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14 Dec 09

Teacher Guides: Can You Trust the News? - Teacher Guide - News - NewsTrust.net

"How can you help your students become discerning news consumers and well-informed citizens? How do you teach them to recognize the difference between good journalism and misinformation?

This teacher guide will show you how to teach core principles of media literacy and journalism through a hands-on, 45-minute classroom activity. This activity can be used in college and high school classes (grades 11, 12 and AP), for studies in communications, civics, current events, history, journalism, language arts, multimedia, social studies, and/or web literacy.

For this project, you will use a review form developed by NewsTrust to help people find good journalism online (learn more about us on our About page). The NewsTrust review form will help your students evaluate the quality of news and opinions – and develop their media literacy skills."

newstrust.net/...teacher-guide-news - Preview

credibility

11 Dec 09

O'Byrne-Facilitating Critical Thinking Skills through Content Creation.pdf (application/pdf Object)

PDF: This paper reports on the results of a pilot study that
investigates if critical evaluation skills could be improved by first analyzing the
techniques authors use to make websites more credible and then having students build
their own hoax websites by using these techniques.

wiobyrne.com/...rough%20Content%20Creation.pdf - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

Facilitating Critical Thinking Skills through Online Content Creation.

"Increasingly, students are using the Internet to obtain information about both general and academic topics (Lubans, 1999; Jones & Madden, 2002; Shackleford, Thompson & James, 1999). Along with this trend there is a growing concern about the dubious nature of online information, and users’ ability to validate or evaluate this information (Alexander & Tate, 1999; Flanagin & Metzger, 2000; Browne, Freeman & Williamson, 2000). Research shows that students are frequently deceived when viewing online content (Leu et al., 2007; Johnson & Kaye, 1998; Rieh & Belkin, 1998). Particularly, students are not able to judge the validity of a website, even when given procedures to do so (Lubans, 1998, 1999). There is still little known about building the healthy skepticism needed by students while reading online information. Because of the reliance of students to use the Internet to find information it is even more paramount to their success as online readers to be able to evaluate the validity and reliability of websites (Leu et al., 2008). This paper reports on the results of a pilot study that investigates if critical evaluation skills could be improved by first analyzing the techniques authors use to make websites more credible (Britt & Gabrys, 2002; Fogg, Marshall, Laraki, Osipovich, Varma, Fang, et al., 2001) and then having students build their own hoax websites by using these techniques. Hoax websites are defined as website “fabrications” that have been created for entertainment purposes, usually invoking the ridiculous, but maintaining a “superficial appearance of scientific professionalism” (Brem, Russell, & Weems, 2001, p. 198).

"

wiobyrne.com/...Hoax_Websites.html - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

Wikipedia presentation TIES - Google Docs

Wikipedia can be an excellent springboard for learning some profound lessons. We’ll look at practical ways to use it with students (grade 7 and up) to: a) develop solid research skills, b) think critically about the nature of authority and evidence, and c) produce persuasive written and oral arguments.

docs.google.com/Doc - Preview

credibility wikipedia critical_thinking

By a Bunch of Nobodies: A Q&A With the Author of The Wikipedia Revolution - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

"Recently, and to the embarrassment of some major publications, a university student in Ireland posted a fake quote on Wikipedia to see how many people would trust it as fact. Several newspapers, including the Guardian, and major blogs published the quote without checking its accuracy.

Critics of Wikipedia say instances like this point to the continuing danger of taking the “encyclopedia that anyone can edit” seriously as an information source. Others call Wikipedia nothing less than a revolution in information. (Our own judgments have been decidedly mixed.)

These debates notwithstanding, Wikipedia’s popularity continues to make standard encyclopedias look as hip as buggy whips.

Wikipedia editor/administrator Andrew Lih, author of the book Wikipedia Revolution, has agreed to answer our questions about Wikipedia and what it means to society.

Are instances like the above-mentioned quote hoax a sign that the media is becoming too reliant on Wikipedia as a source?

I once visited the massive Reuters operation in Bangalore, India, which was taking over many of the fact-checking functions of the London newsroom. I had a good chat with the researchers there, who when they found I was writing a book about Wikipedia, were enthusiastic to say they were fans and users of Wikipedia, but were explicitly told that Wikipedia is not allowed as a final authority for their fact-checking. And that’s entirely appropriate and right.

Wikipedia should be the starting point of research, not the ending point.

