Hapgood

I wrote a Twitter thread today this is probably worth keeping. I reproduce it here with minor edits for clarity.  (And yes, I delete tweets eventually) ================= What McKew describes here is what researchers have been seeing in the data for ages now. Trolls, bots, and borgs aren’t just putting out fake news — they Continue reading

  I talk about 90-second fact-checks and I think people think I’m a bit unhinged sometimes. What can students possibly do in that short amount of time that would be meaningful? A lot, actually. For example, this press release on some recent research was shared with me today: Now I want to re-share this with Continue reading

A message I sent to a newsgroup on Facebook’s recent proposal that users could rate sites as a solution. To my surprise, I find myself suggesting they should follow Google’s model, which, while often faulty, is infinitely better than what they are proposing. ============== (Regarding the announcement), I think there’s a better, time-tested way of Continue reading

I have a new and complete three-part activity sequence up on the Four Moves blog. It asks students to delve into whether a story about birds intentionally setting fires is an accurate summary of research cited. It goes through three steps: Evaluating the reporting source. Evaluating the research source. Checking for distortion of the source material. I Continue reading

The way that machine learning works is basically this: you input some models, let’s say of what tables look like, and then the code generates some things it thinks are tables. You click yes on the things that look like tables and the code reinforces the processes that made those and makes some more attempts. Continue reading

I wrote a prediction a couple weeks ago for Nieman Lab, and it was general and media literacy focused. But here’s some more mundane, somewhat U.S.-centric predictions: Social media overrun by AI. AI’s main influence in the coming year will not be in driving cars but in driving state-sponsored social bots and corporate astroturfing. The ability of AI Continue reading

When you’re confronted with a news claim you want to verify, you have a lot of options. Generally, the first move of our four move method is to look for previous work. Find a fact-check or a reliable article from a local or well-resourced publication that’s already done the verification for you. The easiest way Continue reading

New Video. Using Wikipedia to investigate sources is a core technique. In this one we show what verifying a traditional news source in Wikipedia looks like. Continue reading

  I do a lot of work that I don’t cover here — in particular, I’m slowly putting together curriculum for the American Democracy Project on what the Stanford History Education Group calls Civic Online Reasoning. (I don’t show a lot of this work here because anything I publish on this blog alters the search Continue reading

New Twitter assignment. A claim is made here. Who is the source of it? What are their qualifications? Link to tweet is here. Bonus question: Can you find a better source for this comparison? Comments closed. To answer, tweet me @holden on Twitter. Continue reading