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

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