https://lucybellwood.com/never-again/

Knowing how to read without the associated apparatus of the trivium, leaves people open to believing just about anything. You can read words, but knowing what to do with those words, endow them with meaning, and reason with them. (summarization)

Oral cultures with knowledge systems engrained into them would likely have included trivium-esque structures to allow their users to not only better remember to to better think and argue.

Spreading misinformation and disinformation is really easy in this day and age because of how accessible information is and how much of it there is on the web. This is explained precisely by Edgerly. Noted in this part of the article, there is a business for the spread of disinformation, particularly in our country. There are people who pay what we call online trolls, to spread disinformation and capitalize on how “chronically online” Filipinos are, among many other factors (i.e., most Filipinos’ information illiteracy due to poverty and lack of educational attainment, how easy it is to interact with content we see online, regardless of its authenticity, etc.). Disinformation also leads to misinformation through word-of-mouth. As stated by Edgerly in this article, “people tend to believe in information… shared by their immediate families and friends”; because of people’s human nature to trust the information shared by their loved ones, if one is not information literate, they will not question their newly received information. Lastly, it most certainly does not help that social media algorithms nowadays rely on what users interact with; the more that a user interacts with a certain information, the more that social media platforms will feed them that information. It does not help because not all social media websites have fact checkers and users can freely spread disinformation if they chose to.

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.

On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

On the need for disinformation educations

...but what is the difference "between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion"

I find it interesting that Amanda's name is the only name mentioned in the New York Post's headline. Not the killer's, nor the victim's, Meredith Kercher. Even though this same New York Post, published an article on March 27, 2015 of Amanda's acquittal. The headline should read, "Rudy Guede, the man who murdered Meredith Kercher, Freed on Community Service." In my opinion the New York Post continues to use her name because it's probably more recognizable, than the others, and they need to sell papers. It's marketing! Doesn't make it right though. But geesh! Give Meredith some respect!

Dame Adjin-Tettey, T. (2022). Combating fake news, disinformation, and misinformation: Experimental evidence for media literacy education. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 9(1), 2037229. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2022.2037229

Study: Digital literacy doesn’t stop the spread of misinformation. (n.d.). MIT Sloan. Retrieved January 12, 2022, from https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/study-digital-literacy-doesnt-stop-spread-misinformation

https://teach.kqed.org/

Sirlin, N., Epstein, Z., Arechar, A. A., & Rand, D. (2021). Digital literacy and susceptibility to misinformation. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7rb2m

But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modem communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I sort of want the ability to more easily capture audio, annotate and save it while I'm listening to radio or even television. Pausing the media and having the ability to reply it (TIVO and some DVRs provide this capability) and do other things with it would be truly fantastic, especially for saving tidbits for later use and consumption.

In fact, HTML makes it very easy (true for the reasons that lead Mark to write that it can be copied and manipulated). It's contemporary authoring systems and the typical author-as-publisher and the choices they make that are what makes this difficult.

The future of rich media lies in striving to be more like dead media (or at least mining it for insights by better understanding it through thoughtful study), rather than the misguided attempts we've been living inside.

(This is something that I've done a 180 on in the last year or so.)

Helmus, Todd C., James V. Marrone, Marek N. Posard, and Danielle Schlang. ‘Russian Propaganda Hits Its Mark: Experimentally Testing the Impact of Russian Propaganda and Counter-Interventions’, 15 October 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA704-3.html.

Krupenkin, Masha, Kai Zhu, Dylan Walker, and David M. Rothschild. ‘If a Tree Falls in the Forest: COVID-19, Media Choices, and Presidential Agenda Setting’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 22 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3697069.

Simone, Costanza De, Antonella Battisti, and Azzurra Ruggeri. “Differential Impact of Web Habits and Active Navigation on Adolescents’ Online Learning.” PsyArXiv, March 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hsvc4.