To the prospective journalist: there is no better place to start researching a story than Wikipedia, and probably no worse place to stop and use as a final word. In short, don’t do it. Wikipedia has helped you get your research started faster; don’t ruin your experience by using it incorrectly."

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/...or-of-the-wikipedia-revolution - Preview

credibility wikipedia

In Praise of the Internet: Shifting Focus and Engaging Critical Thinking Skills | In the Library with the Lead Pipe

"It is a call to arms to shift our attitude away from magnifying the perils of online research and towards examining the many types of useful information along with how and when to use them; to shift our primary focus away from teaching how to find information and towards engaging critical thinking skills. Often we have just one class period with our students and “the greater need is evaluation; they already know at least one method of finding articles.” [1]

The kernel of this post emerged from a recent conversation with my brother. He asked me, “What would you estimate the ratio of inaccurate to accurate information on the Internet is?”

I hemmed and hawed and asked, “on the free web or including subscription sites?”

He clarified, “Well anytime I’ve randomly wanted to look something up … I’ve never come across something I’ve noticed to be faulty, but I wonder sometimes if A) I’ve totally been mislead by faulty info or B) if most stuff I’ve ever looked up is OK. But they make such a big deal to not trust things on the Internet unless you know the poster is reputable. I think information is more likely to be incomplete rather than flat out wrong. Go find something wrong on the Internet and give me a link.”

I sent him some of the standards:

* http://www.dhmo.org/ [2]
* http://zapatopi.net/afdb/ [3]
* http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

He asked, “What search would bring those things up that you’d actually be looking for? I’m just curious sometimes about these things. I’m skeptical of the skeptics, you know.”"

inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/...aging-critical-thinking-skills - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

24 Nov 09

My Favorite Liar | Zen Moments

"hat made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact."

www.zenmoments.org/my-favorite-liar - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

15 Nov 09

A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority « Clay Shirky

"Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published. This is how Google’s PageRank algorithm works, it’s how Twitscoop’s zeitgeist measurement works, it’s how Wikipedia’s post hoc peer review works. At this point, its just an information tool.

Second, it produces good results, and as a consequence people come to trust it. At this point, it’s become a valuable information tool, but not yet anything more.

The third characteristic is when people become aware not just of their own trust but of the trust of others: “I use Wikipedia all the time, and other members of my group do as well.” Once everyone in the group has this realization, checking Wikipedia is tantamount to answering the kinds of questions Wikipedia purports to answer, for that group. This is the transition to algorithmic authority. "

www.shirky.com/...-idea-of-algorithmic-authority - Preview

credibility

The News Literacy Project

"The News Literacy Project is an innovative national educational program that is mobilizing seasoned journalists to help middle school and high school students sort fact from fiction in the digital age.

The project’s primary aim is to teach students the critical thinking skills they need to be …
Learn More "

thenewsliteracyproject.org - Preview

credibility critical_thinking

13 Nov 09

Media Education Project » Blog Archive » Monograph Series: Metacognition

"Metacognition focuses on thinking about thinking and it is vital to understanding how it is that we learn, consume, and process information. From a media education perspective, metacognition promotes an analytical and critical examination of core beliefs and assumptions.

This monograph deals with a wide range of methods for fostering self-reflexive analysis."

www.mediaeducationproject.ca/...monograph-series-metacognition - Preview

literacy critical_thinking credibility

08 Nov 09

Mediactive » Toward a Slow-News Movement

"The rapid-fire news system’s abundance of falsehoods has other causes than simple speed, including the reduction reduction a former staple of journalism: fact checking before running with a story.

Citing the grotesque “balloon boy” stunt, Clay Shirky (also a friend) observed recently — in a Tweet, no less — that “fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”

I’m not entirely sure the balloon-boy situation is exactly the most precise example of this phenomenon, because there weren’t all that many facts journalists could check during the time the balloon was in the air. The family’s publicly weird ways should have prompted much more skepticism, earlier than it did, but journalists went with the story in front of them.

