6 Jeremy

Ditto on that couldn’t open with 07 problem
on 06 Dec 2007 at 5:59 pm7 Nancy

Be interesting to plot scores based on something—gender, age, hair color, math grade, ses….

When ever I get these images as emails labeled “This IS Unbelievable” I cringe. I also cringe when I get the “gang initiation”, “missing teen”, “send this on and you’ll be rich”, “deoderant (or cellphone) causes cancer”, “dying teen” or “Golden Compass is anti-God” emails. It amazes me how gullible people (teachers) are. Yikes.

OK, the brouhaha over Golden Compass wasn’t a hoax.
on 06 Dec 2007 at 6:12 pm8 Todd

I don’t ever surf, but that first picture is similar to my worst nightmare. I’m not going to get to sleep tonight, even if that is a fake.
on 06 Dec 2007 at 6:15 pm9 SurRural Librarian

I like to use somthingawful.com for crazy artificial pictures. Check out the shark at:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/add-something.php
on 06 Dec 2007 at 8:17 pm10 dan

Dang. Sucks about PowerPoint 2007. Ya know Apple released a patch for that problem, right? Yep. Called it Keynote. I think Santa’s bringing me the latest version this Christmas which oughtta export something compatible for you people. Sit tight ’til then, I guess.

Todd, not that it’ll do your sharkophobia any good but that there’s a dolphin.
on 06 Dec 2007 at 9:51 pm11 Todd

It actually did cross my mind that the fin looked a bit more like a dolphin, but that kind of logical thinking would never cross my mind if I was in the water faced with that murky outline.
on 08 Dec 2007 at 5:06 pm12 fgk

you may want to double check your reference on the horse pic.
on 12 Sep 2008 at 6:38 pm13 Moving Through Some Changes: Thoughts On Teaching

[...] and Writing Challenge. I’m thinking of a fourth flavor (Graphic Challenge) working with one of Dan’s many ideas that gnaw at the back of my head. Students write about images, sometimes rationalizing why they think something is fake or legit [...]