One of the things I’ve been trying to convince people for the past year and a half is that the only viable literacy solution to web misinformation involves always checking any information in your stream that you find interesting, emotion-producing, or shareable. It’s not enough to check the stuff that is suspicious: if you apply your investigations… Continue reading

I have been talking about Pinterest as a disinformation platform for a long time, so this article on QAnon memes on Pinterest is not surprising at all: Many of those users also pinned QAnon memes. The net effect is a community of middle-aged women, some with hundreds of followers, pinning style tips and parfait recipes… Continue reading

Dave Winer has a great post today on the closing of blogs.harvard.edu. These are sites run by Berkman, some dating back to 2003, which are being shut down. My galaxy brain goes towards the idea of federation, of course. The idea that everything referencing something should store a copy of what it references connected by… Continue reading

Thanks to initial work by folks at Wellesley and Wikidata work from 9of99 on Wikipedia, the Newspapers on Wikipedia project has both created an initial Wikidata set of extant U.S. Newspapers and mapped that to needs for page and infobox creation. The full set is here and can be queried in multiple ways: http://tinyurl.com/yb6sng9e Visually… Continue reading

So I forgot to report this, but I put together a team and submitted a proposal to the Rita Allen Misinformation Solutions Forum contest, and our project was chosen out of all the submissions as one of five finalists. I’ll be going to D.C. in October to pitch it in a competition for one of… Continue reading

I was putting together materials for my online media literacy class and I was about to pull this video, which has half a million views and proposes that AIDS is the “greatest lie of the 21st century.” According to the video, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, retrovirals do (I think that was the point, I honestly… Continue reading

A lot of people support the Newspapers on Wikipedia Project, but only a tiny fraction of supporters participate. Why? I know so many people in open pedagogy that have never edited Wikipedia. I know you live with secret shame. So why not address that? Why not make this your first Wikipedia project? We’ll make it… Continue reading

The Newspapers on Wikipedia Project is moving forward. If you don’t know what the project is about, read the brief summary on the WikiProject page, and then maybe this short Poynter story which I think explains the project more concisely than I typically have. If you’re not into clicking links, the best summary I can… Continue reading

This is sped up, but an introduction to how to start a local newspaper page on Wikipedia. It’s not meant to introduce people to Wikipedia as much as the process of slowly building out an article based on quality sources. We really need faculty and students who are willing to sign up for our project… Continue reading

Early on in the Digital Polarization Project we had students do large info-environmentalism projects, and we still do that sometimes. But I’ve become convinced that the more sustainable change is in simpler actions — stuff you can do in a few hours or even a few seconds. Here’s an example from today — I was… Continue reading