What's also clear in the research is that phonics isn't enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That's why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that.

But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

Colleges and universities generally don't like state officials telling them what to do. "Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best," Butler said.

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. "We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts."

A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. "Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition," the authors wrote. "As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training."

teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too.

trust was sincere intent followed by consistent, related action.

How can we get back to that common ground? We need new mechanisms—suited to the digital age—that allow for a shared understanding of facts and that focus our collective attention on the most important problems.

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.

Matthew Mayer, a professor of educational psychology at Rutgers’ Graduate School of Education, says that among experts the best solutions to school shootings are not really in dispute: basic gun control, more and better mental-health services and a robust national threat-assessment program. We also need to help educators create an atmosphere where students who hear about a potential threat feel comfortable sharing that information with adults. (Many student shooters, including Gabe Parker at Marshall County, hint about their plans to at least one other person or tell them outright. Getting those others to inform teachers is one of our best options for preventing shootings from happening in the first place.) In February, Mayer and his colleagues circulated an eight-point document titled “A Call for Action to Prevent Gun Violence in the United States of America,” which summarized these and other key actions needed to reduce the risk of school shootings. So far, 4,400 educators and public-health experts have signed it. But political will is still missing. “We keep revisiting the same conversations every five or six years without learning or changing much of anything,” Mayer says. “Armed guards and metal detectors make it look like you’re doing something. You get far fewer points for talking about school climate and mental health.”

A common lament among educator-survivors is the way that personal boundaries shift within the school community. Abbey Clements, who taught second grade at Sandy Hook, says that after the shooting, she would take her entire class to the bathroom at the same time, so that no one would have to leave her sight. But as they drew their students close, she says, she and her colleagues distanced themselves from one another. “You’re afraid that if you start talking about your own trauma, you might trigger someone else’s,” she says. “You’re also afraid of looking weak or unstable, afraid you’ll be asked to leave or take leave if you admit how much you’re struggling.” As a result, many teachers bury their fear and anger and guilt, until it changes into something else entirely. The question of where to erect a memorial, or when to take one down, can create fierce divisions. So might similar questions about how long to allow comfort dogs on campus, or what to do with the mountain of gifts and condolences that pile up. Students may come close to blows over whether to discuss the shooting during class time. Teachers may feel close to doing the same. “It’s not all ‘Kumbaya,’ ” Clements says. “When the system is cracked by a trauma of this magnitude, a lot of stuff leaks out. It gets messy. And it can change relationships.”

From the inside, a mass shooting can feel distinctly unchartable. But Reed — and Pynoos, and Melissa Brymer, his colleague at the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress — say that while each school shooting is different in its particulars, several features are common to all. For example, Brymer says, it can be the secondary trauma that undoes a school’s recovery. “After a shooting, everyone wants to talk about how to find the next shooter so that this doesn’t happen again,” Brymer says. “But that’s not what the school itself needs to focus on. We’ve had suicides, car accidents, overdoses.” For a school that’s already traumatized, she says, these follow-up events can be incredibly devastating. Brymer advises schools to conduct mental-health screenings before anniversaries, to find the people who are struggling most and help them. The hierarchy of hurt can split in surprising ways. For the most part, people closest to the carnage are the most traumatized, and people farther away are less so. But any teacher might be plagued by any number of things, including what they saw and how they responded in the moment. One educator might flee the building in a panic, leaving his students behind, only to be devastated by guilt afterward. Another might behave heroically, then seethe with resentment over not getting enough recognition. Each will need counseling and support to fully recover.

Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students’ needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete. We know that the trauma that teachers experience after a school shooting can be both severe and enduring. “Their PTSD can be as serious as what you see in soldiers,” says Robert Pynoos, co-director of the federally funded National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, which helps schools coordinate their responses to traumatic events. “But unlike soldiers, none of them signed up for this, and none of them have been trained to cope with it.” We know that teachers who were least able to protect their students in the moment tend to be especially traumatized. “For teachers, the duty to educate students is primary,” Pynoos says. “But the urge to protect those students is deeper than that. It’s primal.” And we know that their symptoms can include major sleep disturbance, hair-trigger startle responses and trouble regulating emotions.

For all the fear they inspire, school shootings of any kind are technically still quite rare. Less than 1 percent of all fatal shootings that involve children age 5 to 18 occur in school, and a significant majority of those do not involve indiscriminate rampages or mass casualties. It has been two decades since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold ushered in the era of modern, high-profile, high-casualty shootings with their massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. According to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, just 10 of the nation’s 135,000 or so schools have experienced a similar calamity — a school shooting with four or more victims and at least two deaths — since then. But those 10 shootings have had an outsize effect on our collective psyche, and it’s not difficult to understand why: We are left with the specter of children being gunned down en masse, in their own schools. One such event would be enough to terrify and enrage us. This year, we had three.

Teachers were the first responders. Before police officers and medics arrived, they gathered sobbing, vomiting, bleeding kids into the safest rooms they could find, then locked the doors and kept vigil with them through the stunned and terrified wait. They shepherded the injured to hospitals in their own cars. And they knelt on the ground with the ones who were too wounded to move, stanching blood flow with their own hands and providing whatever comfort and assurance they could muster.

Trump’s digital strategy, Singer and Brooking argue, is not unlike militant groups and street gangs that leverage the viral web to tell a compelling story about policy, religious dogma, or their own perceived fearsomeness, all in an engaging voice, while repeatedly targeting exactly the right audience to trigger a dopamine response or sheer terror, both online and IRL. "To 'win' the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, authenticity, community, and inundation," Singer and Brooking write. "And if you can 'win' the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles."

