It’s 2018, and I’ve still not found anything that helps me think as clearly as federated wiki. At the same time, running a web server of your own is still, in 2018, a royal pain. Case in point: recently a series of credit card breaches forced a series of changes in my credit card number Continue reading

A quick follow-on to my last post — it’s worth mentioning that “conspiracy theorist” is also a much older term than many realize. A few years ago, in fact, a story was going around the forums that the term was either invented by the CIA or at least made an undesirable moniker by them. Again, Continue reading

Was reading the new Oxford collection on conspiracy theory (quite an impressive collection, can be bought here) and noted that one of the articles dated the term conspiracy theory back to the 1870s. It’s not central to the author’s argument, but it’s not trivial either. The author sees the term as coming out of crime, Continue reading

I wrote a thing for Neiman’s year-end journalism predictions yesterday that I’m quite excited about. Hopefully will be out soon. (Update: it’s here.) In the article I finally publish this term I’ve been throwing around in some private conversations — the “homeostatic fallacy”.  Homeostasis is a fundamental concept of biology. The typical example is human Continue reading

I often talk about the dangerous of teaching students to “recognize” fake news. Here’s a good example from today of why recognition is a lousy strategy that can lead to bad results, a tweet proposing that the President of Nigeria has been replaced with a clone. Here is how Peter Adams’s excellent newsletter The Sift  describes Continue reading

Someone asked me today whether I could share any insights about OER creation. I have a few thoughts about that, but the one I always come back to is that you have to empower teachers first. You know that thing on planes where it’s like “In case of sudden decompression, put on your own oxygen Continue reading