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Web Literacy For Student Fact-Checkers Wins MERLOT 2018 Classics Award
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
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We Should Put Fact-Checking Tools In the Core Browser
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
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False Positives and Fake News
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
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300+ Web Searches for Your Online Literacy Class
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
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Publishers and Platforms Need to Label Genres. Now, Please.
Today, from Medium. News about Trump! See down there at the bottom? The headline about Trump? It’s yet another satirical headline showing up as like hard news. In 2018. A year and a half after we were supposed to fix this sort of thing. What’s going on? So here’s a way to think about this. Continue reading
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How To Read Laterally: A Lesson for New York Times Columnists Including But Not Limited to Bari Weiss
Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control: Dave Rubin, a liberal commentator who favors abortion rights, opposes the death penalty and is Continue reading
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Media Literacy Is About Where To Spend Your Trust. But You Have To Spend It Somewhere.
A lot of past approaches to online media literacy have highlighted “debunking” and present a large a portion of cases where students debunk tree octopuses and verifiably false things. And show students how they are manipulated, etc. And this is good in the right amounts. There’s a place for it. It should comprise much of Continue reading
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The Three Acts of Online Media Literacy Lessons: A First Pass
Some years ago, Dan Meyer pioneered and promoted a structure of math lessons based on three “acts” that fit together in a way that gave lessons a momentum and rhythm in the way that three act structure in film gives films (or TV shows or whatever) a structure and a rhythm. The acts as I Continue reading
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Recognition Is Futile: Why Checklist Approaches to Information Literacy Fail and What To Do About It
The following is a provocation for #EngageMOOC. Thanks to Bonnie Stewart and the rest of the #EngageMOOC crew for inviting me to contribute. Whooping Cough When I was in my twenties I went to the doctor with a cough I believed was whooping cough due to the tell-tale “whoop” intake of breath that occurred after Continue reading
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From Precinct to Voter
A summary of some reading from an old Wikity page. One way of thinking about current political trends is to see them as continuations of of trends brought about by other channels and uses of data dating back to the 1960s. In this telling, data and direct access to voters first erodes the precinct level Continue reading