Categories
Education Video

Danah Boyd's look at Media Literacy

I’m still watching this whole video but… I’ve already seen some powerful observations. Extremely relevant to the current media making landscape and the State of the Internet. She’s eloquently expresses some of the concerns I have that motivated me to relaunch AA.

TL;DR – Part 1. Media Literacy doesn’t work. Or at least it doesn’t accomplish what people think it does.

https://youtu.be/0I7FVyQCjNg
Categories
Activism

Lies spread faster than the truth

From the scientific paper The spread of true and false news online published in Science in 2018:

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Making your own media teaches you how to find facts and remain skeptical.

Categories
Education Media

Raising Media-Savy Kids

This new article has some good links to other good info about media literacy efforts and advice.

https://www.wired.com/story/kids-digital-media-literacy-tips/

Categories
About this site

The Return of Audio Activism

The last time I wrote here was over ten years ago. A lot in the world, and my life, has changed. Sadly the manipulation of our minds by the mainstream media has not. In fact it’s gotten a lot worse.

This post isn’t about chronicling all the ways the world has changed. Just to acknowledge it and to say “Howdy!”. I hope to make more in the Audio Activism style and share it here. My goal is still to teach others how to make their own media and share my point of view along the way.

(A lot of the information on AudioActivism.org is very outdated. I leave it here as a historical record. Hopefully it’ll help illustrate what’s improved and what hasn’t.)

Edit: The mainstream media isn’t the only force of manipulation in the world right now. Lots of individuals and groups are using the power of the Internet to do the same. When I first dreamed of the power of the Internet being used for good to help artists I knew it was “The wild west”. But I saw a glass half full. So did others. Many of us now see it half empty. The fight to keep the Wild Wild Web safe for everyone seems never ending.

Categories
About this site

Carrboro Creative Coworking

Incase you’re wondering what I’m up to check out Carrboro Creative Coworking.

Carrboro Creative Coworking is a professional shared workspace with a community atmosphere. It is designed to be a welcoming environment for microbusiness, freelance professionals, home-office workers, entrepreneurs, start-up business owners, tech workers, graduate students, writers, architects, civil engineers, designers and others. Coworkers receive access to a reliable office space inside a unique modern community.

Categories
About this site

Change is Good

I’m moving the majority of my blogging activities to Yesh.com. Please change my RSS feed in your feed reader to www.yesh.com/blog/feed. The podcasting feed URL is the same for now www.audioactivism.org/wp-rss2.php. Here is a post I wrote over at Yesh.com explaining the change. Please join me over there!

Welcome to Yesh.com. You might have come here in the past to look at the design “Portfolio of Brian C. Russell”. Well that’s still around. Its just over here now.

This is still the home of Brian C. Russell. Fact is I’ve had many online homes. Too many at this point to even list. Seriously. But here is a bit of info about this particular transition in my life.

From October 2004 to July 2006 I blogged over at AudioActivism.org. It has been more popular than I ever could have imagined. Not as big as some but still amazing to me. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to communicate with people from all over the world. But mostly my reach as been because of audio podcasting.

I set out to interview activists and tell people about online activism tools. My tag line was (is) “Meta data about media activism”. I made a ton of audio files and share them via my RSS feed. You can still listen to them here.

Another part of AudioActivism.org that is popular and useful is the tutorials section. I wrote Podcasting Tutorial & Intro, How to Pocast with WordPress 1.5, HowTo Create a interview Podcast on the Cheap, DIY Radio: Or how I learned to stop worrying about the media and start podcasting, and more. I’m very proud of these writings. They aren’t going any where right now and I hope they continue to be useful to people.

Thanks to many factors I found that AudioActivism.org has amazing google juice. This is the ability to blog about something and see it as one of the top five hits in a Google search. Because I wrote about social justice issues and other progressive topics I was able to demonstrate the power of blogging and podcasting for communicating ideas to millions with few resources. I hope this has inspired people to blog and podcast so they can create positive change in the world. I can only hope I’ve been able to accomplish this. Sometimes its hard to measure or define success.

As you can probably tell I’m changing my home for blogging, and maybe podcasting. The main reason is I want to keep it personal. It other words all over the place. That’s how I think.

AudioActivism.org is a site with a mission. As it turns out its mission became rather focused. But because it was also my personal blog I wrote about stuff that was pretty diverse in subject matter. I became concerned it was too diverse. I hope AudioActivism.org can become better at its original mission of politically leftist media. I have some ideas for its future. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to abandon it completely.

So here I am. The ‘I’ part is important. Yesh.com is about me, Brian C. Russell. I have A LOT of interest. They ebb and flow. My life is changing a ton right now. Moving to another blog is only one. So if you want to keep up with what I think this is THE place to do it. My goal is make this a blog by an expert who really likes helping people.

Categories
Blogs Education

A wiki about Educational Blogging

Andy Carvin writes over at his blog Learning.Now about the wiki SupportBloggging.com. This wiki appears to be a place for information about blogging for education. Lots of information there like How to Start blogging, Testimonials, and what’s the diference between social networking sites and blogs. I will definitely be recommending it to teachers and students who ask me about blogging. [Along with Blogging101 by Anton Zuiker of-course.] Which recently has been quite a few. I think Higher Ed and K-12 teachers could benefit from this. Props to Steve Hargadon for creating this resource. This site is really needed!

Categories
Activism Local Wi-Fi

Sign the Chapel Hill WiFi Petition

I just wanted to renew my call to everyone who lives and works in Chapel Hill to sign the Free Public WiFi in Chapel Hill, NC NOW! petition. As of today, June 19, 2006, we only have 42 signatures. We need many more before I can present this to the Chapel Hill Town Council. There has been lots of positive movement towards the creation of a municipal network in Chapel Hill.

BTW, if you don’t live in Chapel Hill you can sign the petition but the council would be most impressed by signatures from their constituents and people who live near and work in Chapel Hill. Lets continue speaking out! Thank you to everyone who has signed the petition already.

To: Chapel Hill Town Council

The time has come for the Town of Chapel Hill to build a free, community-owned, public municipal network. The network should have wireless access and provide an open, unfiltered, and unmonitored connection to the Internet available to ALL people. It must be maintained by a local nonprofit for the people of Chapel Hill. Not by a private business or corporation.

We request that the Chapel Hill Town Council act swiftly to bring this service to the people.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Categories
PodcasterCon 2006 Unconferences

UnConference interview published in Europe

Earlier in the year Terry Smith of Society for Technical Communication – Carolina interviewed me for an article about unconferences. I recorded the audio of our conversation, blogged it, and podcast it. [MP3] The impetus for the story was PodcasterCon 2006. First the story was published in their local newsletter [PDF]. Now I learn from Terry that the STC TransAlpine chapter in Europe republished it in their newsletter. (Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Italy) Very cool to see this info about unconferences spreading around the world! Also the local STC Carolina chapter is going to hold their own unconference.

Categories
Education Hardware Linux Technology

Internet Tablets for Education?

What do educators think about students using mobile internet devices for education? For example the Nokia 770.

Its an internet tablet with wifi built in, 800×480 touch screen, Linux based OS, bluetooth, Opera web browser, GTalk (VOIP), IM, email client, word processor, and I’ve even seen a Citrix client for it. Keyboard is not included but has been known to work via bluetooth. Retails for $359.95 USD.

I haven’t used this device but I thought it could be handy. Here are more URLs about it.
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog
www.internettablettalk.com/

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