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 follows the discovery by teachers that children familiar with traditional computer spellcheckers were simply applying it to the tests. Source: Pupils find spellchecker ‘cheat’ in literacy test – BBC News They taught the students TOO well!
There will be times when scrapping what happened altogether may be the best plan and just starting over or moving on and then circling back at another time, but more often then not, it’s worth it to just pause and reflect. These moments can yield a great deal of learning for everyone, including us. Source:…
Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What’s more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve…
Teachers in Littleton, Colorado — like teachers in many places — are increasingly asking students to read and write online. Free tools like Google Docs have made it easy for students to work on the same piece of writing at home and at school, and have allowed teachers to explore collaborative writing assignments and synchronous…
But the focus on code has left a potentially bigger opportunity largely unexplored. In the past, people were educated, and learned job skills, and that was enough for a lifetime. Now, with technology changing rapidly and new job areas emerging and transforming constantly, that’s no longer the case. We need to focus on making lightweight,…
