Local News Headlines: May 31, 2023

Ivy Tech Community College to Provide Free Google Career Certificates
Ivy Tech Community College, in partnership with national nonprofit, Jobs for the Future (JFF), will offer five Google Certificates at no cost to students as part of the College’s Ivy+ IT Academy.The Google Career Certificates program prepares learners for entry-level jobs in the in-demand fields of cybersecurity, data analytics, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, project management, and UX design. This offering will equip students with job-ready skills as they pursue their degree, while also connecting them to career resources and a network of over 150 companies through the program’s employer consortium. 

In collaboration with corporate partner, TechPoint, Ivy+ IT Academy’s offering of the Google Career Certificates will support the company’s goal of increasing the state’s tech workforceby 41,000 by 2030 and solidify Indiana’s national reputation as a vibrant tech hub. Designed and taught by Google employees, each certificate includes over 150+ practice and graded assessments, quizzes, or writing assignments to ensure rigor and mastery. To help prepare learners for jobs, the program provides resources including resume templates, coaching from Career Circle and interview practice with Big Interview. Graduates are also connected with an employer consortium of over 150 companies—including American Express, Ford, Verizon, Walmart, and Google—that hire in the certificate fields.

Launched in 2018, over 150,000 people have graduated from the Google Career Certificates program in the U.S. Seventy-five percent of them report a positive career impact—such as a new job, higher pay, or a promotion—within six months of completion. To learn more about the Google Career Certificates program or to enroll, visit the Ivy+ IT Academy webpage or follow the IT Academy on LinkedIn.

About Grow with Google 
Grow with Google was started in 2017 to help Americans grow their skills, careers and businesses. It provides training, tools and expertise to help small business owners, veterans and military families, jobseekers and students, educators, startups and developers. Since Grow with Google’s inception, it has helped more than nine million Americans develop new skills. Grow with Google has a network of more than 9,500 partner organizations like libraries, schools, small business development centers, chambers of commerce and nonprofits to help people coast-to-coast.

Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media creates dashboard of alleged ‘information superspreaders’
Social media superspreaders have the ability to rapidly disseminate information, regardless of its veracity. This means they can influence consequential conversations, for better or worse. With the goal of tracking superspreaders that are disseminating large quantities of low-credibility content, Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, or OSoMe, has launched a new tool: the Top FIBers dashboard.

This dashboard provides monthly reports highlighting the top 10 superspreaders of low-credibility information on social media. Superspreaders are identified using a metric called the “False Information Broadcaster index” or “FIB index,” which captures the consistency with which users share links to low-credibility sources that are subsequently reshared many times.

For example, a user with a FIB index of 100 has shared at least 100 posts linking to low-credibility sources, each of which has been reshared at least 100 times. On the other hand, a user who shares only one post linking to a low-credibility source will have a FIB index of one, even if it was reshared millions of times.

OSoMe claims to use a definition of misinformation commonly utilized in academic research, which focuses on sources of information that mimic news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent. Using this definition, the dashboard searches for posts that contain at least one link to any source that meets three criteria: rated to have low credibility; categorized as either “conspiracy/pseudoscience” or “questionable/fake news”; and labeled as having a low or very low factual score. These ratings are curated by an independent third party, Media Bias/Fact Check, and compiled by Iffy.news.

OSoMe states that they update their list of sources each month before releasing a new Top FIBers monthly report.

This Week in Hoosier History

Hawks

1896 – Howard Hawks, director and producer of Scarface, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo, was born in Goshen.

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