But Clay’s point is absolutely right in a general sense. And it suggests that we all might be wise to think before we react, just as most of us failed to do during the early hours and days of the “#amazonfail” situation last April. As he wrote then, a lot of us were wrong and believed things that turned out not to be true — and we reacted with fury to something that was a mistake, not evil design. (I am one of those people.)"

mediactive.com/...toward-a-slow-news-movement - Preview

credibility

22 Oct 09

Goodbye To The Age Of Newspapers (Hello To A New Era Of Corruption) | The New Republic

"Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt."

www.tnr.com/...apers-hello-new-era-corruption - Preview

public_sphere comm217 credibility journalism

Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good--and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.
Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country. Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.
23 more annotations...
- Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them
- One danger of reduced news coverage is to the integrity of government. It is not just a speculative proposition that corruption is more likely to flourish when those in power have less reason to fear exposure. The World Bank produces an annual index of political corruption around the world, based on surveys of people who do business in each country. In a study published in 2003 in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Alicia Adsera, Carles Boix, and Mark Payne examine the relationship between corruption and "free circulation of daily newspapers per person" (a measure of both news circulation and freedom of the press). Controlling for economic development, type of legal system, and other factors, they find a very strong association: the lower the free circulation of newspapers in a country, the higher it stands on the corruption index.
- And while the new digital environment is more open to "citizen journalism" and the free expression of opinions, it is also more open to bias, and to journalism for hire. Online there are few clear markers to distinguish blogs and other sites that are being financed to promote a viewpoint from news sites operated independently on the basis of professional rules of reporting. So the danger is not just more corruption of government and business--it is also more corruption of journalism itself.
- These developments raise practical questions for anyone concerned about the future of American democracy. If the traditional ways of sustaining professional journalism are insufficient, what models are there to support the genuinely vital public functions that the press has traditionally performed? How do these alternatives fit into the new digital environment?
- For the past three hundred years, newspapers have been able to develop and flourish partly because their readers have almost never paid the full cost of production. From the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, many newspapers were politically subsidized, directly by governments or through political parties. Then, as consumer markets expanded, newspapers increasingly sold not just news to readers, but also readers to advertisers. And the more advertisers they gained, the less dependent they were on any single one.
- The key to the rise of independent and powerful newspapers in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was their role as market intermediaries--that is, in connecting large numbers of sellers (advertisers) and buyers in a local area. That role required changes in content, language, and design, so as to appeal to a wider public that included women, working-class, and immigrant readers. Instead of narrowly focusing on politics and business, newspapers now had an interest in presenting a wider range of stories.
- If there is one overriding factor behind the current financial crisis of the press, it is simply that the Internet has undermined the newspaper's role as market intermediary. Advertisers do not need to piggyback on the news to reach consumers, and consumers have other ways to find out about products and sales. Newspapers also cannot possibly duplicate online the monopoly position that they have enjoyed in print during recent decades as the sole surviving papers in their metropolitan area, and so they no longer have the pricing power for ads that Buffett describes as "economic heaven." Craigslist, eBay, and many other sites provide alternatives--and none of them bears any cost of news production.
  
  To read the news, moreover, consumers do not need to pay for it online.
- The implications of these developments for the public role of newspapers are dire. Think of the newspaper as a collection of different lines of business represented by its various sections, from the news pages to the classifieds. Insofar as newspapers have upheld a public-service vision, they have been engaged in cross-subsidy, using their profitable lines of business, such as the classifieds, to pay for news coverage that probably would have been hard to justify on a narrower view of return on investment. Especially in recent decades, when newspapers were cash cows, their owners could afford to pursue public-service journalism, and some of them did (others just milked their papers for all they were worth). In addition, Buffett's law of the newspaper jungle, the "survival of the fattest," favored a broad conception of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are workin
- Of course, a medium that 40 percent of the public still claim to read should not be pronounced dead yet. The situation is also a bit more complicated, and more hopeful, than these trends suggest. Total readership of news that originates from newspapers has probably at least stabilized.
- Among many journalists as well as investors, the hope has vanished that newspapers as we have known them can make the transition to a world of hybrid print-online publication. Like network TV news and weekly newsmagazines, newspapers have been living off aging audiences that acquired their media habits in earlier decades. A few years ago, it seemed that they could rely on that aging print readership to tide them over until revenue began gushing from the Web. But online ads still account for only 8 percent of ad sales, and their growth has stalled just as earnings from print have tumbled. The result is that newspapers are shrinking not just physically or in labor power, but in the most important dimension of all--their editorial mission.
- The average reader who might have learned about world events in a local paper or on the evening news is probably not going to search out foreign news sites on the Internet. And it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America's economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America's news media are withdrawing from it.
  