Brashier, N. M., & Schacter, D. L. (2020). Aging in an Era of Fake News. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 0963721420915872. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420915872

Bode, L., & Vraga, E. (2020 May 7). Analysis | Americans are fighting coronavirus misinformation on social media. Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/07/americans-are-fighting-coronavirus-misinformation-social-media/

The Associated Press (2020, May 8). UN Chief Says Pandemic Is Unleashing a “Tsunami of Hate.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/08/world/ap-un-virus-outbreak-hate-speech.html

• 0:37 - need to recognize the networked nature of today's media
• 0:37 - need to recognize the networked nature of today's media
• 0:48 - work within traditional media literacy and build on things that have worked for decades, but recognize what has changed and use the strengths of networked media
• 1:05 - how do children check sources on the internet
• 1:20 - one of the simplest ways is to follow the links back to the source
• 1:34 - when it's a photo, you can do a reverse image search
• 1:50 can do a news search and sort by date to see if the news story is current
• 2:45 - misinformation campaigns happening - mixing genuine content with misinformation
• 3:25 - some create alternate identities or fake accounts
• 4:25 - important to get a sense of how reliable a source is
• 4:35 - what is the purpose of the source and what is their business model? - is there accuracy and reliability in this, then likely will trust it as a source

• 5:10 - impact that we don't get our news from a limited number of sources
• 5:45 - some of these sources are from friends on social media, others are algorithmically determined
• 6:08 - some advantages and disadvantages - the old model was news curated in a newspaper; new model has the potential of getting news we may not have gotten in the old model
• 6:20 but in the old system you had gatekeeping and 'provenance'; in online news it's sometimes an effort to see where the information originates; gate keeping falls to us now
• 7:05 we need to train young people to do this
• 7:30 how should we teach this?
• 7:35 - with the concept approach you don't need to feel like an expert

• 7:40 - success teaching media literacy from the key concepts for three decades; begin from these
• 7:52 - media are constructed;
• 7:55 - they have commercial considerations;
• 7:58 they have social and political implications;
• 8:00 that audiences negotiate meaning;
• 8:05 that each medium has a unique form and the form influences the content
• 8:20 these can be applied to any form of media and adapted to any grade from K-12

• 8:30 so the key concepts of digital literacy are paralleled and are in addition to those, they don't replace the original five concepts
• 8:40 now have implications of digital literacies in that they are networked so we need to understand the idea of the network
• 8:50 understand that content now is shareable, that this is the default rather than the exception
• 8:55 - the ways the tools we use influence not just the content but the ways we use them
• 9:05 - this has an impact, an ethical dimension
• 9:10 - these can be applied in any context and to any grade level
• 9:20 - we have a full digital literacy curriculum that we offer (speaking about Media Smarts Canada); it has lessons on seven different aspects that a teacher or school board can use
• 9:45 - the value of the key concepts is teachers can modify these resources to their contexts
• 9:50 - teachers have in those key concepts what is essentially a GUIDING STAR to understand what they are supposed to be achieving with these lessons

Seems like this is a critical assumption to examine for current media literacy/misinformation discussions. As networks become very large and very flat, does this assumption of reciprocity and good faith hold? (I'm thinking, here, of people whose expertise I trust in one domain but perhaps not in another, or the fact that sometimes I'm talking to one part of my network and not really "actively seeking information" for other parts.)

what is this?

When students are shown quick techniques for judging the veracity of a news source, they will use them. Regardless of their existing beliefs, they will distinguish good sources from bad sources.

https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/

Teaching media literacy is an important skill!

Is this a problem with media literacy? Or does it stem from a mindless bias against Wikipedia? The problem described sounds like literacy taught poorly.

never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

...

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling. It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information.

The Web has become an insidious propaganda tool. To fight it, digital literacy education must rise beyond technical proficiency to include wisdom.

• Double-check every claim before you share.
• Be wary of casual scrolling.<br> Everything you see affects your attitudes.
• Don't automatically disbelieve the surreal (or unpleasant).
• Do not exaggerate your own claims.
• Be prepared to repeat the truth over and over.
• Curate good resources, and share updates to them.
  • It will reinforce the previous information.
  • it will boost search engine rankings of the collection.

Everything listed here is important. Are we skipping too quickly past what is commonly called media literacy? Does choosing appropriate images include these considerations--for example, who made the image, for what purpose, with which viewpoints included or excluded, etc.? http://www.medialit.org/reading-room/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry

The possibilities of digital writing, given the WYSIWYG interface above, allow for students to integrate a variety of media into their own annotation compositions. Moreover, this use of media is not simply illustrative but as an integral part of the overall argument.