In 1968, two psychologists wrote a paper theorizing that computers could become communications devices. The US Department of Defense ran with the idea, and in 1969 the precursor of the internet as we know it today, the military-operated ARPANET, went live. The National Science Foundation took over in the 1980s before business began to dominate in the 90s, at which point, things started to grow in exponential leaps. There were 28,000 internet users in 1987, according to Singer and Brooking. Today, there are billions.

Trump's unlikely rise to the White House was symptomatic of social, political, and technological trends decades in the making—trends that gave rise to the internet and social media and which, in turn, transformed the way we control, spy on, and kill each other.

Because our view of a person’s world is one dimensional, we fill in the gaps and construct false images of who they are.

In releasing the study results, Campus Technology reported that some teachers had expressed mixed feelings about the use of technology. These opinions came in the form of open-ended questions answered directly by educators. The educators were not identified. One noted that the learning process can suffer if students depend too much on their devices. “People can easily get addicted to their devices, and using technology can change the way the brain develops - not always in a good way,” the teacher wrote. Another educator wrote: “Technology is accidentally increasing students' weakness in reading and figuring things out (or critical thinking). They confuse clicking with learning.”

The study also looked at how technology helped teaching effectiveness. A large majority of educators, 87 percent, said technology had positively affected their ability to teach. Eleven percent said they felt technology had no effect on the quality of their teaching. Just two percent said technology had a negative effect on teaching.

this possibility of increased ownership and agency over technology and a somewhat romantic idea I have that this can transfer to inspire ownership and agency over learning

The Domain of One’s Own initiative at University of Mary Washington (UMW) is helping to recast the conversation about student data.

There's also potential for confusion within the CRDC itself. While this particular item refers clearly to "a shooting," the previous item asks about a long list of incidents, some involving "a firearm or explosive device" and others involving "a weapon."

A separate investigation by the ACLU of Southern California also was able to confirm fewer than a dozen of the incidents in the government's report, while 59 percent were confirmed errors.

For comparison, the Everytown for Gun Safety database, citing media reports, listed just 29 shootings at K-12 schools between mid-August 2015 and June 2016. There is little overlap between this list and the government's, with only seven schools appearing on both.

Our reporting highlights just how difficult it can be to track school-related shootings and how researchers, educators and policymakers are hindered by a lack of data on gun violence.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries.

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school? We should know. But we don't. This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.

visualizations are more than just ‘‘prettypictures’’: rather, precisely in virtue of their bringinginto play oursharedcognitive and aesthetic frame-works as human beings, they thereby catalyze theepistemological – but also aesthetic and therebysocial, if not also political – processes that create ashared intersubjective framework in the first place,one that then makes possible trust-building and asharedsensus communiswithin which the enterpriseof collaborative science may take place

a view towards examining how visualizationscontribute to building frameworks of trust.

‘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.

interest in understanding how web pages are rankedis foiled: in particular, users cannot know whether ornot a high ranking is the result of payment – andagain, such secrecy reduces trust and thereby theusability and accessibility of important information

The basic dilemma is simple. If the algorithms areopen – then webmasters (and anyone else) interestedin having their websites appear at the top of a searchresult will be able to manipulate their sites so as toachieve that result: but such results would then bemisleading in terms of genuine popularity, potentialrelevance to a searcher’s interests, etc., therebyreducing users’ trust in the search engine results andhence reducing the usability and accessibility ofimportant information. On the other hand, if thealgorithms are secret, then the legitimate public

‘‘The liberation of ourjudgments from subjective private conditions is anecessary condition for weighing our judgments withthe possible judgments of others, by putting ourselvesin the position of everyone else.’’

Finally, Thorseth points out that Kant’s notion ofreflective judgment is ofpossiblejudgments, in con-trast with actual judgments – where the former referto something virtual in the sense of what ispossiblefor human beings to imagine. For Thorseth, the well-known virtual world of Second Life stands as anexample of a virtual reality in which a key conditionof reflective/possible judgment is met – namely, thatwe are able to avoid the illusion that our purely pri-vate and personal conditions somehow constitute anobjective context or reality

Contrary to what many have criticised as anexcessively idealistic Kant in the (in)famous exampleof the Categorical Imperative requiring us to tell thetruth even to those obviously bent on harm, Myskjapoints out that in Kant’s later work, a more realisticunderstanding of human nature and thereby, a morenuanced understanding of the role of deceptionemerges. Briefly, deception may take place for lessthan ideal reasons – but as deception allows us tohide our more negative characteristics while none-theless developing more virtuous character, it canhelp us become better persons. This role of deceptionfits wonderfully well with what is otherwise oftenregarded as a highly morally problematic dimensionof online communication – precisely that we can therehide our real selves.

phenomenologically-basedapproach to trust, one that stresses precisely that‘‘...the bodily presence in the encounter appears to beessential for understanding the relation of trust.’’ Hemakes this point in part by way of reference to thework of K. E. Løgstrup,1E. Levinas,2and others –and thereby takes up trust as an ‘‘irreducible human

At the same time, however, especially as the Internetincreasingly becomes a primary venue for partici-pating in ‘‘...the political, social and commercialactivities necessary for full participation in a liberaldemocracy,’’ establishing trust in online worldsbecomes a correlatively more pressing matter.

In particular, Myskjapoints out that the largelydisembodiedcharacter ofmost online communication thereby cuts us off fromimportant, perhaps crucial channels of non-verbalcommunication that may be essential to trust-building.

Kant’s basicthoughts on autonomy and the public domain arehighly relevant to challenges concerning modernsociety, particularly to communication in the publicsphere. Trust is but one important topic being dis-cussed here; openness another. Thus, our aim has notonly been to demonstrate how Kant can be produc-tively applied to new technology; in addition, it hasbeen to show how the basic philosophical queriesraised within this context can be fruitfully illuminatedwithin Kant’s conceptual frames.