  Newspapers around the United States are also pulling back their coverage of Washington.
- The concern about statehouse coverage--indeed, about newspaper retrenchment in general--is not just the declining number of reporters, but deterioration in the quality of journalism. As the editorial ranks are thinned, internal checks on accuracy are being sacrificed. As reporters with years of experience are laid off, newspapers are losing the local knowledge and relationships with trusted sources that those reporters had built up, which enabled them to break important stories.
- After the dot-com bust, the effusive talk about the miracles of the information revolution thankfully went out of style. But the social transformation under way--and there ought to be no doubt that one is indeed underway--is breaking up old monopolies of communication and power and creating new possibilities for free expression and democratic politics. As in any upheaval, some effects are unanticipated, and not all of them are positive, and what is perhaps most confusing, the good and bad are often intertwined.
  
  By vastly increasing the options for diversion as well as information, the Internet has extended a process that had already begun when cable began increasing the number of TV channels. And if the political scientist Markus Prior is right, that expansion of choice is partly responsible for one of the most worrisome trends in American life: diminished attention to the news and reduced engagement in civic life among a significant part of the public.
- But there is another side to the story. As Yochai Benkler argues in his brilliant book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, the new "networked information economy" has some critical advantages for realizing democratic values. The old "industrial model" mass media have required large investments of capital and provided a platform to speak to the public for a relatively small number of people, but now the falling costs of computers and communication have "placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a billion people around the globe." Instead of being confined to a passive role, ordinary people can talk back to the media or circumvent them entirely and enter the public conversation.
  
  The new public sphere, in Benkler's view, is also developing mechanisms for filtering information for reliability and relevance, organizing it into easily navigated paths, and raising it to higher levels of public debate, contrary to critics who have worried that the Internet would be a chaotic Babel or a polarized system of "echo chambers" (as Cass Sunstein argued in his book Republic.com). And, unlike the old mass media, the new digital environment facilitates decentralized individual and cooperative action, often organized on an open and voluntary basis. Benkler invests a great deal of hope in this type of non-market collaborative production--the kind that has generated new social media such as Wikipedia, which, amazingly, despite being an encyclopedia, has also become an important news medium because it is so rapidly updated.
  
  Of course, some of these innovations are mixed blessings: people can now share their misinformation as well as their knowledge. Viral email, Twitter, and social network sites can be used to spread rumors and malice through channels hidden from the wider public and insulated from criticism. Benkler is right about the many important gains from new technology, but he does not adequately balance the gains against the losses that the emerging networked economy is also bringing about--among them the problems that Prior identifies, such as the diminished share of the public following the news, and perhaps most important, the toll on the institutions of professional journalism.
- News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept. When someone consumes a box of chocolates, no one else can have them, but that is not true of news. The news itself is never really "consumed" at all, which is why anyone can pass on news to those who have not paid for it--and in the digital environment, information is so easily and instantly passed on that news is, in a sense, even more of a public good than it has ever been. (Copyright protects only the form of expression, not the information itself.)
  
  Markets under-produce public goods because private incentives are insufficient to generate as much production of those goods as there would be if all those who derived a benefit from them had to pay. Still, for a long time, thanks largely to their role as market intermediaries, newspapers have been able to produce this particular public good--newsworthy information, necessary to hold government accountable--on a commercial basis. And that way of getting around the problem of financing news for the general public is now coming to an end.
  
  The non-market collaborative networks on the Web celebrated by Benkler represent an alternative way of producing information as a public good. Before Wikipedia was created, hardly anyone supposed it would work as well as it has. But it has severe limitations as a source of knowledge. Its entries, including news items, are re-written from other sources, and it does not purport to offer original research or original reporting. The blogosphere and the news aggregators are also largely parasitic: they feed off the conventional news media. Citizen journalists contribute reports from the scene of far-flung events, but the reports may just be the propaganda of self-interested parties.
  
  Voluntary networks cannot easily duplicate certain critical advantages that large-scale and professionally run media have had--the financial wherewithal to invest in trained reporters and editors and to assign them to beats and long projects, and a well-established system of professional norms that has been a source of conscientious motivation and restraint in the reporting of news. The new social media add value when they are a supplement to professional journalism. To the extent that they supplant it, however, the wildfires of rumor and malice will be harder to check.
- Nearly a century ago, in Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann wrote:
  
      The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible
      medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears,
      and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly
      sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all
      literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people
      determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It
      is the only book they read every day.
  
