These discussions can be fraught with power dynamics, resulting in controversial issues appearing unbalanced as more powerful authors block alternative viewpoints.

Using questions and keywords to find the information you need

Our students have an unprecedented breadth of information resources at their fingertips, yet there is a significant danger that they will miss the opportunity to engage with those voices that hold the greatest prospects for growth. Collecting confirmations of one’s existing views is a poor substitute for meaningful learning.

For example, an individual who believes that knowledge in a certain domain consists of a set of discrete, relatively static facts will likely achieve a sense of certainty on a research question much more quickly than someone who views knowledge as provisional, relative, and evolving.

Nyhan and Reifler also found that presenting challenging information in a chart or graph tends to reduce disconfirmation bias. The researchers concluded that the decreased ambiguity of graphical information (as opposed to text) makes it harder for test subjects to question or argue against the content of the chart.

A study by Nyhan and Reifler showed that having test subjects engage in a self-affirmation exercise significantly reduced their level of defensive processing when faced with counter-attitudinal information on policy issues.

Likewise, merely telling students that motivated reasoning has an impact on their information processing is apt to yield mixed results because students who view themselves as intelligent, fair-minded people will likely meet this revelation with a level of disconfirmation bias.

additional motivation for test subjects to process information accurately made the impact of early preferences less prominent, though the influence did not disappear entirely

Is it safe to assume that we give each bit of information a “fair hearing,” always adjusting our beliefs to conform to compelling evidence? Or do our backgrounds and preferences inhibit our ability to be objective when evaluating information that challenges our beliefs?

By examining information as a product of people’s contingent choices, rather than as an impartial recording of unchanging truths, the critically information-literate student develops an outlook toward information characterized by a robust sense of agency and a heightened concern for justice.

embodied information,”

Gymnastics is a sport in which athletes called gymnasts perform acrobatic feats – leaps, flips, turns, handstands and more – on a piece of apparatus such as a balance beam, or with a piece of apparatus like a rope or ribbon. 

Zack [42] distinguished these four termsaccording to two dimensions: the nature of what is being processed and the consti-tution of the processing problem.The nature of what is being processed is either information or frames of ref-erence. With information, we mean “observations that have been cognitively pro-cessed and punctuated into coherent messages” [42]. Frames of reference [4, p.108], on the other hand, are the interpretative frames which provide the context forcreating and understanding information. There can be situations in which there is alack of information or a frame of reference, or too much information or too manyframes of reference to process.

Sensemaking is about contextual rationality, built out of vaguequestions, muddy answers, and negotiated agreements that attempt to reduce ambi-guity and equivocality. The genesis of Sensemaking is a lack of fit between whatwe expect and what we encounter [40]. With Sensemaking, one does not look at thequestion of “which course of action should we choose?”, but instead at an earlierpoint in time where users are unsure whether there is even a decision to be made,with questions such as “what is going on here, and should I even be asking this ques-tion just now?” [40]. This shows that Sensemaking is used to overcome situationsof ambiguity. When there are too many interpretations of an event, people engagein Sensemaking too, to reduce equivocality.

Decision making is traditionally viewed as a sequential process of problem classifi-cation and definition, alternative generation, alternative evaluation, and selection ofthe best course of action [26]. This process is about strategic rationality, aimed atreducing uncertainty [6, 36]. Uncertainty can be reduced through objective analysisbecause it consists of clear questions for which answers exist [5, 40]. Complex-ity can also be reduced by objective analysis, as it requires restricting or reducingfactual information and associated linkages [42]

Crisis environments are characterized by various types of information problemsthat complicate the response, such as inaccurate, late, superficial, irrelevant, unreli-able, and conflicting information [30, 32]. This poses difficulties for actors to makesense of what is going on and to take appropriate action. Such issues of informationprocessing are a major challenge for the field of crisis management, both concep-tually and empirically [19].

It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

Every student brings their own personal digital practices

I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”—like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carrying groceries or walking long distances—and their repertoire of pro-test, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities.

Understanding Individual Neuron Importance Using Information Theory

Understanding Convolutional Neural Network Training with Information Theory

sandwiches

For students to work in the open, everything they use has to be original content, openly licensed, or in the public domain

This won't be the first time that teens use Snapchat as a portal for political action.

travel

information LDLC workers

Github has taught a generation of programmers that copies are good, not bad, and as we noted, it’s copies that are essential to the Garden.