Blair’s posts are a remarkable feat of digital storytelling. She spun the all-in-all rather trivial behavior of two strangers into the social media equivalent of a rom-com and initially the story was heralded as the summer feel-good story we were in desperate in need of. (There also was some speculation that this was all a hoax, which is possible but seems implausible at this point.) But soon questions emerged about the ethics of this modern-day fairy tale, especially when it became clear that the female subject of the story did not welcome the attention and had her social profiles deleted after internet sleuths had figured out her identity. On July 12, she put out a statement through her lawyer in which she claimed to have been “doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed” and that voyeurs had come looking for her. By that point, the couple responsible for the tweets was slammed online as well.

Earlier, I have criticized Facebook for not anticipating the ethical problems with Facebook live and for its general approach of trying things out without much ethical forethought. But wouldn’t a pragmatist argue that because they are charting into new territory, digital innovators are more likely to make ethical mistakes giving the lack of existing normative framework?  This pragmatic defense only has limited power though, as there are general guiding ethical norms and principles in place already.  It is of course true that (some of) these norms might be subject to change in the digital environment and that sometimes our existing frameworks are ill-equipped to deal with new moral dilemmas. However, this does not excuse some of the more egregious ethical lapses we have seen recently, which were violations of well-known and accepted moral guidelines.

This approach, I believe, works well for digital ethics, where we try to articulate rules that govern how we interact with each other through digital technologies. For example, when social media emerged, there was no fixed rule about when it is appropriate to tag someone in a picture and when it isn’t. So we figured out a netiquette and ethical norms as we were going along, based on experience, existing norms, insights from experts etc. There still might be areas of disagreement, but I would argue that overall we have come to an understanding of what is acceptable and what isn’t on this issue, and these norms are passed on to new users of social media.

Phillip Kitcher, in the introduction of The Ethical Project describes the project of this pragmatic naturalism as follows: “Ethics emerges as a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished. We, collectively, made it up, and have developed, refined, and distorted it, generation by generation. Ethics should be understood as a project --the ethical project-- in which we have been engaged for most of our history as a species.” This a functionalist view sees ethics as a set of guidelines that make communal living possible. A successful ethical system is one that can fulfill this function.

For a pragmatist, documenting this change and questioning what perpetuated it in order to better understand our current norm is the more interesting endeavor. From this understanding, ethical guidelines can be crafted, but the descriptive process precedes the prescriptive one.

According to pragmatics, our attitudes and norms change in response to societal changes. For example, in an episode of Mad Men a guest at a party could be seen slapping a child that wasn’t his. It was one of the many (and one of the milder) examples in which the show’s creators’ reminded their audience that in the 1960s different rules governed social interactions.

In daily language, the word pragmatic is often used pejoratively, to describe someone with a lack of principles (or character) who will let the situation, rather than a firm moral compass, guide her actions. But in the philosophical sense, pragmatism refers to an orientation towards ethics that isn’t occupying itself with abstract concepts such as “truth,” “right” and “wrong” or with coming up with all-encompassing ethical theories. Instead it focuses on praxis rather than theory and sees the role of the ethicist more to “de-scribe” norms as they develop than to “pre-scribe” them. 

The first of the two maps in the GIF image below shows the US political spectrum on the eve of the 2016 election. The second map highlights the followers of a 30-something American woman called Jenna Abrams, a following gained with her viral tweets about slavery, segregation, Donald Trump, and Kim Kardashian. Her far-right views endeared her to conservatives, and her entertaining shock tactics won her attention from several mainstream media outlets and got her into public spats with prominent people on Twitter, including a former US ambassador to Russia. Her following in the right-wing Twittersphere enabled her to influence the broader political conversation. In reality, she was one of many fake personas created by the infamous St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

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.

merican public life has become increasingly ideologically segregated as newspapers have given way to screens. But societies have experienced extremism and fragmentation without the assistance of Silicon Valley for centuries. And the polarization in the US began long ago, with the rise of 24-hour cable news. So just how responsible is the internet for today’s divisions? And are they really as bad as they seem?

And in our schools, we need to continue the work done by many states that are pursuing educative approaches to school safety and student success by reducing school exclusions and leveraging initiatives that strengthen students’ social-emotional skills, mental health supports, and sense of safety and belonging. If we genuinely want to ensure safer schools, we should follow the evidence about what works, rather than jeopardizing lives with ideological battles.

Numerous studies have suggested an association  between exclusionary discipline  practices and an array of serious educational, economic and social problems, including school avoidance and diminished educational engagement; decreased academic achievement; increased behavior problems; increased likelihood of dropping out; substance abuse; and involvement with juvenile justice systems. All of these problems are costly to the victims and to our society. They drive up the public costs associated with the aftermath of violence, substance abuse counseling, unemployment or underemployment, policing and the justice system, and much, much more.

Indeed, school exclusion, without these supports, can exacerbate a bad situation. In the Parkland case, the fact that Nikolas Cruz had been expelled from school may have contributed to driving an angry young man who felt isolated to take out his frustration and anger by killing students and staff at his former school. In theory, zero-tolerance policies deter students from violent or illegal behavior because the punishment for such a violation is harsh and certain. However, research shows that such policies ultimately increase illegal behavior and have negative effects on student academic achievement, attainment, welfare, and school culture.

These social-emotional learning practices have been found in hundreds of studies to reduce negative behavior and violence in schools, making schools safer while also increasing academic achievement. The guidance builds on what we know about how to increase school safety through “conflict resolution, restorative practices, counseling and structured systems of positive interventions.” The guidance also provides research-based resources to address students’ mental health needs, as well as proven practices that make students feel more connected to school and part of a community, so they are less likely to engage in negative and harmful behavior.

