Hapgood

Was reading the new Oxford collection on conspiracy theory (quite an impressive collection, can be bought here) and noted that one of the articles dated the term conspiracy theory back to the 1870s. It’s not central to the author’s argument, but it’s not trivial either. The author sees the term as coming out of crime, Continue reading

I wrote a thing for Neiman’s year-end journalism predictions yesterday that I’m quite excited about. Hopefully will be out soon. (Update: it’s here.) In the article I finally publish this term I’ve been throwing around in some private conversations — the “homeostatic fallacy”.  Homeostasis is a fundamental concept of biology. The typical example is human Continue reading

I often talk about the dangerous of teaching students to “recognize” fake news. Here’s a good example from today of why recognition is a lousy strategy that can lead to bad results, a tweet proposing that the President of Nigeria has been replaced with a clone. Here is how Peter Adams’s excellent newsletter The Sift  describes Continue reading

Someone asked me today whether I could share any insights about OER creation. I have a few thoughts about that, but the one I always come back to is that you have to empower teachers first. You know that thing on planes where it’s like “In case of sudden decompression, put on your own oxygen Continue reading

New article out in EDUCAUSE Review that outlines a possible open pedagogy framework. Here’s the key graphic: As long-time readers of this blog know, I may be the misinformation literacy person right now, but I came here by way of thinking about open pedagogy and its intersection with digital literacy and democracy. It’s literally my Continue reading

I’ve mentioned before that students come into the misinfo classes we teach more or less not trusting things. Here’s student trust in four stories they should have low trust in: Level one there is low trust. And that’s where the students are. That’s the dubious prompts, so that would be good if that was the Continue reading

More on this in a future post. Continue reading

A neighbor was sweeping his sidewalk, pushing tiny white rocks back into his rock garden. The sky was an uninterrupted blue. A mailman worked his way up the empty street. There were no signs of “Sharia Law.” The migrant caravan was still hundreds of miles away in Mexico. Antifa protesters had yet to descend on Continue reading

People often ask me what we can do about older people and online information literacy. Old people are not necessarily more confused than young people, but for various reasons they are positioned to do much more harm when they get things wrong. They also tend to be embedded in more ideological tribes whereas as young Continue reading