👓 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 CaulfieldMike 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 CaulfieldMike 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 2: Investigate the Source | NewsWise | YouTube

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