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.”

developed on an evidence-based foundation that draws from the learning sciences and is implemented using effective strategies that focus on improving the quality of learning experiences and improving the outcomes for all students.

enable everywhere, all-the-time learning and ensure greater equity and accessibility to learning opportunities over the course of a learner’s lifetime

You might have seen the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in the previous step. In this 6-minute video, #BlackTwitter after #Ferguson, we meet activists who were involved in the movement and learn about their own uses of Twitter as a platform of protest. Hashtags, when used like this, can be extremely complex in the way they represent ideas, communities and individuals.

To start you thinking, here’s a quote from lead educator Jean Burgess. Jean considers how Twitter has changed since 2006 and reflects on her own use of the platform in the context of changing patterns of use. In response to the suggestion that Twitter is a dying social media platform, Jean states that: the narratives of decline around the place at the moment […] have to do with a certain loss of sociability. And to those of us for whom Twitter’s pleasures were as much to do with ambient intimacy, personal connections and play as they were to do with professional success theatre, celebrity and breaking news, this is a real, felt loss: sociability matters.

Google also says location records stored in My Activity are used to target ads. Ad buyers can target ads to specific locations — say, a mile radius around a particular landmark — and typically have to pay more to reach this narrower audience. While disabling “Web & App Activity” will stop Google from storing location markers, it also prevents Google from storing information generated by searches and other activity. That can limit the effectiveness of the Google Assistant, the company’s digital concierge. Sean O’Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher with whom the AP shared its findings, said it is “disingenuous” for Google to continuously record these locations even when users disable Location History. “To me, it’s something people should know,” he said.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told the AP it is “frustratingly common” for technology companies “to have corporate practices that diverge wildly from the totally reasonable expectations of their users,” and urged policies that would give users more control of their data. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey called for “comprehensive consumer privacy and data security legislation” in the wake of the AP report.

“If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” Mayer said. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.” Google says it is being perfectly clear. “There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the AP. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.”

Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)

Storing your minute-by-minute travels carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects — such as a warrant that police in Raleigh, North Carolina, served on Google last year to find devices near a murder scene. So the company lets you “pause” a setting called Location History.

It’s this combination, the fetish for strength and the idealization of racially coded innocence, that has historically led authoritarian movements to subvert the rule of law in the name of order.

The scene could come right out of today’s Blue Lives Matter meme factory. Along with images of warriors, weapons, and German shepherds, pictures of children—often little blond girls—hugging cops infuse the movement with an ominous sentimentalism.

The Thin Blue Line runs less risk of alienating potential supporters; the American flag, filtered through a lens darkly, might send just the right message.

The blue line poses the old question of organized labor—which side are you on?—as a loyalty test.

The Blue Lives Matter movement, which began after the December 20, 2014, slaying of two New York City police officers, soon adopted the Thin Blue Line flag. The murders were the catalyst for what quickly became a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, its insistence that we pay more attention to killer cops than to cops killed in the line of duty.

“The black above represents citizens,” he said, “and the black below represents criminals.” That those on the wrong side of the line are typically citizens themselves doesn’t bother Jacob, who has built a thriving business, Thin Blue Line USA

"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."

Gatov, who is the former head of Russia's state newswire's media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. "Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through," he said. "Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won't be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers."

"There's no paradox here. It's two sides of the same coin," Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur known for his pro-government views, told BuzzFeed. "The Kremlin is weeding out the informational field and sowing it with cultured plants. You can see what will happen if they don't clear it out from the gruesome example of Ukraine."

The trolls appear to have taken pains to learn the sites' different commenting systems. A report on initial efforts to post comments discusses the types of profanity and abuse that are allowed on some sites, but not others. "Direct offense of Americans as a race are not published ('Your nation is a nation of complete idiots')," the author wrote of fringe conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, "nor are vulgar reactions to the political work of Barack Obama ('Obama did shit his pants while talking about foreign affairs, how you can feel yourself psychologically comfortable with pants full of shit?')." Another suggested creating "up to 100" fake accounts on the Huffington Post to master the site's complicated commenting system.

According to the documents, which are attached to several hundred emails sent to the project's leader, Igor Osadchy, the effort was launched in April and is led by a firm called the Internet Research Agency. It's based in a Saint Petersburg suburb, and the documents say it employs hundreds of people across Russia who promote Putin in comments on Russian blogs.

The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day. On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day.

Russia's campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin's message on the comments section of top American websites.Plans attached to emails leaked by a mysterious Russian hacker collective show IT managers reporting on a new ideological front against the West in the comments sections of Fox News, Huffington Post, The Blaze, Politico, and WorldNetDaily.The bizarre hive of social media activity appears to be part of a two-pronged Kremlin campaign to claim control over the internet, launching a million-dollar army of trolls to mold American public opinion as it cracks down on internet freedom at home.

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.

Then I used Gephi, another free data analysis tool, to visualize the data as an entity-relationship graph. The coloured circles—called Nodes—represent Twitter accounts, and the intersecting lines—known as Edges—refer to Follow/Follower connections between accounts. The accounts are grouped into colour-coded community clusters based on the Modularity algorithm, which detects tightly interconnected groups. The size of each node is based on the number of connections that account has with others in the network.

Using the open-source NodeXL tool, I collected and imported a complete list of accounts tweeting that exact phrase into a spreadsheet. From that list, I also gathered and imported an extended community of Twitter users, comprised of the friends and followers of each account. It was going to be an interesting test: if the slurs against Nemtsov were just a minor case of rumour-spreading, they probably wouldn't be coming from more than a few dozen users.

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.

