May 2017
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Activity: Evaluate a Website
This is Tim Gunn, the star of the Project Runway series, and a gay rights advocate. But is that message he is holding up for real? It looks like it might be another example of sign-faking, where the content of pieces of paper held up by someone are digitally altered. Now the first step of Continue reading
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Activity: Confirming the Nixon Witch-Hunt Headline
A fun one for today. President Trump made a comment about a witch-hunt, and then this showed up in my Twitter feed. So, is this a real headline or a fake? Did this article really run, with this headline? If so, how did you verify it? If not, how did you debunk it? (This one Continue reading
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Innovation vs. Invention
As everyone is aware, I delete my tweets on a rolling basis. But over my morning coffee I had an great discussion with Rolin Moe, David Kernohan, and Maha Bali about innovation which is probably worth snapshotting here. And, while I’d love to say I just have the greatest instincts, it turns out that Audrey Watters Continue reading
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The Annotation Layer As a Marketplace for Context: A Proposal
A lot of our thinking about giving articles a “fact-checking” context has been about automated, centralized, closed approaches — Facebook algorithms that flag things, plugins that provide context, etc. Some of these things are deep in proprietary plumbing of platforms. Others are service-based real-time overlays of information. All of them require you opt-in to some Continue reading
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Auto-Annotating News Articles To Scaffold Media Literacy Skills In Students
I’ve been playing around a bit with auto-annotating news articles to foster better literacy reflexes in students. Here’s the latest work in progress: I’ve made an annotation bot that goes out and finds articles mentioning industry front groups and asks students to do research to confirm or deny the connection. How does this work? I Continue reading
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Introducing the #CheckPlease Tag
One of the things we have learned as we’ve run the student fact-checking project is the hardest thing is to get all the students unique stuff to check. It’s not that there aren’t enough facts out there needing checking — we see them daily. But consider a teacher of history who wants to do a Continue reading
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Corner-Clipping
The best thinking about media and media literacy this week comes from Linda Holmes, a journalist who generally writes about television. Maybe that gives her a special insight, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just she’s wicked smart. She goes on: Corner-clipping is exhausting to both the people who read it and the people who Continue reading