One thing we do in the Digital Polarization Initiative is to hone the actions we encourage students to take down to their most efficient form. Efficient meaning: easy to memorize quick to execute with a high likelihood of providing a direct answer to the question you have Our student fact-checkers rely heavily on Wikipedia, and… Continue reading

Today, OLC Innovate leadership requested feedback from attendees on the issues of data collection and privacy raised by (among other things) the attendee tracking badges and session check-in procedure. I replied in email but am republishing it here, lightly edited: I’m really glad to see you considering privacy issues, and mostly wanted to just thank… Continue reading

Just a short note to say thank you to MERLOT’s review committee on ICT Literacy which awarded Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers the 2018 MERLOT Classics award in that category this past Thursday. It’s one of eight MERLOT Classics awards given out this year, with other awards in the areas of Biology, Teacher Education, Psychology, Sociology… Continue reading

Years ago when the web was young, Netscape (Google it, noobs!) decided on its metaphor for the browser: it was a “navigator”. The logo and imagery borrowed heavily from the metaphor of navigation, really coming to the fore with the release of Navigator 2.0, but continuing — with some brief interruptions — late into its… Continue reading

I keep losing this information, so I thought I’d put it here on the blog. Some notes to thinking about disinfo in a different way. I realize this is a lot of stuff from everywhere and nothing is directly comparable. But some trends emerge. First from Pew most people think they are good or pretty… Continue reading

Sometimes in online media literacy we need a Google search that will turn up a mixture of high quality and low quality information for students to sort through. But it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a large array of unique queries on the spot. I generated this list of questions to ask Google, Bing,… Continue reading

Today, from Medium. News about Trump! See down there at the bottom? The headline about Trump? It’s yet another satirical headline showing up as like hard news. In 2018. A year and a half after we were supposed to fix this sort of thing. What’s going on? So here’s a way to think about this.… Continue reading

Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is… Continue reading

A lot of past approaches to online media literacy have highlighted “debunking” and present a large a portion of cases where students debunk tree octopuses and verifiably false things. And show students how they are manipulated, etc. And this is good in the right amounts. There’s a place for it. It should comprise much of… Continue reading

Some years ago, Dan Meyer pioneered and promoted a structure of math lessons based on three “acts” that fit together in a way that gave lessons a momentum and rhythm in the way that three act structure in film gives films (or TV shows or whatever) a structure and a rhythm. The acts as I… Continue reading