When I say you can fact check a lot of things in one to two minutes, I mean, literally, one to two minutes. Here’s an example:   You can sit around and think critically about whether this is possible all day, of course. But the easiest way to debunk this is to discover that the… Continue reading

For many years, the underlying thesis of the tech world has been that there is too much information and therefore we need technology to surface the best information. In the mid 2000s, that technology was pitched as Web 2.0. Nowadays, the solution is supposedly AI. I’m increasingly convinced, however, that our problem is not information… Continue reading

The idea of the fact-checking activity in the Digital Polarization Initiative is simple: civic education as public work. The education piece is simple: students learn how to tell truth from fiction on the web through checking our claims and investigating questions. We have a short textbook on that that they can read in a week.… Continue reading

As you may know, one of the great innovations of the 2016 election season was the use of fake “local” papers like the Denver Guardian to spread fake news: The Denver Guardian, as we all now know, was a completely fake site that only published this single page. The page was shared on Facebook over… Continue reading

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