A Troubling Trend

So, when I jump online with my coffee in the morning to read the news, a few blogs, and the last few minutes worth of social media, in the back of my mind, I'm always considering the question this blog attempts to address: How do we argue?

Three years ago, I wrote about my concern that the intentional spread of misinformation had the potential to taint what was already an unruly public discourse. Recently, a growing number of my posts have dealt with arguments based on misinformation seeping out of less rigorous parts of the blogosphere.

I'm starting to become more and more concerned about this.

It is no longer the occasional post by my crackpot friends (I know quite a few, and they are fun at parties).   People who I personally know to be smart and reasonable have used bad evidence to back up provocative statements about political debates.

The latest version of this was related to AmberAlert.gov, which went offline for days due to the shutdown. It turns out that the service itself was still running, but the website was offline - which was a bad visual, but not really bad news (Note: AmberAlert.com was not offline).

But here's where it gets ugly: The Blaze ran a story about how the Amber Alert website was down, and in the headline, The Blaze's Oliver Darcy noted that the website for Michele Obama's Let's Move Campaign was still up and running. Here's how Darcy wrote up that comparison in his story:

It was immediately unclear when the website was taken down. However, it should be noted that First Lady Michelle Obama’s website for her “Let’s Move” campaign is still up, running and fully functional.
 The AMBER Alert program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement and broadcasters that issues urgent bulletins following cases of child abductions.

Darcy did not lie or twist facts in that section of text. Instead, he simply implied a lie. He suggested, by placing these two websites side-by-side, that Letsmove.gov is a federally funded program and that the maintenance of its website is performed by federal workers - supported by federal tax dollars.

The implication suggests that Michele Obama is running a federal program and that her programs get special treatment.

And that is how the "story" was presented to me when someone I know and respect posted about this on a social network. The suggestion was that the federal government values Michele Obama's project more than it values missing children.

Three years ago, I would have expected this from the fringe. But today I'm seeing it come from mainstream voters who are civically engaged.

It is a troubling trend.

I teach critical thinking, ethical debate, and rhetorical skills because I want my students to push back against this. I honestly don't care about their politics; I just want them to know how to argue their positions from an informed place.

I'll keep doing that work, but here's two questions for the interwebs:

1. What can our connected and networked society do to push back against this trend?
2. What skills do today's readers need to identify the kind of misinformation we're seeing?

Student Journalism Battle in Central Florida

The University of Central Florida was ground zero for a very interesting digital brawl about journalism, writing, the role of student newspapers, teaching and learning, and social media in the university this weekend.

A journalism professor commented on a lead story in the student paper The Central Florida Future. The comment was posted on the paper's public Facebook page. The comment thread that grew out of this is a fascinating - if sometimes heated - discussion.

I learned of this from a friend who teaches journalism. He shared this blog post from Jimromenesko.com.

Writing and rhetoric concerns abound: public writing versus academic writing, student writing versus professional writing, the role of public forums as far as students and teachers are concerned...

One of the questions I walked away with was this: When writing goes public, how does that impact the relationship between writing teachers and students?

I think this question is only going to grow in importance as barriers to broad publication continue to come down.

Good Questions

Just a quote today.

In the midst of [Claude] Shannon's career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others.  They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist.  It wasn't the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, 'he drew people out, got them thinking.'  More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.

---The Idea Factory by Jon Gertne

Education 3.0 Blog Starts Up on Wired

The first post for a blog on Education 3.0 went up on Wired today.

It's loaded with good insights.

How do we help our people, who will work more in teams than as individuals, who will work on more projects at a single time than ever before, and who will interface with technology at a rate as of yet unseen? How do we encourage learning for these skills when our schools are still filled with individual projects and grades trumping all else, with instruction and assessment doing everything possible to hone concentrated focus as was required in industrial-aged work vs. multi-tasking required today, and when the majority of classrooms (K-20) still require students to put away their devices and stop using the web so that they can “learn?”