  Of course, the day is long gone when anyone would seriously claim the newspaper was the bible of democracy or that their editors exercise a priestly power. But the job of separating rumor from fact remains just as vital as it ever was. Although daily journalism may be losing its economic foundation, it has not lost its justification.
- If newspapers are no longer able to crosssubsidize public-service journalism and if the de-centralized, non-market forms of collaboration cannot provide an adequate substitute, how is that work going to be paid for? The answer, insofar as there is one, is that we are going to need much more philanthropic support for journalism than we have ever had in the United States.
  
  When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, besides using printing contracts to subsidize favored party organs, the federal government supported the press in what First Amendment lawyers today would call a "viewpoint-neutral" way--through cheap postal rates that were available to all newspapers. And since the 1960s, both the federal and state governments have aided public broadcasting, which has enabled public TV and radio stations to become important sources of news.
- The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing.
- Besides full non-profit operation of a newspaper, a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica, which describes itself as "an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." Publishing online as of last June, ProPublica also works in partnership on some stories with newspapers such as The New York Times. The partnerships enable newspapers to keep down the costs of investigative stories, and they give ProPublica access to mass distribution as well as a check on quality. Similarly, the Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on health policy, announced last fall that it would begin directly employing reporters to create a health policy news service. According to Drew Altman, Kaiser's president, besides making some stories freely available to newspapers and online, the news service will establish partnerships with newspapers for specific stories, which the papers will then have the right to release first. Some other foundations that focus on specific areas of policy may follow this approach as a way to promote public awareness of their concerns.
- But there is yet a third use of non-profits--and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media, which, according to its director David Bennahum, receives about $4 million annually from seventy funders to support online political news sites in five states as well as one for national news, The Washington Independent. Bennahum says that "the narrative voice of newspapers is not what [online] readers want" and that the sites his center finances are instead doing a kind of journalism that brings readers into dialogue.
  
  The notion that the digital medium requires a more inclusive relationship with the "people formerly called the audience" is a common theme among online journalists. Joshua Micah Marshall, the founder of TalkingPointsMemo.com, which runs on a commercial basis, says that many of the stories on his site grow out of ideas and tips supplied by readers in thousands of emails daily. Any news operation has information flowing in and out; an online publication can productively open up this process to anyone who is able and prepared to help. Stories develop online incrementally, often through participation in a collaborative network, rather than being written behind the scenes and released only when checked and finished. This is entirely different from "citizen journalism," and has the potential to be just as rigorous as traditional journalistic practices.
- Doubtful that they can ever achieve the scale of the big metros, Rosenstiel compares the Web-based city news sites to aggressive city magazines. If one major concern is keeping government accountable, that kind of aggressive reporting is certainly a valuable function and well worth supporting. But owing to their more limited economic basis, the non-profit news sites are unlikely to be able to offer the coverage, or to exert the influence, of a daily newspaper read by half the people in a city.
- Many people have been expecting the successors of newspapers to emerge on the Web. But there may be no successor, at least none like the papers we have known. The metropolitan daily may be a peculiar historical invention whose time is passing. We may be approaching not the end of newspapers, but the end of the age of newspapers--the long phase in history when newspapers published in major cities throughout the United States have been central to both the production of news and the life of their metropolitan regions.
  
  Metropolitan newspapers have dominated news gathering, set the public agenda, served as the focal point of controversy, and credibly represented themselves as symbolizing and speaking for the cities whose names they have carried. They have tried to be everyone's source of news, appealing across the ideological spectrum, and to be comprehensive, providing their readers with whatever was of daily interest to them. Some newspapers, a smaller number than exist today, will survive the transition to the Web, but they probably will not possess the centrality, the scope, or the authoritative voice--much less the monopolies on metropolitan advertising--that newspapers have had.
- News coverage is not all that newspapers have given us. They have lent the public a powerful means of leverage over the state, and this leverage is now at risk. If we take seriously the notion of newspapers as a fourth estate or a fourth branch of government, the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself. Newspapers have helped to control corrupt tendencies in both government and business. If we are to avoid a new era of corruption, we are going to have to summon that power in other ways. Our new technologies do not retire our old responsibilities.

