How To Participate In Digipo (September 2017 version)

I will be preparing for my classes to start contributing to Digipo next week. I look forward to the storm of consternation that will crease my learners' faces as I trot out more crazy notions.

Every time I say I can’t make it easier to participate in Digipo, I find a way to make it easier.

The current process involves no skills greater than knowing how to work a word processor, and (more importantly) allows students to participate anonymously if they wish, without having to sign up for Google accounts or have edits tracked under pseudonyms. We accomplish this through a Microsoft Word template and by submitting the files into public domain.

You can of course use a more complex process, sign your name to the article, and use Google Docs as your central tool. Depending on your needs and skill level you may want to do that. It’s just not required anymore.

Here’s the steps.

1. Read (at least some) of the book.
2. Pick a question to investigate from our list of 300+ questions, or make up your own.
3. Have your students download this Microsoft Word template that guides them through an investigation of a question. Apply the skills from the book.
4. Do whatever sort of grading, assessment, or feedback you want.
5. Take student reports where the students have agreed to submit them into public domain, and zip up the word documents. Mail them to michael.caulfield@wsu.edu. Make sure you introduce who you are, what the class is about, and a bit about your experience as I do not open zip files from random people. Also give me a blurb about how your class would like to be identified on the site (they have the option  of remaining anonymous too). For verification purposes, send it from your university account. I may email back to verify.
6. I’ll put them on the Digipo site in a subdirectory with a bit about your class and give you a password that allows them to edit online going forward.
7. At a later point we’ll assemble a small panel of professors who will go through the student work and choose ones to “promote” to the main directory based on quality. The key question reviewers will ask is whether the document provides better information than at least one of the top ten Google results for the question.

That’s it!

 

 

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers Is Out

I will be using parts of this book next semester for my incoming freshman comp students.

Back before the election I was working on a book on the problems of living in “the stream” — this endless flow of stuff we read, retweet, and react to. My argument in that still unfinished work was that while the stream is useful and exciting it also warps our sense of reality in unhelpful ways. Forced to decide within seconds to retweet an inflammatory tweet or share a headline on Facebook we tend to make bad decisions that pollute the information environment and reduce the depth and complexity of our thought. The 2016 primary elections in the U.S. were going to be Exhibit A of this trend, with a nod toward the acceleration of these trends in the 2016 general election.

It was going to be a condemnation of the attention economy we’ve developed and its whole rotten ad-driven substrate, followed by a plea to return to some older visions of the web.

After the general election I felt both vindicated and weirdly distant. As I continued to work on the book it occurred to me that what the world needed, much more than a scholarly book or extended philippic, was a textbook or field guide that explained how to survive in this world of viral information flows and social media firehoses.

So in November I switched gears and began to write a textbook for web literacy that focused on the question of what web literacy for stream culture looked like. What I found is that it had to be quick and tactical. Users are presented with hundreds of headlines and statements a day through social media, and asked to retweet or share that information with little or no background. Students need skills that help them to get closer to the truth in betwen the few minutes between when they see something and when they decide to share it. Conversations with researcher Sam Wineburg confirmed this need for quick and frugal fact-checking basics.

So I wrote this book: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. It’s still rough and unfinished in places, but it’s in a shape that’s suitable for classroom use.

I don’t mean it to replace what we do with critical thinking and web efforts around digital identity, making, and collaboration. But I think it fills a gap that I’m not seeing other resources address. And it’s a real important gap.

Here are some other formats:

PDF
MOBI (Kindle)
EPUB
PressBooks XML

Comments and suggested edits are welcome, but for maximum efficiency I’d ask you communicate comments about specific pages or passages using Hypothes.is on the web version of the book.