To begin to develop a grammar of fake news, I collected six types of false information we’ve seen this election season.

Instead, I would encourage the social platforms to include prominent features for filtering and flagging. They should work with journalists and social psychologists to invent a new visual grammar so that when content is fact-checked, debunked, corrected, or verified, those processes are transparent and available to anyone seeking to understand more about the origins of a story.

Jeff Jarvis wrote over the weekend, we need to be careful what we wish for: We don’t want Facebook to become the arbiter of truth.

The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones called Twitter a “self-cleaning oven,” suggesting that false information could be flagged and self-corrected almost immediately. We no longer had to wait 24 hours for a newspaper to issue a correction.

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.

Dissemination MechanismsFinally, we need to think about how this content is being disseminated. Some of it is being shared unwittingly by people on social media, clicking retweet without checking. Some of it is being amplified by journalists who are now under more pressure than ever to try and make sense and accurately report information emerging on the social web in real time. Some of it is being pushed out by loosely connected groups who are deliberately attempting to influence public opinion, and some of it is being disseminated as part of sophisticated disinformation campaigns, through bot networks and troll factories.

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.

When humans are angry and fearful, their critical thinking skills diminish.

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

By now we’ve all agreed the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we’re struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it’s about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false).

Researchers have found time and time again that more guns mean more deaths. And Americans have a lot of guns, and easy access to them. Americans own almost half of the 650 million civilian-owned guns there are in the entire world, and gun homicide rates in the US are 25 times higher than in other high-income countries. States and developed countries with more guns have more gun deaths.

Analyzing data on hundreds of shootings in Boston from 2010 to 2014, Anthony Braga of Northeastern University and Philip J. Cook of Duke University found that on a bullet-per-bullet basis, shootings committed with a large-caliber firearm are much more likely to result in a fatality than those with a smaller-caliber gun. Caliber is a measure of the diameter of the bullets fired by a particular gun.

But they found stark differences in shooting outcomes depending on the caliber of gun used. They divided the calibers of guns used in the shootings into three categories: small, which included .22-, .25- and .32-caliber handguns; medium, including .380s, .38s and 9mms; and large, including .40s, .44 magnums, .45s, 10mms and 7.62 x 39s.

For all the paranoid American theories of being “red-pilled,” of awakening into a many-tentacled liberal/feminist/Jewish conspiracy, the most corrosive force, the ectoplasm infusing itself invisibly through media and culture and politics, is white supremacy.

listen, don’t center yourself, get educated, think about your responses and what role they play

DiAngelo sets aside a whole chapter for the self-indulgent tears of white women, so distraught at the country’s legacy of racist terrorism that they force people of color to drink from the firehose of their feelings about it.

“The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.)

In DiAngelo’s almost epidemiological vision of white racism, our minds and bodies play host to a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself, sickening us in the process. Like a mutating virus, racism shape-shifts in order to stay alive; when its explicit expression becomes taboo, it hides in coded language.

To be perceived as an individual, to not be associated with anything negative because of your skin color, she notes, is a privilege largely afforded to white people;

Whites profit off of an American political and economic system that showers advantages on racial “winners” and oppresses racial “losers.” Yet, DiAngelo writes, white people cling to the notion of racial innocence, a form of weaponized denial that positions black people as the “havers” of race and the guardians of racial knowledge. Whiteness, on the other hand, scans as invisible, default, a form of racelessness. “Color blindness,” the argument that race shouldn’t matter, prevents us from grappling with how it does.

DiAngelo addresses her book mostly to white people, and she reserves her harshest criticism for white liberals like herself (and like me), whom she sees as refusing to acknowledge their own participation in racist systems. “I believe,” she writes, “that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color.” Not only do these people fail to see their complicity, but they take a self-serving approach to ongoing anti-racism efforts: “To the degree that white progressives think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived.”

And the expectation of “white solidarity”—white people will forbear from correcting each other’s racial missteps, to preserve the peace—makes genuine allyship elusive. White fragility holds racism in place.

DiAngelo attempts to explicate the phenomenon of white people’s paper-thin skin. She argues that our largely segregated society is set up to insulate whites from racial discomfort, so that they fall to pieces at the first application of stress—such as, for instance, when someone suggests that “flesh-toned” may not be an appropriate name for a beige crayon. Unused to unpleasantness (more than unused to it—racial hierarchies tell white people that they are entitled to peace and deference), they lack the “racial stamina” to engage in difficult conversations. This leads them to respond to “racial triggers”—the show “Dear White People,” the term “wypipo”—with “emotions such as anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, “and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

In more than twenty years of running diversity-training and cultural-competency workshops for American companies, the academic and educator Robin DiAngelo has noticed that white people are sensationally, histrionically bad at discussing racism. Like waves on sand, their reactions form predictable patterns: they will insist that they “were taught to treat everyone the same,” that they are “color-blind,” that they “don’t care if you are pink, purple, or polka-dotted.” They will point to friends and family members of color, a history of civil-rights activism, or a more “salient” issue, such as class or gender. They will shout and bluster. They will cry. In 2011, DiAngelo coined the term “white fragility” to describe the disbelieving defensiveness that white people exhibit when their ideas about race and racism are challenged—and particularly when they feel implicated in white supremacy. Why, she wondered, did her feedback prompt such resistance, as if the mention of racism were more offensive than the fact or practice of it?

For one, much of the new research centers on U.S. politics and, specifically, elections. But social networks drive conversations about many other topics such as business, education, health, and personal relationships. To battle bad online information, it would be helpful to know whether people respond to these sorts of topics differently than they respond to information about political candidates and elections. It also would be useful to know whether myths about certain subjects — for instance, a business product or education trend — are trickier to correct than others.