Deluged by apparent facts, arguments and counterarguments, our brains resort to the most obvious filter, the easiest cognitive shortcut for a social animal: We look to our peers, see what they believe and cheer along. As a result, open and participatory speech has turned into its opposite. Important voices are silenced by mobs of trolls using open platforms to hurl abuse and threats. Bogus news shared from one friend or follower to the next becomes received wisdom. Crucial pieces of information drown in so much irrelevance that they are lost. If books were burned in the street, we would be alarmed. Now, we are simply exhausted.

For the longest time, we thought that as speech became more democratized, democracy itself would flourish. As more and more people could broadcast their words and opinions, there would be an ever-fiercer battle of ideas—with truth emerging as the winner, stronger from the fight. But in 2018, it is increasingly clear that more speech can in fact threaten democracy. The glut of information we now face, made possible by digital tools and social media platforms, can bury what is true, greatly elevate and amplify misinformation and distract from what is important.

But in the digital age, when speech can exist mostly unfettered, the big threat to truth looks very different. It’s not just censorship, but an avalanche of undistinguished speech—some true, some false, some fake, some important, some trivial, much of it out-of-context, all burying us.

"Portrait of a Negress,

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Hydathodes

‘In a complexinformation society, with a highly developed divi-sion of intellectual labor, we have no option butrely on information from sources that are usuallytrustworthy.’

‘Thedilemma, then, is that a right to information couldmake people worse off in terms of information.’’Elgesem then provides a contextual analysis of therole search engines play in the broader ‘‘informationecology’’ constituted by contemporary ICTs. Elgesemis able to connect the search engine dilemma withKant’s second formulation of the CategoricalImperative, ‘‘Act in such a way that you treathumanity, whether in your own person or in theperson of another, always at the same time as an endand never simply as a means.’’8Here, Elgeseminterprets Kant to mean that by ‘‘humanity,’’ Kantrefers to our ability to reason as the central propertythat makes us human. The simple point, as empha-sized in Kant’s famous example regarding lying, isthat failure to provide truthful information is a primeexample of violating the CI because false informationmakes it impossible for the recipient to exercise herrationality. By the same token, Elgesem argues that abiased search engine likewise makes it impossible forusers to exercise their rationality, and thus likewiserepresent violations of the CI.

Instead of trying to force their messages into the mainstream, these adversaries target polarized communities and “embed” fake accounts within them. The false personas engage with real people in those communities to build credibility. Once their influence has been established, they can introduce new viewpoints and amplify divisive and inflammatory narratives that are already circulating. It’s the digital equivalent of moving to an isolated and tight-knit community, using its own language quirks and catering to its obsessions, running for mayor, and then using that position to influence national politics.

However, as the following diagrams will show, the middle is a lot weaker than it looks, and this makes public discourse vulnerable both to extremists at home and to manipulation by outside actors such as Russia.

Half of Americans say news and current events matter a lot to their daily lives, while 30 percent say the news doesn’t have much to do with them. The rest aren’t sure. A quarter of Americans say they paid a lot of attention to the news on Tuesday, with 32 percent paying just some attention, 26 percent paying not very much attention and 18 percent paying no attention at all. Forty-seven percent thought the news was at least a little busier than average. Of those who paid any attention to the news on Tuesday, 32 percent spent an hour or more reading, watching or listening. About 23 percent spent 30 minutes to an hour, 18 percent spent 15 minutes to half an hour, and 21 percent spent less than 15 minutes. Just 15 percent of those who paid any attention to the news Tuesday have a great deal of trust in the media to state the facts fully, accurately and fairly. Thirty-eight percent have a fair amount of trust, 28 percent don’t have much trust in the media, and 11 percent have none at all. Those who followed the news on Tuesday were most likely to say they had gotten their news from an online news source (42 percent) or local TV (37 percent), followed by national cable TV (33 percent), social media (28 percent), national network news (23 percent), radio (19 percent) and conversations with other people (19 percent). The least popular source was print newspapers and magazines (10 percent).

Most Americans pay at least a little attention to current events, but they differ enormously in where they turn to get their news and which stories they pay attention to. To get a better sense of how a busy news cycle played out in homes across the country, we repeated an experiment, teaming up with YouGov to ask 1,000 people nationwide to describe their news consumption and respond to a simple prompt: “In your own words, please describe what you would say happened in the news on Tuesday.”

differing nomenclature makes the search for a commonly agreed definition or understanding of digital literacies even more elusive

Representation of Digital Intelligence

As people see more, they are more likely to notice things they can do something about, which confirms the perception of control and also reduces crisis intensity to lower levels by virtue of early intervention in its development

As forcefulness and ambiguity increase, enactment is more con- sequential, and more of the unfolding crisis is under the direct control of human action. Conversely, as action becomes more tentative and situations become more clearly structured, enactment processes will play a smaller role in crisis development and managment. Enactment, therefore, will have most effect on those portions of a crisis which are loosely coupled.

