Tag: Mike Caulfield

Bookmarked Opinion | Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole by Charlie Warzel (nytimes.com)

Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation.

Warzel profiles Mike Caulfield and his work with four moves and SIFT.

SIFT has its limits. It’s designed for casual news consumers, not experts or those attempting to do deep research. A reporter working on an investigative story or trying to synthesize complex information will have to go deep. But for someone just trying to figure out a basic fact, it’s helpful not to get bogged down. “We’ve been trained to think that Googling or just checking one resource we trust is almost like cheating,” he said. “But when people search Google, the best results may not always be first, but the good information is usually near the top. Often you see a pattern in the links of a consensus that’s been formed. But deeper into the process, it often gets weirder. It’s important to know when to stop.”

It is interesting to think about this alongside pieces from Tim Harford and Edward Snowden which both emphasise the importance of curiosity. Caulfield is not against curiousity, but instead about not being pulled down the rabbit hole.

That natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy. It allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. “Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective,” Mr. Caulfield wrote.

Replied to

Bookmarked Blended Content Studio (emergencyonline.blog)

A week or so ago, a video I made for an internal course here went viral, and many people (a hundred or so?) tracked down my email and asked to be a part of it.

It occurred to me that both those emailing and many at WSU would benefit from having access to all the materials outside of the Canvas course shell. Not the quizzes and not the recorded sessions, but the videos and text in a meaningful sequence.

I am publishing this today with a couple hours that miraculously was not scheduled and there seems to be no current emergency. All the same, I do apologize that this will be put up in a basic form that wouldn’t meet course standards if I was teaching a public course. But I hope it’s useful.

The course consists of three core modules, structured around the Connect, Explain, Engage concept:

Mike Caulfield breaks down some of the pieces associated with the structure of blended learning and some consideration in regards to the creation of video content. I really like how he addresses the different options, as well as things to consider. I find reading these pieces useful in that it forces me each time to reconsider my thoughts.

Some things that stood out to me were the use of unlisted YouTube videos:

I use unlisted YouTube videos for a lot of my materials. It’s not secure — anyone with the link can watch it. But for things where I don’t care who sees it, it’s a good technique for sharing course video.

Nudging up the personal ‘you’:

whatever volume you normally do “you” — you need to nudge it up just a bit if you are recording a video of any length. There’s something that asynchronous video does where it shaves of a bit of enthusiasm, a bit of emotion. Something about it being recorded.

Or maybe it’s when we don’t have an energy on the other end of the conversation, when we don’t have that audience energy, we just don’t give it our all?

Online time is different to face-to-face time:

So maybe divide it by 1.6, or 1.5. Two hours and 40 minutes of class might be replaced by 1 hr and 36 minutes of explanatory video. If you add in questions or activities in between the videos — short quizzes, reflection, discussion prompts, it’s even less. You might end up with 50 minutes of video and 50 minutes of reflection/quizzing. And as long as the videos are introducing new material and concepts in a concise way, this holds whether the videos you’re asking students to watch were made by you or someone else.

Importance of signalling, segmenting and weeding:

We talked about signalling, where we use one channel of audiovisual communication to help students organize another. Segmenting, where we give students a chance to process information periodically. And weeding, where we remove extraneous material that might be confusing to students.

A couple additional things: speak quickly (speech on video seems slower than in person). Give a sense of immediacy, the sense you’re talking to the specific person listening at a time approaching now. And we talked about this a bit in terms of segmenting, but give the students opportunities for active learning. You don’t learn what you don’t integrate, and integration is linked to doing, not listening.

Liked Just Add Wikipedia! by mikecaulfield (siftingthroughtheoutbreak.wordpress.com)

So if we didn’t know Vox already, what would we do? I’m going to show you a move called “Just add Wikipedia”.

So we come up here and we hover, and we see the Vox link and follow it to the site. But rather than read the site we immediately do this — we go up to the search bar and strip off everything after the domain and type space plus wikipedia and hit return.

