The DigiPo mission — to teach students web literacy while they help fix our information environment — is vast. But your involvement with it can literally be as little as 240 seconds.

Here’s an example. I logged into a document today to find that some kind soul had made precisely one edit to one of the documents (which now exist in Google Docs for easy editing). Here it is:

The original article called Vox a “leftist” news source. Someone came in a couple weeks ago and changed “leftist” to “center-left” which more accurately reflects the place of Vox in the online news world.

That’s it. That’s all this person did. But it made the article better.

You, as an instructor or an instructional designer, could go into that article as well, and look at some real student writing. You’d find sentences like this:

More specifically, most Trump voters were lower-class, uneducated, and, white.

And looking at that sentence you’d remember (or perhaps learn) something about students: they really struggle with tone, partially because they have a hard time stepping out of their point of view and partially because they just don’t have access to a semi-academic idiom the way we do.

So you could, in an effort to make that article better, rewrite that sentence as:

More specifically, many Trump voters were white, with lower levels of income and education.

Or something better than that. You’re the person that gets to decide.

Then, over time, with hundreds of people like you writing single sentences like this we would have real examples of profitable revision to share with students as models.

In a minute I’ll post links to some student articles that need work. Edit them by clicking the edit this page link at the top. Log in, for now, with admin as the user and this. Then fix a sentence. You’re done!

If you want credit for fixing the sentence, make sure you are logged in when you access the link, and for best results, add a short comment about what you did. If you don’t want credit, don’t log in (or log out). But fix a sentence. It’s easy!

The change will show up on the website within about 10 minutes.

Here are some articles that need help with style and language:

Can Standardized Testing Damage Kids’ Brains?

Does citrus reduce risk of stroke?

Does Shaq believe the Earth is flat?

Did 9,200 dead people vote in Nevada in 2016?

Will Betsy DeVos, Trump’s new education secretary, end Common Core?

Do smart people need more time alone?

Was Mozart’s Sister was just as talented as Mozart?

Do parents need to “nag their daughters to success”?

Do selfie takers tend to overestimate attractiveness?

Are women considered better coders – but only if they hide their gender?

Did the EPA stay silent on Flint’s tainted water?

Do smart people need more time alone?

Does a new Alzheimer’s treatment fully restore memory function?

Did Southern Illinois College at Carbondale Close Due to Social Justice Warriors?

 

Is a positive outlook good for your health?

Are e-cigarettes as harmful as smoking tobacco?

Did the EPA admit the world’s most popular pesticide is killing bees?

 

You can edit just one sentence, right? To improve our information environment? Three minutes of work?