The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns.
Basically, Facebook becomes an echo chamber for like minded individuals, limiting access to information that is contrary to the beliefs of the echo chamber.
It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world. In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed “the green…
…Both Reader Rabbitand Cluefinders were the work of The Learning Company (TLC), a dominant player in the realm of educational software during its peak in the late 1980s and ’90s. At a certain point, TLC owned pretty much every computer game that mattered to millennials: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, even Oregon Trail….
More than 40 years before women gained the right to vote, female “computers” at Harvard College Observatory were making major astronomical discoveries. Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed about 80 women who studied glass plate photographs of the stars. They found galaxies and nebulas and created methods to measure distance in space. They were…
With all due respect, this is what I call Edutech Shiny Toy Syndrome. And it is out of control. Kids don’t need screens for individualized educational experiences. They are already on those stultifying, addictive, isolating screens far too much. Bah! Humbug! Source: Silicon Valley’s Schools Program — Students Are an Afterthought | National Review I don’t…
Then, just to add to the confusion, management decided that we should have two student intakes: one in August/September (the traditional starting time for new students), and one in February. This meant that, if we were fast enough, we could trial the new curriculum on a small group of students that started in February, rather…
Hours after a mob of villagers beat five strangers to death over a rumor on WhatsApp, nobody wanted to clean up the blood: There was just too much of it. … Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads…