Bookmarked Introducing SIFT, a Four Moves Acronym (Hapgood)

Don’t CRAAP, SIFT

Mike Caulfield continues with his development of the ‘Four Moves‘ associated with fake news and web literacy. He has introduced an acronym that can be used to remember the moves: SIFT.

  • (S)TOP
  • (I)nvestigate the Source
  • (F)ind better coverage
  • (T)race claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

Caulfield sums up this change as “Don’t CRAAP, SIFT.”

Liked Data Voids and the Google This Ploy: Kalergi Plan (Hapgood)

Let students know that all search terms should be carefully chosen, and ideally formed using terms associated with the quality and objectivity of the information you want back. Googling “9/11 hoax” is unlikely to provide you reliable information on the 9/11 attacks, as people who study 9/11 don’t refer to it as a hoax. In a similar vein, “black on white crime”, the term that began the radicalization of the Charleston church shooter, is a term used by many neo-Nazis but does not feature prominently in academic analysis of crime patterns. Medical misinformation is similar — if you search for information on “aborted fetuses” in vaccines when there are not aborted fetuses in vaccines the people you’re going to end up reading are irresponsible, uneducated kooks.

Liked Attention Is the Scarcity by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

The primary skill of a person in an attention-scarce environment is making relatively quick decisions about what to turn their attention toward, and making longer term decisions about how to construct their media environment to provide trustworthy information.

Bookmarked Why Reputation? by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

I have a reputation, which is the trace of past events and current relationships in a social system. But that reputation isn’t really separate from the techniques others use to decode and utilize my reputation for decision-making.

This relationship is synergistic.

Responding to Xiao Mina’s reflection on dissensus, Mike Caulfield discusses the challenge of reputation.
Liked The Homeostatic Fallacy and Misinformation Literacy by mikecaulfield (Hapgood)

the goal of disinformation isn’t really around these individual transactions. The goal of disinformation is to, over time, change our psychological set-points. To the researcher looking at individuals at specific points in time, the homeostasis looks protective — fire up Mechanical Turk, see what people believe, give them information or disinformation, see what changes. What you’ll find is nothing changes — set-points are remarkably resilient.

But underneath that, from year to year, is drift. And its the drift that matters.

Liked In the Web’s Hyperreality, Information Is Experience (Hapgood)

But whatever your take, I encourage you to think of disinformation in this way, at least for a bit  — not as the spread of false information, but as the hacking of the simulated reality which we all must necessarily inhabit. As something that does not just change knowledge, but which produces new life experiences as real as the the Iraq War, your neighbor’s fight with cancer, or your child’s illness. To see it in this way is perhaps more terrifying, but ultimately necessary as we attempt to address the problem.

Replied to 👓 Does anyone else keep their own knowledge wiki? | Lobsters by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)

Replied to Does anyone else keep their own knowledge wiki? by nikivi (lobste.rs)
I’ve been extending and improving my personal wiki for 1 year now and it has been one of the best things I’ve done. I found writing blog posts was too high friction and very often didn’t finish things because th…

I really like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity theme. I reflected upon my experience here. I decided though to incorporate it into my ‘Collect’ site. My only point of confusion about the blog versus wiki is that Wikity is in fact built around ‘posts’ and WordPress.
Liked It’s Not About the “Heat” of the Rhetoric, It’s About Its Toxicity by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

Meanwhile, post by post, click by click, people of all ages are being slowly groomed into conspiracy cultures that turn fear into violence and authoritarian rule. Once people’s reality is warped in this way, bringing them back is difficult, and yet we are moving at a snail’s pace on educational and technological fronts. The media is still talking about the problem as if the core was people being impolite. The world slowly slides toward a dark future, across the globe. We have educational solutions (just read the rest of this blog) but they remain un-deployed or under-deployed.