Capacity and response repertoire affect crisis perception, because people see those events they feel they have the capacity to do something about. As capacities change, so too do perceptions and actions. This relationship is one of the crucial leverage points to improve crisis management.

As Coyle and Meier (2009) argue, disasters are often seen as crises of information where it is vital to make sure that people know where to find potable water, how to ask for help, where their relatives are, or if their home is at risk; as well as providing emergency response and human-itarian agencies with information about affected populations. Such a quest for information for ‘security’, in turn, provides fertile ground for a quest for technological solutions, such as big data, which open up opportunities for the extended surveillance of everyday life. The assumption is that if only enough information could be gathered and exchanged, preparedness, resilience and control would follow. This is particularly pertinent with regard to mobile pop-ulations (Adey and Kirby 2016)

"The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn't controlled by the Kremlin," said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia's presidential human rights council. "That's why they're going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures."

"Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s," said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. "When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there's a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control."

creating a new international news operation called Sputnik to “provide an alternative viewpoint on world events.” More and more, though, the Kremlin is manipulating the information sphere in more insidious ways.

RuNet Echo has previously written about the efforts of the Russian “Troll Army” to inject the social networks and online media websites with pro-Kremlin rhetoric. Twitter is no exception, and multiple users have observed Twitter accounts tweeting similar statements during and around key breaking news and events. Increasingly active throughout Russia's interventions in Ukraine, these “bots” have been designed to look like real Twitter users, complete with avatars.

We’ve built an information ecosystem where information can fly through social networks (both technical and personal). Folks keep looking to the architects of technical networks to solve the problem. I’m confident that these companies can do a lot to curb some of the groups who have capitalized on what’s happening to seek financial gain. But the battles over ideology and attention are going to be far trickier. What’s at stake isn’t “fake news.” What’s at stake is the increasing capacity of those committed to a form of isolationist and hate-driven tribalism that has been around for a very long time. They have evolved with the information landscape, becoming sophisticated in leveraging whatever tools are available to achieve power, status, and attention. And those seeking a progressive and inclusive agenda, those seeking to combat tribalism to form a more perfect union —  they haven’t kept up.

As I wrote in “Hacking the Attention Economy,” manipulating the media for profit, ideology, and lulz has evolved over time. The strategies that hackers, hoaxers, and haters have taken have become more sophisticated. The campaigns have gotten more intense. And now many of the actors most set on undermining institutionalized information intermediaries are in the most powerful office in the land. They are waging war on the media and the media doesn’t know what to do other than to report on it.

How many years did it take for the US military to learn that waging war with tribal networks couldn’t be fought with traditional military strategies? How long will it take for the news media to wake up and recognize that they’re being played? And how long after that will it take for editors and publishers to start evolving their strategies?

there’s no cost to the administration to be helpful to the media because the people the Trump Administration cares about don’t trust the media anyhow.

News agencies, long trained to focus on reporting information and maintaining a conceptual model of standards, are ill-equipped to understand that they may have a role in this war, that their actions and decisions are shaping the way the war plays out.

When messaging is coordinated and consistent, it easily fools our brains, already exhausted and increasingly reliant on heuristics (simple psychological shortcuts) due to the overwhelming amount of information flashing before our eyes every day. When we see multiple messages about the same topic, our brains use that as a short-cut to credibility. It must be true we say — I’ve seen that same claim several times today.

I saw Eliot Higgins present in Paris in early January, and he listed four ‘Ps’ which helped explain the different motivations. I’ve been thinking about these a great deal and using Eliot’s original list have identified four additional motivations for the creation of this type of content: Poor Journalism, Parody, to Provoke or ‘Punk’, Passion, Partisanship, Profit, Political Influence or Power, and Propaganda.This is a work in progress but once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patterns in terms of the types of content created for specific purposes.

Back in November, I wrote about the different types of problematic information I saw circulate during the US election. Since then, I’ve been trying to refine a typology (and thank you to Global Voices for helping me to develop my definitions even further). I would argue there are seven distinct types of problematic content that sit within our information ecosystem. They sit on a scale, one that loosely measures the intent to deceive.

As Danah Boyd outlined in a recent piece, we are at war. An information war. We certainly should worry about people (including journalists) unwittingly sharing misinformation, but far more concerning are the systematic disinformation campaigns.

To understand the current information ecosystem, we need to break down three elements:The different types of content that are being created and sharedThe motivations of those who create this contentThe ways this content is being disseminated

The over­load of information, for example, is becoming so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart the principle of instantaneity and 'real-time' communication, but also slows down operators to a pomt where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information.