Scholars have known for decades that people tend to search for and believe information that confirms what they already think is true. The new elements are social media and the global networks of friends who use it. People let their guard down on online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where friends, family members, and coworkers share photos, gossip, and a wide variety of other information. That’s one reason why people may fall for false news, as S. Shyam Sundar, a Pennsylvania State University communication professor, explains in The Conversation. Another reason: People are less skeptical of information they encounter on platforms they have personalized — through friend requests and “liked” pages, for instance — to reflect their interests and identity.

Another key, potentially surprising, takeaway from that study: “In general, fake news consumption seems to be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, hard news — visits to fake news websites are highest among people who consume the most hard news and do not measurably decrease among the most politically knowledgeable individuals.”

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford released a report showing that false news sites appear to have a limited reach in Europe. For instance, in France, where Russians are accused of trying to interfere with the most recent presidential election, most of the false news sites studied reached 1% or less of the country’s online population each month in 2017. However, when researchers looked at how people interacted with false news on Facebook — via shares and comments, for example — “a handful of false news outlets in [the] sample generated more or as many interactions as established news brands.”

As false news has become a global phenomenon, scholars have responded. They’ve ramped up their efforts to understand how and why bad information spreads online — and how to stop it. In the past 18 months, they’ve flooded academic journals with new research and have raised the level of urgency. In a March 2018 article, titled “The Science of Fake News,” in the prestigious journal Science, 16 high-profile academics came together to issue a call to action, urging internet and social media platforms to work with scholars to evaluate the problem and find solutions.

Digest the information below, even though it might feel uncomfortable, and arm yourself with the truth about the potential damage screen time is capable of imparting—particularly in a young, still-developing brain.

People can post about what they’re actively listening to (either on their personal websites or via podcast apps that could report the percentage of the episode listened to) and send “listen” Webmentions to pages for podcasts or other audio content.

Marginalia#section5 With Webmention support, one could architect a site to allow inline marginalia and highlighting similar to Medium.com’s relatively well-known functionality. With the clever use of URL fragments, which are well supported in major browsers, there are already examples of people who use Webmentions to display word-, sentence-, or paragraph-level marginalia on their sites. After all, aren’t inline annotations just a more targeted version of comments?

As mentioned earlier, Webmentions allow notifications between web addresses. If both sites are set up to send and receive them, the system works like this: Alice has a website where she writes an article about her rocket engine hobby. Bob has his own website where he writes a reply to Alice’s article. Within his reply, Bob includes the permalink URL of Alice’s article. When Bob publishes his reply, his publishing software automatically notifies Alice’s server that her post has been linked to by the URL of Bob’s reply. Alice’s publishing software verifies that Bob’s post actually contains a link to her post and then (optionally) includes information about Bob’s post on her site; for example, displaying it as a comment. A Webmention is simply an @mention that works from one website to another!

If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.

Webmention is a (now) standardized protocol that enables one website address (URL) to notify another website address that the former contains a reference to the latter. It also allows the latter to verify the authenticity of the reference and include its own corresponding reference in a reciprocal way.

The new organs process this enormous amount of information to break you down into categories, which are sometimes innocuous like, “Listens to Spotify” or “Trendy Moms”, but can also be more sensitive, identifying ethnicity and religious affiliation, or invasively personal, like “Lives away from family”. More than this, the new organs are being integrated with increasingly sophisticated algorithms, so they can generate predictive portraits of you, which they then sell to advertisers who can target products that you don’t even know you want yet. 

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, two Brooklyn-based artists whose work explores the intersections of technology and society, have been hearing a lot of stories like mine. In June, they launched a website called New Organs, which collects first-hand accounts of these seemingly paranoiac moments. The website is comprised of a submission form that asks you to choose from a selection of experiences, like “my phone is eavesdropping on me” to “I see ads for things I dream about.” You’re then invited to write a few sentences outlining your experience and why you think it happened to you.

Part of the reason is because an undergraduate education doesn't really train a person to think like a scientist. Instead, undergraduates focus on learning the large amount of foundational material in a field. It really isn't until graduate school (or after several years at the bench) that a person is taught how to generate new knowledge in the field. Once you can generate new knowledge in the field, then you call yourself a scientist.

We should extend the title of "scientist" to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time at the research bench designing experiments and contributing to the scientific literature. However, few scientists would be willing to extend the title to somebody who simply studied science as an undergraduate and moved on to other things.

Actually, no, it hasn't, no matter what the Bunny's sign says. The scientific method is designed specifically to root out bias and false assumptions, including political ones. Sure, individual scientists can be political, but the scientific method is not. Its ideological agnosticism is why it works so well. In fact, the self-correcting nature of science means it is the best source of secular knowledge that humankind possesses.

What about people who don't have PhD's? Are they scientists, too? In any world in which credentials matter, the answer is no. (I describe a major exception to the rule below.) Just like getting an MD or a JD is a prerequisite to being called a doctor or a lawyer, in general, getting a PhD in the natural sciences is the prerequisite to being called a scientist.

From Weekend Edition on NPR. Annotations in source available here. “Robograders” are on the rise in high stakes testing, and other aspects of our classrooms. Keep in mind this is just an algorithm looking for patterns in student writing. An algorithm isn’t magic, it’s code (writing) written by people. “The idea is bananas, as far as I’m concerned,” says Kelly Henderson, an English teacher at Newton South High School just outside Boston. “An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous.”