The post speaks to many of the concerns that prompted my move to e-portfolios, collaborative pre-writing exercises, a classroom that welcomes the use of phones, and open-web exams.

The author is seeking to widen the audience of an important discussion, and I applaud that effort.

I couldn't help but notice that the author Jeff Borden works for Pearson, a for-profit education publishing and assessment company. They make some good products and publish some great books, but I wonder how Jeff and his company feel about my believe that classrooms should use as much open source software and/or freeware as possible.

Don't get me wrong, private companies like Pearson should play a role in the advancement of Education 3.0. I am not one who thinks education is at odds with the private sector. I'm not against profit. In fact, I like profit. I just don't want to see the pursuit of profit trump the public mandate of education.

Popular Science is Cutting Comments

Wow!

As of today, the website for Popular Science will no longer have a comments section.

Read their announcement here for reasons behind the change. 

The decision is backed, naturally, by some good social science, but those reasons do say a lot about... well, I have to say it... about how we argue.

It comes down to trolling, spam bots, and politically motivated commenters who seek to undermine scientific consensus. 

Suzanne LaBarre, who wrote the announcement, presents multiple studies that demonstrate how "even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests." 

I know I get fired up when I get sucked into a volatile comments section. I can see those results in my own online activity.

Still, a major website pulling user interaction is no small thing.

What do you think?

A Fantastically Fun Dig at Academic Writing Submitted and Published

Retraction Watch has a great post about "a group of Serbian academics who, fed up with the poor state of their country’s research output, scammed a Romanian magazine by publishing a completely fabricated article."

Here's a link to the manuscript.

The authors have an excellent grasp on how academic writing can make nothing sound like something.

The methods section includes this beauty:

Since, obviously, representative data is often expensive and difficult to provide, we conducted a multidisciplinary programming simulation, using World Wide Web and a statistical programming library to provide random, well-defined populations on which the various methods of data mining are used to discover a plethora of delicately-looking results.

I laughed.

I also love the key words: "data mining, randomness studies, hermeneutic heuristics , EU support."

I am trying to figure out a way to make it work as a reading on academic writing and the pitfalls of academese. Whether I succeed or not, it's just fun to know this is out there.

And if you do go and read the manuscript, don't skip the bibliography. 

A Battle for the Core of the Common Core

This video makes me nervous. 

I don't like seeing a person escorted out of a public meeting by security. I especially don't like it when that person is a concerned parent asking about school standards. 

But something stinks here. 

The Baltimore Sun and I agree, the district officials in this video are less-than-competent when it comes to holding public meetings. They dealt with Robert Small's questions in the most inappropriate way I can imagine (btw, all charges against Small were dropped). 

But what about what Small was saying? He leveled a false accusation. He misinterpreted the baseline Common Core standard that ‘all high school grads should be ready for community college,’ and instead suggested the schools won’t prepare students for anything but community college. Then when one of the speakers tried to answer that concern, Small started telling a story about where he grew up - speaking over any attempt to clarify the issue.

Let me say again, escorting Small out was the wrong move. But the precise nature of Small's misinterpretation - that subtle twist of the policy's intent - caught my attention. It is too much like the current anti-Obamacare adverting blitz, loaded with just-slightly-altered facts. 

The Common Core story has legs. It has made the rounds not only on conservative websites and conspiracy theory outlets, but also on more mainstream sites. The video and an accompanying story were originally posted on an explicitly conservative corner of the Examiner - a site with no editorial filters. The author Anne Miller is a good writer who identifies as a conservative and has an impressively long list of right-leaning articles on the site. The comments section of this article is loaded with calls to stop paying taxes and suggestions that the government is going to “rape us of us our rights and freedoms." 

Now, one YouTube video and an Examiner article are not enough to suggest the existence of a large misinformation campaign. But consider the recent conference “The Changing Role of Education in America: Consequences of the Common Core.” It was sponsored by the American Principles Project, in conjunction with the Pioneer Institute and the Heartland Institute. Those groups are big players, and all advocate for the privatization of education as well as the end to federal healthcare reform efforts.

