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

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