Furthermore, and differentiating digital time from clock time, he suggests that a lack of adherence to chronological time is compounded by the fact that digital technologies connect with a flow of information that is al-ways and instantly available. He argues that continual change, which is bound up with web services such as social network sites, blogs and the news, is central to the experi-enced need for constant connectivity.

Her astonishing quickness of perception, detected a change in my voice, or my manner, when I put that question, which warned her that I had been speaking all along with some ulterior object in view. She stopped, and taking her arm out of mine, looked me searchingly in the face.

How do users identify and evaluate online “resource containers” of information?

The visual context and cues that print containers provide used to help individuals identify a document’s origins and measure its value

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Following the history of information technology and the massive trend towards open source, wecan see that democratizing information is the natural next step in the incessant trend to opensource, and thus the next big opportunity for innovation.

The way to play a consolidating market is to investheavily into the consolidating incumbents (which are likely to continue growing strongly for along period of time) and to invest progressively in the insurgent platforms that will grow tocommoditize the incumbent business models and create a new wave of innovation. We arefocused on the latter

Those who succeed the most and establish successful platforms “on top” of the open standardlater tend to consolidate the industry by leveraging their scale (in assets and distribution) tointegrate vertically and expand horizontally at the expense of smaller companies. Competing inthis new environment suddenly becomes expensive and startups struggle to create value in theshadow of incumbents, compressing venture returns.Demand then builds for a low cost, open source alternative to the incumbent platforms, and thecycle repeats itself: the new open standard emerges and gets adopted, the market decentralizes asnew firms leverage the cost savings to compete with the old on price, value creation shiftsupwards (once more), and so on

Information technology evolves in multi-decade cycles of expansion, consolidation anddecentralization. Periods of expansion follow the introduction of a new open platform thatreduces the production costs of technology as it becomes a shared standard. As production costsfall, new firms come to market leveraging the standard to compete with established incumbents,pushing down prices and margins, and decentralizing existing market powers.The price drop attracts new users, increasing the overall size of the market and creating newopportunities for mass consumer applications. Entrepreneurial talent moves to serve the newmarkets where costs are low, competition is scarce, and the upside is high. Often these earlyentrepreneurs will introduce new kinds of business models, orthogonal to existing ones

Non-cooperative companies solve this problem by taking up front capital and using that to subsidize one or both sides of the marketplace – guaranteeing fees to musicians and doing lots of marketing to recruit users. Cooperatives lack this up front capital, making it hard to get started.

First and foremost, it is not clear that Info Coops will produce more open information? After all, the logic of the information coop model is that information is only shared with members.

An FOI request involves a written query for records, a submission fee

Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning

Information we receive without consciously asking a question

an effective marginal cost of zero

February 2016, Lee passed away at age 89

Wessam Elhefnawy is a PhD student at Old Dominion University (ODU), member of the Pareto Lab directed by Professor Yaohang Li.

Singers

the protection of private information in an online environment has become the responsibility of user

In repeating the well-worn phrase that is supposed to sum up natural selection, ‘survival of the fittest’, we seldom think to ask: the fittest what? It won’t do to think that the phrase refers to fitness in individuals such as you and me. Even the fittest individuals never survive at all. We all die. What does survive is best described as information, much of which is encoded in the genes.

institutional demands for enterprise services such as e-mail, student information systems, and the branded website become mission-critical

This level of personalization makes marketers salivate

when Americans get news online, they increasingly reach for a smartphone (55%), with computer use falling significantly

the figure is just 53 percent when people are asked specifically about the news that they themselves use

people do not always distinguish between news reports and advertising on news sites, and the contrast between a professionally reported story and the “around the web” recommendations that may accompany it can be jarring

Amazon.com : You're annotated out there. Gibson: Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text.

Technology is the problem. When the profit motive trumps the public good

Avant d’être des biens économiques, la culture et l’information fondent notre humanité

Katie Courie

How information is accessed, created, and shared is revealing about the future of learning

what does it mean to be human in a digital age

how we make decisions with that data needs to be as transparent as the content

And so, that part I think was the second marking point for me was this idea of connectedness, and that by being connected-- being transparent and connected-- you produced this huge array of potential knowledge futures in these areas.

