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

The following is a provocation for #EngageMOOC. Thanks to Bonnie Stewart and the rest of the #EngageMOOC crew for inviting me to contribute. Whooping Cough When I was in my twenties I went to the doctor with a cough I believed was whooping cough due to the tell-tale “whoop” intake of breath that occurred after… Continue reading

A summary of some reading from an old Wikity page. One way of thinking about current political trends is to see them as continuations of of trends brought about by other channels and uses of data dating back to the 1960s. In this telling, data and direct access to voters first erodes the precinct level… Continue reading

I wrote a Twitter thread today this is probably worth keeping. I reproduce it here with minor edits for clarity.  (And yes, I delete tweets eventually) ================= What McKew describes here is what researchers have been seeing in the data for ages now. Trolls, bots, and borgs aren’t just putting out fake news — they… Continue reading

  I talk about 90-second fact-checks and I think people think I’m a bit unhinged sometimes. What can students possibly do in that short amount of time that would be meaningful? A lot, actually. For example, this press release on some recent research was shared with me today: Now I want to re-share this with… Continue reading

A message I sent to a newsgroup on Facebook’s recent proposal that users could rate sites as a solution. To my surprise, I find myself suggesting they should follow Google’s model, which, while often faulty, is infinitely better than what they are proposing. ============== (Regarding the announcement), I think there’s a better, time-tested way of… Continue reading

I have a new and complete three-part activity sequence up on the Four Moves blog. It asks students to delve into whether a story about birds intentionally setting fires is an accurate summary of research cited. It goes through three steps: Evaluating the reporting source. Evaluating the research source. Checking for distortion of the source material. I… Continue reading