There’s a too-long-Twitter-canoe that is getting into questions of whether use of commercial services are of the faith or not. It’s a worthwhile discussion, but I thought I’d bolt from it and put something on the blog instead. A while ago I decided I wanted to work with one of our most technology-phobic faculty here.… Continue reading

Went to IndieWebCamp this weekend, just for a little bit, mainly to listen to the keynotes and hang out with Ward Cunningham and Pete Forsyth. I love the work these people are doing, but I wanted to kick back against one myth there I see repeated over and over. There are a whole bunch of… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

After talking with Jon Udell and re-reading an old post of mine on storage-neutral web-infrastructure I realize I can make an old point much easier. So here goes: Make Servers Dumb Again. You’ve heard of the Dumb Terminal, right? The idea that a terminal wouldn’t do anything but display stuff composed on centralized servers? Well,… Continue reading

I spent some time over the past few weeks looking into Search Engine Optimization. Why? Because we’re trying to motivate students to do their best work for our fact-checking project, and one of the big motivations is knowing that you have a page that people are actually using to get answers to questions. So if… Continue reading

I live in the Portland metro area; if the traffic isn’t bad I can make it from my doorstep to Powell’s in about 20 minutes. If the traffic is bad, my family sometimes parks the car at the park & ride at Parkrose, and takes the MAX in. People don’t realize how small Portland is,… Continue reading

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

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

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

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