fact checking | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Episode 009 – Mike Caulfield: Engaging Students in Media Literacy | Media and the End of the World Podcast

Listened to Episode 009 – Mike Caulfield: Engaging Students in Media Literacy by Adam Croom and Ralph Beliveau from Media and the End of the World Podcast

Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative at the American Democracy Project and director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, joins us today to talk about engaging students in media literacy. He recently published the open Creative Commons licensed textbook “Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.”

Show Notes

Refactoring media literacy for the networked age (Nieman Lab)

Digital Polarization Project

Hapgood (Mike’s blog)

Referenced blog posts:

I’m Writing a Book On the Disinfotopia of Social Media

Despite Zuckerberg’s Protests, Fake News Does Better on Facebook Than Real News. Here’s Data to Prove It.

Wikity, One Year Later

Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers (Mike’s book)

Hapgood is such a fantastic blog that while scrolling through the back catalog of Media and the End of the World episodes to see what might be interesting, I naturally put this one at the top of the list. I’m definitely not sorry. Caulfield’s work always gives me some hope that we can fix things in a broken world.

📑 How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes | Nieman Lab

Annotated How The Wall Street Journal is preparing its journalists to detect deepfakes (Nieman Lab)

As deepfakes make their way into social media, their spread will likely follow the same pattern as other fake news stories. In a MIT study investigating the diffusion of false content on Twitter published between 2006 and 2017, researchers found that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truth in all categories of information.” False stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth and reached 1,500 people six times more quickly than accurate articles. ❧

This sort of research should make it easier to find and stamp out from the social media side of things. We need regulations to actually make it happen however.

👓 Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos | Hapgood

Replied to Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

I worked with Civix, a Canadian non-profit, to do a series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization. I had boiled it down to four scripts runnin…

As I read this and tinker around a bit with some of the resources, including one for canadafactcheck.ca mentioned within one of the videos and add the “Wikipedia” to the Omnibar or try the “-site:” trick, the results there aren’t very solid themselves. Similarly a search for NewsWise.ca is rough because there are dozens of similar products with the same name which makes me think about the phrase “Doctor heal thyself.”

On the idea of the “-site:xyz.com” trick, perhaps one could create a browser extension or a bookmarklet that would use javascript to take the URL in the browser bar and massage it to return the requisite string and then execute the appropriate search so that with a simple click of a button, anyone can “remember” how to do it?

Similarly with searching for the root URLs of particular outlets by clipping off the longer paths of URLs one could use a browser bookmarklet to accomplish this with a simple click and save the seconds involved with highlighting and pasting? The more dead simple and quicker it can be, the better off we are. I’ve documented a browser bookmarklet on my site that trims news article URLs down to the base URL: https://boffosocko.com/2017/03/27/to-amp-or-not-to-amp-that-is-the-question/

As an example of this type of functionality, albiet probably with a lot more programming and manual work, Brill’s company NewsGuard has developed a Chrome browser extension that is meant to provide visual indicators on pages and in search for levels of fact checking: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newsguard/hcgajcpgaalgpeholhdooeddllhedegi?hl=en

👓 A Roll-Up of Digipo Resources (4 September 2018) | Hapgood

Read A Roll-Up of Digipo Resources (4 September 2018) by

Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

One of the nice things about running a blog-fueled grassroots semi-funded initiative is the agility. The Digipo project has moved far and fast in the past year. But one of the bad things is all the…

📺 Online Verification Skills — Video 4: Look for Trusted Work | NewsWise | YouTube

Watched Online Verification Skills — Video 4: Look for Trusted Work by

Mike Caulfield from NewsWise | YouTube

“It’s the internet! You can go out and find a better story and invest your time in that.” –Mike Caulfield

📺 Online Verification Skills — Video 3: Find the Original Source | NewsWise | YouTube

Watched Online Verification Skills — Video 3: Find the Original Source by

Mike Caulfield from NewsWise | YouTube

📺 Online Verification Skills — Video 2: Investigate the Source | NewsWise | YouTube

Watched Online Verification Skills — Video 2: Investigate the Source by

Mike Caulfield from NewsWise | YouTube

NewsWise is a news literacy program to provide school-aged Canadians an understanding of the role of journalism in a healthy democracy and the tools to find and filter information online.

For those who like browser bookmarklets and shortcuts, I’ve dug up some code that will take a URL and automatically remove the additional path (as demonstrated manually in the video) to leave you with the base URL. It can be found here on my site: https://boffosocko.com/2017/03/27/to-amp-or-not-to-amp-that-is-the-question/. Perhaps it will help people verify sites even quicker?

📺 Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video | NewsWise | YouTube

Watched Online Verification Skills — Video 1: Introductory Video by

Mike Caulfield from NewsWise | YouTube

The Stanford research report, Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information, can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048994

NewsWise is a news literacy program to provide school-aged Canadians an understanding of the role of journalism in a healthy democracy and the tools to find and filter information online. Visit http://newswise.ca/ for more information and resources. NewsWise is the product of a partnership between CIVIX and the Canadian Journalism Foundation, with the support of the Google.org Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation.

👓 The Persistent Myth of Insurmountable Tribalism Will Kill Us All | Hapgood

Read The Persistent Myth of Insurmountable Tribalism Will Kill Us All by

Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

You know what I don’t see in my classes — in a Republican district, where a nontrivial number of students don’t believe in climate change? Any reaction of the sort that you “can’t trust the site because declining sea ice and climate change is a myth.” Not one. It’s not just a Republican thing. We find the same thing with prompts for liberal hot-button issues on GMOs. Students — many of whom are very committed to “natural” products and lifestyles — make accurate assessments of the lack of credibility of sites supporting their opinions. They believe this stuff, maybe, but admit the given site is not a good source.

After some of the depression of reading the entire Knight Foundation paper last night, this short vignette about Mike’s work in the trenches gives me a lot of hope. I wish I had read it last night before retiring.

I’ll be bookmarking some additional sources today/tomorrow from the paper as well as from Mike’s work and various links.

For those interested in misinformation, journalism, authority, trust, verification, fact checking, etc., the MisInfoCon is going on this week in Washington. Some interesting things in the Twitter feed for #misinfocon.

It’s a Hacks/Hackers project.

Some of the details might be useful for digital pedagogy settings as well. May make an interesting project for those in EDU522 especially if you’re considering the hoax website assignment?