Ian O’Byrne, an assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “As an educator and researcher who studies these digital places and tools, I’m in front of screens a lot. I experiment and play in these spaces. I’m also writing and researching the impact of these screens and their impact on the well-being of others as it relates to children and adolescents. The problem in this is that one of the other hats that I wear is as a parent and husband. I am not only critical of my engagement and use of these digital technologies, but I’m also cautious/cognizant of their role as a mediator in my relationships with my children and significant other. These screens and digital tools play a strong role in our lives and interactions in and out of our home. In our home we have screens and devices all over the place. We have a video server that is ready to serve content to any one of these screens on demand. We have voice-assistive devices listening and waiting for our commands. I believe it is important as an educator and researcher to play with and examine how these devices are playing a role in our lives, so I can bring this work to others. Even with these opportunities, I’m still struck by times when technology seems too intrusive. This is plainly evident when I’m sitting with my family and watching a television show together, and I’m gazing off into my device reading my RSS feed for the day. Previously I would enjoy watching the funniest home videos and laughing together. Now, I am distant. The first thing in the morning when I’m driving my kids in to school and stop at a red light, previously I would enjoy the time to stop, listen to the radio, look at the clouds or bumper stickers on cars around me. Now, I pull out the phone to see if I received a notification in the last 20 minutes. When I call out for the voice-activated device in my home to play some music or ask a question, my request is quickly echoed by my 2-year-old who is just learning to talk. She is echoing these conversations I’m having with an artificial intelligence. I’m trying to weigh this all out in my mind and figure what it means for us personally. The professional understanding may come later.”

The second comes from Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist who in 1969 wrote a hugely influential paper called “The Strength of Weak Ties.” In this paper, he suggested that the stronger the tie between any two people, the higher the fraction of friends they have in common.

The first comes from Elizabeth Bott, an influential anthropologist who published a book in 1957 called Family and Social Networks. In this book, she hypothesized that the degree of clustering in an individual’s network could draw the person away from a tie with somebody else. In other words, if you are part of a group of close friends or relations, you are less able to make strong links outside this group.

The team found that the number of friends that pairs of individual have in common is strongly correlated with the strength of the tie between them, as measured in other ways. That’s regardless of whether people are linked by mobile-phone records or by social ties in rural Indian villages.

Social scientists measure the strength of these links using a variety of indicators, such as how often a person calls another, whether that call is reciprocated, the time the two people spend speaking, and so on. But these indicators are often difficult and time-consuming to measure.

This system of demonstrating tasks to one robot that can then transfer its skills to other robots with different body shapes, strengths, and constraints might just be the first step toward independent social learning in robots. From there, we might be on the road to creating cultured robots.

Soon we might add robots to this list. While our fanciful desert scene of robots teaching each other how to defuse bombs lies in the distant future, robots are beginning to learn socially. If one day robots start to develop and share knowledge independently of humans, might that be the seed for robot culture?

If we didn’t have social learning, we wouldn’t have culture. As zoologists Kevin Laland and Will Hoppitt argue, “culture is built upon socially learned and socially transmitted information.” Socially acquired knowledge is distinct from what we learn individually and from information inherited through genes or through imitation.

his imaginary scene shows the power of learning from others. Anthropologists and zoologists call this “social learning”: picking up new information by observing or interacting with others and the things others produce. Social learning is rife among humans and across the wider animal kingdom. As we discussed in our previous post, learning socially is fundamental to how humans become fully rounded people, in all our diversity, creativity, and splendor.

The forces that Berners-Lee unleashed nearly three decades ago are accelerating, moving in ways no one can fully predict. And now, as half the world joins the Web, we are at a societal inflection point: Are we headed toward an Orwellian future where a handful of corporations monitor and control our lives? Or are we on the verge of creating a better version of society online, one where the free flow of ideas and information helps cure disease, expose corruption, reverse injustices?

For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding.

Perelman says his Babel Generator also proves how easy it is to game the system. While students are not going to walk into a standardized test with a Babel Generator in their back pocket, he says, they will quickly learn they can fool the algorithm by using lots of big words, complex sentences, and some key phrases - that make some English teachers cringe. "For example, you will get a higher score just by [writing] "in conclusion,'" he says.

"It's so scary that it works," Perelman sighs. "Machines are very brilliant for certain things and very stupid on other things. This is a case where the machines are very, very stupid."

"The idea is bananas, as far as I'm concerned," says Kelly Henderson, an English teacher at Newton South High School just outside Boston. "An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous."

Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. It’s a tool for finding people who possess uncommon, hard-to-locate traits, whether that’s “person thinking of buying a new refrigerator,” “person with the same rare disease as you,” or “person who might participate in a genocidal pogrom,” and then pitching them on a nice side-by-side or some tiki torches, while showing them social proof of the desirability of their course of action, in the form of other people (or bots) that are doing the same thing, so they feel like they’re part of a crowd.

Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice.

we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting

Privacy advocates tried to explain that persuasion was just the tip of the iceberg. Commercial databases were juicy targets for spies and identity thieves, to say nothing of blackmail for people whose data-trails revealed socially risky sexual practices, religious beliefs, or political views.

We need to keep education separate so we will never confuse what its purpose really is:  freedom.

Children need to view themselves as full human beings, as citizens even, something a good liberal arts foundation provides. By limiting education to a workforce development function and downplaying its political, social and development roles, the conservative position that education must be in service to the workforce benefits those who are currently in power, and education leaders are aggressively converting that belief into policy.

Sure, education is linked to the workplace. Students grow up to be workers, and the federal government has a role in ensuring states are providing a quality education, especially in districts with many black and brown children. However, to collapse education and labor into a single agency is to also reduce education’s role in developing full human beings. Students are more than widget makers for the economy. And black students, whose ancestors’ bodies were once reduced to instruments of labor in slavery, have the most to lose from a shortsighted, politically-driven merger of the U.S. education and labor departments.

Unschooled reductions in government and reflexive conservatism create more problems and inefficiencies than they purport to resolve.

