Writing, Research, & Technology
Spring 2018
Panel Members: Sabrina, Lewis, And Mike
Hashtag: #cyberbullying
Twitter questions:
Q1: Provide the definition of cyberbullying in your own words, what’s an example of #cyberbullying?
Q2: What are ways you think we can prevent/limit #cyberbullying?
Q3: Have you known someone or have you yourself ever been a victim of #cyberbullying?
Readings:
Today we are workshopping your drafts with help from the Writing Center, but before we get to it, our tutors will begin by giving us a sense of what the WC can do for you, where it’s located, and how to make an appointment.
Links:
Today we are spending most of our time workshopping your ideas for the Truthometer post. We’ll also work on talking about those studies you checked out last week. Before we do that, I wanted to see if you had any questions with WordPress. I was planning to give you some time to tweak those a bit, but they were so impressive I scrapped that.
For your 4th blog post, I asked you to go upstream on a news report that cites a recent study. There were a number of news stories to choose from in the headlines last week, including:
These were just a few. Did anyone choose these news sources or follow up on a similar study? How did your searches go? Did anyone find an impact factor? Did you use Google Scholar? Did you “accurately summarize the state of research and the consensus of experts in a given area, taking into account majority and significant minority views” as Caulfield suggests? How hard was this, being an outsider? What does Caulfield say about this? Hint:
Often you are not in a position to critically read original scholarly research because it takes many years to develop the knowledge and literacies required to become an expert. That’s one of the reasons you are in college. This expertise can be observed if you try to pick up a journal from any given field. What makes these journals really credible, however, is the process of peer review. What is peer-review? The library at NC State explains it quite succinctly in this YT video:
Yet, for all of the credibility peer-reviewed journals muster, sometimes these journals are not even immune to the effects of the web. Consider the article, “The Case for Colonialism,” which was published in Third World Quarterly last month. Do some quick searching to find out about how this was received by the wider academic community, and what other sources say about this journal and the author. Are they the same? Although this is a rare case, why is it important to read laterally? What else might we find when we read laterally?
STEP 1: Open a new document in your WRT folder in Google Drive. Name this “Feedback on Truthometer ideas” and add your name and the specific post’s URL to your post at the top of the page. Be sure to grab the link from the copy tool at the top of your dash window and not the browser URL (otherwise the link from the dashboard will send users to their own WP dash — confusing, I know).
STEP 2: Copy and paste the following bullets at the top of your document:
STEP 3: In a new tab or window, go to this spreadsheet and find your name in the Owner/Author column. Copy the emails of the three readers next to your name. Toggle back to your document and click the blue share button at the top right. Add these email addresses to the “share with others” field. Make sure they can edit.
STEP 4: Help each other. In a moment you should receive invitations to respond to three authors (look in your Shared With Me folder in Drive). Follow the link to the Google Doc and then to the WP post then answer the questions by writing a ¶ to the author. Sign your name so they can come to you with questions. Ultimately you are trying to help the author decide which of these 3 ideas are the most appropriate for the Truthometer task. Put another way, you are checking up on their ideas to see which are viable. The bulleted questions, then, are meant to guide this process. Again, be sure to sign your feedback and clearly separate it from other respondents. Aim to respond to at least two peers in class today, if not all three.
Today we are continuing to talk about filter bubbles; we’ll then see how you did going upstream and reading laterally on recent studies.
On Monday you compiled common stories from news feeds from 3 different filter bubbles: conservative, liberal, and mainstream. Let’s look at them.
Watch this TED Talk by Eli Pariser on filter bubbles.
Since Pariser’s talk 7 years ago, information has become even more filtered. For example, a 2014 Pew Study found that there are key differences between folks on the left and the right of the political spectrum (see image on the right). While Facebook is an echo chamber for consistent conservatives, consistent liberals are likely to defriend people who disagree with them politically. Moreover, while consistent liberals have a more diverse media diet, conservatives distrust the news and hence, mostly stick to Fox News for their information. At the same time, Pew found that there’s a wide cohort of people (46% of those) whose politics are more mixed; those folks tend to listen — rather than speak — when it comes to politics online; in other words, they tend to be influenced by their filter bubbles rather than contribute to them.
So what specific technologies raised by Pariser drive filter bubbles? In other words, what makes them work? In assigned groups, take 10-15 minutes to read the Pariser quotation below and complete the related task. Be ready to share your findings with the class.
“Even if you’re logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you’re on to what kind of browser you’re using to where you’re located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore.”
Task: Do a search for “Google Analytics” and see what this tool can do. What some of the features of Analytics that any web designer can use to track or influence readers?
“There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.”
Task: Which of your online accounts have personalization settings? Which of these can you turn off? Do some poking around the web to see if you can find advice on this and be ready to share some tips with us.
“…what’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don’t decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don’t actually see what gets edited out.
Task: Visit the site Blue Feed, Red Feed, play around with the filter bubbles, and read the methodology. Be ready to explain it to the class.
“What we’re seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. And the thing is that the algorithms don’t yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance. We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important ”
Task: Read this piece Facebook wrote in 2015, telling the public that the company “…discovered that if people spend significantly more time on a particular story in News Feed than the majority of other stories they look at, this is a good sign that content was relevant to them.” What other factors do Facebook consider when calculating meaningful content? List them and tell us which of these give users some control.
Today we are going to review the rubric I created after our class discussions on Wednesday. Then we’re going to talk about the importance of reading laterally through an activity on filter bubbles.
Last week both sections worked to create a list of expectations for the fact-check blog posts; I thought we did a nice job and produced a list that overlapped between the two sections. Yesterday I organized these lists into a rubric:
After Trump was elected last November, Saturday Night Live ran this satirical ad of a planned community called “The Bubble”:
The ad poked fun of the privileged position that hipsters, progressives, or white millennials can choose to close themselves off from a version of America that threatens their worldview (they jokingly call it “Brooklyn”). It’s a funny skit because it plays off some of the fundamental trouble with a networked view of reality. Hence, the importance of what Caulfield calls “reading laterally.” For your homework today, you read laterally by looking at what others have said about Breitbart, Occupy Democrats, FoxNews, and others. From this you were supposed to answer a few questions:
Conservative: Townhall, Drudge Report, The Geller Report, Breitbart, and The Blaze
Liberal: The Raw Story, Occupy Democrats, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and AlterNet
Mainstream: NY Times, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Politico
On Wednesday we’ll talk more about what you found.
Read Caulfield’s chapters on using scholarly sources to read laterally, Chapters 20-25 (“Stupid journal tricks,” “Finding a Journal’s Impact Factor,” “Using Google Scholar…,” “How to Think About Research,” “Finding High Quality Secondary Sources,” and “Choosing Your Experts First“).
Use WP post #4 to go upstream on a news report that cites a recent study. (For some of you who have already blogged about a recent study, feel free to pick up where you left off.) If you’re stuck, type “recent study” into Google and click the “News” tab at the top. Like so:
Once you find a news story that cites a study or piece of scholarship, go upstream to find that original study. [Note: You may have to log in to Rowan’s library to access some of these.]
Even if you cannot find the actual study, use the strategies from the chapters above to check the credibility of the journal and the expertise of the author(s). If you get stuck on one strategy, discuss it in your post, but move to another. Not all journals will have an impact factor and not all authors can be easily found in Google Scholar, but you should seek both. Ultimately your goal is to use these search strategies to “accurately summarize the state of research and the consensus of experts in a given area, taking into account majority and significant minority views.”