I do have to be careful with what I'm asserting here, because I think parents and community members are right to demand answers about the coming changes associated with Common Core  I think the concerns of people like Robert Small should be heard. After all, if implemented correctly, Common Core will take years to address its mandate, and every stakeholder ought to be involved in that process. That means lots of constructive dialogue along the way. 

But this video and the way it's being reported will not lead to constructive dialogue. It presents charged misinformation about the Common Core.  It suggests that everything about Common Core's implementation has been decided, and it suggests that the Common Core will intentionally not prepare any students for university-level education. Those are misrepresentations created by slight adjustments of the policy's actual language. 

Rhetorically it's a great move if you are actively trying to turn public opinion against Common Core. Ethically, it is dubious, because it relies on the intentional spread of misinformation. 

  

Like I said, something stinks. I think we are seeing the flames fanned in another misinformation campaign like the one coming to a head right now with the Affordable Health Care Act.  

I don't think Anne Miller or Robert Small or anyone else are the masterminds of some massive conspiracy. The misinformation about Common Core has been out there for a while. If the people who have read that misinformation come to believe that a socialist Federal government is trying to dumb down our schools, then they should stand up and ask questions. 

And school boards should not forcefully escort those people out of public meetings. 

But the problem that remains is a tough one: How do reformers fight a misinformation campaign that paints reformers as a dishonest enemy within? 

Ben Swann Headline: 8th Grader Fibs, Setting Right Wing Blogs Ablaze

Earlier this week, the people over at Ben Swann reported that a South Carolina teacher told a student to change an answer on a pop quiz about the US Constitution.

They have since retracted that story. Their source was lying about the incident. Their source was an 8th grade school girl.

The quiz in question asked if it is constitutional for a police officer to confiscate a gun from a law abiding citizen. According to the young student, the teacher saw the answer "No," and then told the student to cross out that answer because the correct answer was "Yes." Here's the photo of the quiz.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I give a quiz, I rarely walk around the room and tell students when they have an answer wrong. So, right off the bat the story sounded fishy. But I wasn't in the classroom. Maybe that's the way they give quizzes in South Carolina.

No matter the case, the people over at Ben Swann jumped on this story, and the story went viral on the conservative blogosphere. If you go to Swann's site, the only thing you see is the retraction, but if you go to other outlets, you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the retraction - or at other outlets you may not find the retraction at all.

So, the story is out there, despite it not being true - the story that was not investigated beyond the accusation of an 8th grade student.

I am pleased to see the people at Ben Swann admit their error, but does that make it all okay?

The reporter Joshua Cook didn't even contact the teacher or anyone at the school. It was the parent of the student who thought to call the school and find out more details, and that's when the story started falling apart. The child's parent out-investigated the reporter.

And once a story like this gets released by these non-news outlets, the story becomes evidence in dinning room arguments around the country: "You know what I heard, the Common Core teaches kids that guns are unconstitutional! I read about it in the news."

The retraction won't work, and the editors at Swann know this. This kind of sloppy reporting is intentional. It puts these stories into the mouths of voters, into the email chains, into the fringe blog posts, into the conspiracy theories, and eventually this story will just sound true to people.

I heard about this in a roundabout way. This morning, a friend of mine posted a Slate story about the effort to get evolution out of the curriculum in Texas. The Ben Swann story was posted as a rebuttal from someone trying to make the point that both sides are messing with education. The classic "They did it first" defense.

Interesting timing: Just as the 'fringe religious right' is making news with their efforts to undermine the education of our kids, the 'fringe conspiracy theory right' reports a false story about a government effort to corrupt children's understanding of the Constitution.

That timing suggests a concerted effort to spread the right kind of misinformation at the right time.

If it wasn't such an unethical disservice to the public, it'd be a pretty smart strategy.