Tim Harford, whose work I have followed since I first got into media and statistical literacy a decade ago, has one of the best pieces yet on our post-truth moment. As we’ve often done in these pages, he traces the roots of our current crisis not to the 2016 election but to the realization in the… Continue reading

I’m a huge fan of peer-to-peer sharing systems. The whole idea of federated content takes much of its inspiration from platforms like BitTorrent, and I’ve repeatedly argued here that the future belongs to platforms that look more like IPFS than Dropbox. (In fact, if you read this blog, this was probably where you first heard… Continue reading

I missed this when Jim put it up, but Martha Burtis’s keynote abstract is up for the Domains conference: Four years into Domain of One’s Own, I wonder if we are at an inflection point, and, if so, what we will do to respond to this moment. At its onset, Domains offered us paths into… Continue reading

I’ve put my tweets on a rolling auto-delete, which probably means I’ll be doing ocassional shorter pieces in this space in addition to longer pieces. For posterity, or something. Anyway, a thought for the day. As we think about the firehose of the Stream — that never-ending reverse-chronological scroll of events that has become the… Continue reading

I’ve been investigating Google snippets lately, based on some work that other people have done. These are the “cards” that pop up on top sometimes, giving the user what appears to be the “one true answer”. What’s shocking to me is not that Google malfunctions in producing these, but how often it malfunctions, and how… Continue reading

There’s lots of primary causes of the recent assault on truth that are non-technological. In fact, most causes have very little to do with technology. I’d point people to the excellent book The Merchants of Doubt which details the well-funded and and well-planned corporate assault on science that began as early as the 1950s around the issue… Continue reading

I have a simple web literacy model. When confronted with a dubious claim: Check for previous fact-checking work Go upstream to the source Read laterally That’s it. There’s a couple admonitions in there to check your emotions and think recursively, but these three things — check previous work,  go upstream, read laterally — are the… Continue reading

Maha Bali has a great post on getting to the source of faked Trump video. She does a great job narrating her process, along with reflecting on it, so I’ll just suggest you go to her blog and read it now. It’s well worth your time. In particular, two things jump out at me —… Continue reading

I’m sitting here starting an argument with you and you are starting an argument with me. I am against expressive social media, I say. I think it is making us very dumb and we should use other forms of social media to teach kids. “But, Mike,” you may be thinking, “why are you so binary,… Continue reading

I’ve generally kept my advocacy for the Lead-Crime Hypothesis off this blog. This is a blog about web-enabled education, after all. But today I can probably get away with it because there’s a web literacy connection. Seriously, I promise. For those who don’t know the lead-crime hypothesis, it goes like this: the massive crime wave… Continue reading