The notion of a governmental reboot seems fair enough. Government bureaucracies that grow over time can be anathema to innovation and efficiency. Technology has challenged the way we engage with all institutions, and the federal government could certainly improve its use of technology to better deliver services.

In broadest terms I would define being part of the IndieWeb as owning your own domain name and hosting some sort of website as a means of identifying yourself and attempting to communicate with others on the internet.

Guide to highlight colors Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word Green–Reference to read Blue–Interesting Quote Gray–Typography Problem Red–Example to work through

Blogging begets blogging. I blog because I'm in the business of locating and connecting interesting things. Operating a popular blog gives people an incentive to approach me with interesting things of their own devising or discovery, for inclusion on Boing Boing. The more I blog, the more of these things I get, as other infovores toss choice morsels over my transom. The feedback loop continues on Boing Boing's message boards, where experts and amateurs debate and discuss the stories I've posted, providing depth and context for free, fixing the most interesting aspects of the most interesting subjects even more prominently in my foremind.

When I think about blogging, there is a cross-over between technology and the way it is used. Big B bloggers are those who take each to their extremes. Content is important. But so is process and product. It is something personal, stemming from our changing circumstances and intent.

Scale in many ways became a distraction, one which was magnified to such a degree by the hype around MOOCs in edtech that anything less that 10s of thousands of “users,” “learners,” “participants,” followers,” etc. was tacitly considered somehow less than optimal for effective online learning

And for me that is the kicker, most folks treat their blog as if it were some kind of glossy headshot of their thinking, whereas the beauty and freedom of blogging was that it was by design a networked tool. Blogging provides a space to develop an online voice, connect with a particular network, and build a sense of identity online in conjunction with others working through a similar process.

we need a legal framework to guarantee at least some access to API data, at least for some people. It is certainly nice that companies start research collaborations, but these fit of course into a sanitized view on their services. We therefore need, I think, something that is able to express the public’s legitimate interest to know “what’s going on” and access to API data is, in my view, a more promising avenue than the forms of purely technical or operational transparency that are often discussed. Fair use principles, for example concerning copyright, exist in academia because there is a belief that research that is not beholden to corporate interest performs a function in public life that is worth protecting. Can we imagine something similar with API data? A legally protected means to do research into these platforms? To find a compromise between privacy and publicness, we would have to find a way to distinguish between “disinterested” research and other applications

Squishy Belly Mommy

Project Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge.

Political and interest-based advertising should be under much stricter scrutiny than, say, the advertising of T-shirts or hair products.

It’s very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for researchers to independently look at behavior on the platform.

filter

Facebook could also offer an optional filter that would keep any post (or share) of an unverified account from showing up. I’d use that filter.

countering misinformation, hate speech and propaganda — can take is to abandon the focus on emotional signaling-as-engagement.

As they stand, and especially with algorithmic reinforcement, “reactions” and “likes” are like megaphones for echo chambers and news outrage.

Addressing implicit and explicit cultural biases in data is going to be a huge challenge for everyone who is trying to build a system dependent on data classified by or about humans.

Project-based learning typically is grounded in the following elements: Role-playing Real-world scenarios Blended writing genres Multiple reading genres Authentic assessments Authentic audiences Real-world expertise brought into the classroom Units that assess multiple skills Units that require research and comprehension of multiple subjects Student choice Collaboration Multiple methods of communication (writing, oral speaking, visual presentations, publishing, etc.)

People are tuning in to communications technologies at an ever-expanding level. Some recent indicators:

social and cultural technologies

“The only way to save a democracy is to explain the way things work,” says Linus Neumann, a CCC spokesman and information security consultant. “Understanding things is a good immunization.”

My responses all focus on exploring and celebrating your child’s interests.

The web was supposed to open up higher ed. In a model like Antigonish 2.0, higher ed may be the lever needed to reopen the web to its participatory, democratic potential.

When you looked at the March on Washington in 1963, you were seeing the Civil Rights movement's organizational strength, the effort and discipline it took to be out in those numbers. The recent Women's March in Washington, D.C., was also very large, but it was the first step of a potential movement, not the culmination of a decade of work. Without a Twitter hashtag or Excel spreadsheets to do your logistics, you really had to build a lot of [organizational] muscle. If you want to be a credible threat to the powers that be, you need to build those muscles.

Ian O’Byrne, an assistant professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston, replied, “In the future we’ll see more opportunities for online, personalized learning. This will include open, online learning experiences (e.g., MOOCs) where individuals can lurk and build up capacity or quench interests. I also believe that we’ll see a rise in the offering of premium or pay content that creates a space where one-to-one learning and interaction will allow mentors to guide learners while providing critical feedback. We will identify opportunities to build a digital version of the apprenticeship learning models that have existed in the past. Alternative credentials and digital badges will provide more granular opportunities to document and archive learning over time from traditional and nontraditional learning sources. Through evolving technologies (e.g., blockchain), this may provide opportunities for learners to document and frame their own learning pathways.”

Similarly, the collective of internet users acting as digital environmentalists advocate for the health of the digital environment.

STRENGTH THROUGH DECENTRALIZATION

A bitmark consists of four basic elements:an asset fingerprintasset metadataan owner accounta digital signature

PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

The ability to establish ownership claims to digital assets — of well-understood forms of intellectual property such as music, movies and books but also for emergent and increasingly critical ones such as computer code, digital art, user-generated data and metadata — will transform many of the 21st century’s largest negative externalities into a new asset class capable of powering the next economic revolution.

What is needed is a trustworthy, secure, and enduring property system that is flexible enough to incorporate digital properties into any community’s broader property rights traditions

a property is an asset plus a property title