Liked We’re Thinking About This Backwards (Hapgood)

While mass education is good and should be pursued as a long-term solution, if I was going to target our online literacy immediately and had a limited number of seats, I would target it at everyone that will find their way to positions of influence. Politicians. Policy leads. Product managers at tech startups. Future FBI agents and social workers and department heads. I would look at the gears of democratic institutions — political, civic, administrative — and see who has their hands on the levers, from the mid-level bureaucrats to the top.

Liked A Short History of CRAAP (Hapgood)

In 2002, Chico State University did a little rearranging and got the letters into the CRAAP acronym. Others organized the questions into RADCAB.

And we taught this and its variations for almost twenty years even though it did not work, and most librarians I’ve talked to realized it didn’t work many years back but didn’t know what else to do.

Liked A Roll-Up of Digipo Resources (4 September 2018) (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 old blogposts a just a snapshot in time, and often out of date.

Another interesting take on Mike Caulfield’s current work is his post ‘The Fast and Frugal Needs of the Online Reader‘.
Bookmarked The “Always Check” Approach to Online Literacy (Hapgood)

One of the things I’ve been trying to convince people for the past year and a half is that the only viable literacy solution to web misinformation involves always checking any information in your stream that you find interesting, emotion-producing, or shareable. It’s not enough to check the stuff that is suspicious: if you apply your investigations selectively, you’ve already lost the battle.

Mike Caulfield continues his work on fact checking arguing that we need to develop the habit of doing check every time we engage with a new link. He makes the comparison with checking your rear view mirrors when driving.

Now imagine a world where checking your mirrors before switching lanes was rare, three standard-deviations-out behavior. What would the roads look like?

Caulfield focuses on two what is the site and is this new correct true. In a world where abundance is only a click away, maybe we are at a point where it is time to reassess what that actually means.

Bookmarked A Provocation for the Open Pedagogy Community (Hapgood)

All my former university hosted sites are gone. We built up a WPMU instance at Keene in 2010, and the lack of broad adoption meant when I left in 2013 we shut it down. I ran some wiki on university servers here and at Keene, and those are gone too.

All my self-hosted sites are corrupted from hacks or transfer errors in imports. Go back into this blog and you’ll find sparse posting schedule for some years between 2010 and 2012 and it’s because those posts got nuked in a 2012 hack. I had to go out to the Wayback Machine and reconstruct the important ones by hand.

Responding to Dave Winer’s news that Harvard are closing down blogs.harvard.edu, the first academic blog hosting space, Mike Caulfield wonders about the temporal nature of institutional and self hosting. He discusses the multitude of sites that have now disappeared as they were either closed or corrupted. This is something he has discussed before. It makes me wonder whether things are any different now? It also makes me wonder about the Domain of One’s Own project and the IndieWeb, what happens when we move out of our homes? What does it mean to have a canonical link or keep a digital commonplace book?
Bookmarked The “They Had Their Minds Made Up Anyway” Excuse by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

If Facebook was a tool for confirmation bias, that would kind of suck. It would. But that is not the claim. The claim is that Facebook is quite literally training us to be conspiracy theorists. And given the history of what happens when conspiracy theory and white supremacy mix, that should scare the hell out of you. I’m petrified. Mark Zuckerberg should be too.

Mike Caulfield explains the dangers of fake news and the way in which the repetition and familiarity with such lies can lead to an odd sense of truth.

People exposed themselves to Facebook multiple times a day, every single day, seeing headlines making all sorts of crazy claims, and filed them in their famil-o-meter for future reference.

Bookmarked Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos (Hapgood)

As I say — it’s the internet — you’re not stuck with that one story that comes to you. By going out and actively choosing a better story you will not only filter out false stories but also see the variety of ways an event is being covered.

Mike Caulfield shares a series of videos summarising his work around Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. Although it only touches on the basics, it still provides a useful introduction to the ‘Four Moves’ approach.