07 Oct 09

Confrontational Computing – Are You Being Duped – Rob Ennals – Research@Intel Day | Connected Social Media

Confrontational Computing is a research project from Intel Labs, Berkeley to create a new tool that makes it easier for readers to pick through this minefield. The tool automatically highlights text snippets that disagree with information found elsewhere. Clicking on a highlighted snippet reveals an argument graph showing best sources on either side of the issue. The links are maintained by a community of users, creating a new venue for rich interaction.

connectedsocialmedia.com/...d-rob-ennals-researchintel-day - Preview

credibility

03 Oct 09

Directory of journalism resources | Socialbrite

Below is one of the best collections of resources to help citizen journalists — and anyone doing research on the Web — learn techniques of accuracy, fairness, transparency, independence and thoroughness in online reporting. Seasoned professionals should find these useful as well. I led the Principles of Citizen Journalism project team that compiled this directory.

www.socialbrite.org/...ectory-of-journalism-resources - Preview

credibility comm217 journalism reference

30 Sep 09

Evaluating Web Sites

Evaluating Web Sites

Follow the links below. After examining each site carefully, answer the questions about it.

www.uni.illinois.edu/...evaluatingsites.php - Preview

credibility

Computer Literacy

The focus of this web page is on the portion of the Computer Literacy courses that deal with information literacy skills and with responsible and ethical online behavior. (syllabus for high school students)

www.uni.illinois.edu/...computerlit - Preview

literacy search credibility

25 Sep 09

racismreview.com » Blog Archive » Cloaked Sites Key to Right-Wing Propaganda

Cloaked websites are published by individuals or groups who conceal authorship in order to deliberately disguise a hidden political agenda. In this way, these sites are similar to previous versions of print media propaganda, such as “black,” “white” and “grey” propaganda. In my latest book, Cyber Racism, I write extensively about how racist groups are using cloaked websites to further their goals to subvert civil rights and affirm white supremacy in covert ways. I also write about the range of political movements that use cloaked websites in a recent article, “Cloaked websites: propaganda, cyber-racism and epistemology in the digital era,” in the journal New Media & Society. While not the exclusive purview of the right-wing, it does seem that the right is amplifying their use of this technique.

Cloaked sites are a key piece of the propaganda machine that Berman is operating, and they’re incredibly hard-to-detect and perniciously effective according to my research. According to this site which seeks to expose Berman, he has been the force behind dozens of cloaked sites, including “RottenAcorn.com” and anti-ACORN site that disguises the real authorship behind something called “Employment Policies Institute” which is a front group that Berman runs. Maddow mentions a couple of others, such as “UnionFacts.com” (with very similar graphics to the previous site) an anti-labor union site, again with the true authorship disguised in order to advance a hidden political agenda. And, “MercuryFacts.org” a cloaked pro-fishing-industry site that disguises its authorship and corporate agenda. In my study of how young people made sense of cloaked white supremacist sites, I found that most of the 15-19 year-olds I interviewed as they surfed the web could not easily tell they were white supremacist sites. It seems very likely that most of those people who visited the cloaked sites that Berman created were fooled as well.

www.racismreview.com/...s-key-to-right-wing-propaganda - Preview

credibility

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine

Various studies have been conducted to find out just what influences people’s perception of a website’s credibility:

* Stanford-Makovsy Web Credibility Study 2002: Investigating What Makes Web Sites Credible Today
* What Makes A Web Site Credible? A Report on a Large Quantitative Study
* The Elements of Computer Credibility
* Elements that Affect Web Credibility: Early Results from a Self-Report Study (Proceedings of ACM CHI 2000 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, v.2, New York: ACM Press)

www.smashingmagazine.com/...bility-findings-and-guidelines - Preview

credibility

10 Sep 09

Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com

Starting this fall, you’ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called “WikiTrust” will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

www.wired.com/...wikitrust - Preview

credibility wikipedia reputation

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

What's in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and -- especially important -- to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.

faculty-staff.ou.edu/...20of%20Baloney%20Detection.htm - Preview

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Teacher Guides: Can You Trust the News? - Teacher Guide - News - NewsTrust.net

O'Byrne-Facilitating Critical Thinking Skills through Content Creation.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Facilitating Critical Thinking Skills through Online Content Creation.

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By a Bunch of Nobodies: A Q&A With the Author of The Wikipedia Revolution - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

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The News Literacy Project

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Goodbye To The Age Of Newspapers (Hello To A New Era Of Corruption) | The New Republic

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Directory of journalism resources | Socialbrite

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10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines « Smashing Magazine

Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text | Wired Science | Wired.com

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

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