Our work, said Campbell, is not to graduate more students, but to enable students to graduate themselves

The studying strategy with “the greatest power,” she adds, involves deeply questioning the text — asking yourself if you agree with the author, and why or why not.

copyright is about ambiguity, not right and wrong answers, may be a helpful way of framing copyright education

want to remain neutral or impartial

In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller

Kenneth Haltman

University-wide 33–39% of faculty said that fewer than half of their undergraduates meet their expectations

Jules Prown

This has much in common with a customer relationship management system and facilitates the workflow around interventions as well as various visualisations.  It’s unclear how the at risk metric is calculated but a more sophisticated predictive analytics engine might help in this regard.

pedagogy of research

Sometimes, even people immersed in a discipline don’t quite understand how or why information is organized

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

The Triple Feedback Loop offers a compass by aligning the information flows in a framework for operating a network of disparate players with different goals who work together on an overarching goal.

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

International Food Information Council

these do not replace the conventional literacies of reading and writing, speaking and listening, but are supplemental to them

‘truth’ is something generally believed by people in a position to know, that are likely to tell the truth

The idea that you’ll get to truth by, for instance, just reading Breitbart and then Truthout, and somehow will come to truth, is kind of a bizarre idea

We need to start with a good term — could we call this vision one of “connected open”?

Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved

1) No one can even agree on a definition of “fake news,” even though a ridiculous number of words are being spent trying to define it.2) Folks don’t seem to understand the evolving nature of the problem, the way that manipulation evolves, or how the approaches they propose can be misused by those with whom they fundamentally disagree.3) No amount of “fixing” Facebook or Google will address the underlying factors shaping the culture and information wars in which America is currently enmeshed.

librarians can do more to promote information literacy.

"This is an issue that cuts broadly across the social media and news industries, and we are working together to help people better understand the sources and authenticity of information before they share with their friends or family," Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice-president of global operations and media partnerships, told AP.

"If you build the freeway, you have the responsibility to make sure the freeway is safe," he told AP."You shouldn't just say that if there are potholes, drivers should try to avoid them."

"Publishers need to take this finding seriously going forward and think about their readers as ambassadors to cultivate. Social media sites should also think seriously about transparency when it comes to emphasising where news articles originate."

The Media Insight Project had this advice for journalists, their employers, and social media networks like Facebook:To publishers and journalists: Your readers and followers are not just consumers to monetise, instead they may be social ambassadors whose own credibility with their friends affects your brand's reputation. It is the sharer's credibility, more than your own, which determines other people's willingness to believe you and engage with you. This underscores the importance of news organisations creating strong communities of followers who evangelise the organisation to others.To news-literacy advocates: In light of growing concerns about "fake news" spreading on social media, this experiment confirms that people make little distinction between known and unknown (even made-up) sources when it comes to trusting and sharing news. Even 19 per cent of people who saw our fictional news source would have been willing to recommend it to a friend.To Facebook and other social networks: Facebook and other social networks could do more to emphasise and provide information about the original sources for news articles. The fact that only two in 10 people in our experiment could recall the news reporting source accurately after seeing a Facebook-style post suggests that basic brand awareness has a long way to go. We found that sharers affect perceptions more than the original news reporting source — but might that change if Facebook made the reporting source label more prominent?

Ms Wardle said the research was a wake-up call for journalists, who should think of themselves as creators of individual "atoms of content", rather than focusing on their brand."Create content that is shareable, do excellent journalism that will be shared — but know that this will not always be enough," she said.

"So as citizens of information and consumers of information, we have to learn how to be critical of the information that we consume and journalists have got an important role to play in helping audiences navigate the news ecosystem.

"Times have changed. It used to be that we had gatekeepers; we had the ABC. [People] went to the newsagent and got their paper and paid their money. Now news comes to us via text message or email or Twitter or Facebook," she said.

"We now become publishers when we share. So we have a responsibility to think about that before we retweet."Claire Wardle

"When people see news from a person they trust, they are more likely to think it gets the facts right, contains diverse points of view, and is well reported than if the same article is shared by someone they are sceptical of," the researchers wrote.

The study found that what mattered most was whether the story was posted to Facebook by someone trusted, or someone previously tagged as not trusted by the social media user.

The study by the Media Insight Project found that people's trust in a piece of content on Facebook was stronger if they trusted the person who shared it — regardless of what organisation published it.

Your favourite social media star is more influential than media organisations that have built up their audience's trust over decades, according to a recent experiment.

Information literacy is not just a set of skills that are “nice to have”; such skills are truly a necessity of modern life.

For the past 40 years, society has demanded information literacy of students

Information literacy presumes a set of unbiased institutions and incorruptible instructors are waiting in the wings to begin inculcating the masses with the proper truth procedures.

A powerful media and information literacy project from UNESCO

Teaching students to separate fact from fiction has become a priority after an election in which false "news" played a large role.

the expert isn’t always right