By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an “echo chamber” that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions.
A recent study published in PNAS examines this phenomenon and finds that social-media users show marked focus in the types of news that interests them. These social-media participants tend to develop strong and well-defined communities around the news outlets they support, and they tend to make connections with like-minded people regardless of the geographic distance between them.
Flipgrid is a video response platform where educators can have online video discussions with students or other educators. Teachers can provide feedback to students AND better yet students can provide feedback to one another. With Flipgrid One (Free) you get one grid with unlimited topics. So if you have multiple classes or subject areas you…
We live in an age of Big: Big Computers, Big Data, and Big Lies. Faced with an unprecedented torrent of information, data scientists have turned to the visual arts to make sense of big data. The result of this unlikely marriage — often called “data visualizations” or “infographics” — have repeatedly provided us with new…
Children and college students aren’t the only ones turning to online education during the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of adults have signed up for online classes in the last two months, too — a jolt that could signal a renaissance for big online learning networks that had struggled for years. Coursera, in which Mr. Gupta and…
In theory, the outside firm’s corporate lawyer, who stayed on the line through each specialist, was the continuity factor. Often, she acted as scribe while the firm’s specialists and I grappled over wording. Ask the corporate lawyer a question and you would hear “well, I would have to go with so-and-so’s advice since he is…
In The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, Tyler Cowen argues that more Americans are living comfortably and contently with what life has handed them. By sheltering ourselves from the new and different, it’s hard to see what is lost by standing still. But if you look at the data, we’re seeing…
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…
