Ultimately one of the prime goals of the Newspapers on Wikipedia project (#NOW) is to make sure that significant local publications have an infocard, and thereby are more likely to generate a Google panel in the search results. But that’s not the first, or hardest step. The first, and more difficult, step is to establish the… Continue reading

TL;DR: I am announcing a project to get students and faculty to produce 1,000 new Wikipedia articles on significant English-language local newspapers by October 12, 2018. This will represent a substantial increase in Wikipedia coverage of these papers (An increase of 1,000 U.S. papers would be almost a 40% increase in U.S. coverage, for example).… Continue reading

Like many people I watched Google’s demo of their new Android system AI calling up a hair stylist and making an appointment with trepidation — was this ethical, to not disclose that it was an AI? But now that the smoke has cleared, I’m realizing something a bit more disturbing. After years of Big Data … Continue reading

One thing people may not realize is I use the exact same techniques we teach to students in my daily work. The skills we are giving students aren’t some dumbed-down protocol. They are great habits for reporters, researchers, and other professionals as well. As an example, this article came up in my news alerts this… Continue reading

One thing we do in the Digital Polarization Initiative is to hone the actions we encourage students to take down to their most efficient form. Efficient meaning: easy to memorize quick to execute with a high likelihood of providing a direct answer to the question you have Our student fact-checkers rely heavily on Wikipedia, and… Continue reading

Today, OLC Innovate leadership requested feedback from attendees on the issues of data collection and privacy raised by (among other things) the attendee tracking badges and session check-in procedure. I replied in email but am republishing it here, lightly edited: I’m really glad to see you considering privacy issues, and mostly wanted to just thank… Continue reading

Just a short note to say thank you to MERLOT’s review committee on ICT Literacy which awarded Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers the 2018 MERLOT Classics award in that category this past Thursday. It’s one of eight MERLOT Classics awards given out this year, with other awards in the areas of Biology, Teacher Education, Psychology, Sociology… Continue reading

Years ago when the web was young, Netscape (Google it, noobs!) decided on its metaphor for the browser: it was a “navigator”. The logo and imagery borrowed heavily from the metaphor of navigation, really coming to the fore with the release of Navigator 2.0, but continuing — with some brief interruptions — late into its… Continue reading

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