HKU Moodle

The proliferation of misinformation—from unsubstantiated claims and misleading narratives to AI-generated content, coordinated hoaxes, and questionable advertising—has transformed our media landscape, influenced public discourse, drove political movements, and reshaped our online/offline behaviours. In any society, understanding our complex, interconnected information ecology is essential for the informed citizenry.

This inquiry-based, hands-on course introduces you to foundational fact-checking and social media verification skills, as well as core concepts in news literacy. Rather than passively consuming the content presented as “news,” you learn to actively identify, assess, and distinguish between reliable and problematic information.

The course draws on diverse disciplinary perspectives—journalism studies, open-source investigation, cognitive psychology, statistics, computer science, political communication, internet governance, and others. It aims to help you develop practical competency in verification techniques while gaining critical insight into how misinformation spreads, what roles key stakeholders play, and ultimately, what each of us internet user can do about information disorder.

In this interdisciplinary course, students will embark on a comprehensive exploration of riverbanks, lake environments, coastal regions and island communities, seeking to capture the myriad ways they access and inhabit these areas in the 21st century. As a foundational component of the CCGL curriculum, we will venture beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries to consider the rich variation of human settlement, behavior, exchange, and evolution across global contexts.

Amidst the growing wave of island and coastal studies, anthropologists and sociologists have recently called for a holistic examination of cultural diversity in human societies. This call extends to often understudied and underappreciated regions of riverbanks, coastlines and islands, where new insights are now being interweaved across the arts, humanities and other social sciences. While conventional studies on traditional or hunter-gatherer societies classically tend to favor those inhabiting arid inland areas, students here will focus on the communities thriving along the shores that have historically occupied a peripheral place in archaeology, history, and cultural and media studies. Coastal societies offer abundant examples of behavioral and cultural evolution, with many religious icons, cultural ideas, linguistic patterns, and stories told and retold, featuring connections to the water. Students will learn how these regions also serve as natural conduits for migration, fostering cultural exchanges, and the flourishing of innovation and social networks.

This course will center the scholarship and important work for sustainable development in these environments, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Through this course, students will recognize the importance of river and coastal societies in urban sustainability (SDG 11), future climate advocacy (SDG 13), by the water (SDG 14) and on land (SDG 15) in various worldwide contexts: from fishing First Nations and Inuit communities in northern Canada and Greenland, to the societies living in the depths of the jungle along the Congo River. We will even go back in time to the Palaeolithic, and learn about our early biological, behavioral and technological evolution, involving deep cultural engagement with, and regular exploitation of, marine resources. We will tie these cross-disciplinary perspectives to the study of Hong Kong's coast and communities, in Mui Wo, Tai O, Lei Yue Mun, Aberdeen, Sai Kung, etc. Students’ exposure to the intricate relationships between water, land and humanity will span regions, disciplines and cultures, shedding light on our paths to a more sustainable future.