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

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

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

I imagine readers here will do fine with this, but it’s something you might want to try with your students. Ask them this: Can they spot the advertisement on this page? (click to enlarge). Even better, show them a couple of these and ask if there is any advertising on the page. Continue reading

It’s a wiki, so it’s messy, with a lot of duds. But as we get towards the end of the semester/quarter, a number of classes are showing up and adding pages (often as group work, so one page = multiple users). Here’s a list of articles in various states. Expect incomplete work when you click… Continue reading

People wonder why I do so many reverse image searches as activities. The answer is bit complex, so hang with me a second. The reason isn’t that reverse image searches are the most important thing or the easiest thing. They’re pretty rare stuff. The reason I use them is they are a powerfully clear example… Continue reading

Something I’m fascinated with right now — expressive responding in polls. Consider this chart which recently made the rounds: That’s right, after the election, Republican confidence in the economy skyrocketed, from -46 to +27. Meanwhile, Democratic confidence moderately declined. But what does that mean, really? Does that mean that partisan identity is so strong that… Continue reading

Today’s assignment: Was novel reading a reason for admitting women into an asylum in the 1800s?   Continue reading

So, given the Twitter user name on this one, you can probably ignore it. But just in case an uncle at Thanksgiving wants to know, what are these pictures really of? Where do they come from? Here’s a picture for you to source: Continue reading

My University of Mary Washington talk was exciting because it was new territory, but a tad less concise than I generally like. It was about an hour. That’s too bad about the length, because the talk was a really great introduction to the subject, and I need an intro I can link to for beginners.… Continue reading