Media Literacy Roundup: 29 Oct 2023
Sunday links and ideas from Wes Fryer
Greetings from Charlotte, North Carolina, and the first edition of my weekly “Media Literacy Roundup” for October 29, 2023!
Substack has become one of my favorite smartphone apps and places to regularly read articles from people I follow and am interested in. I’ve decided to try sending out a short update each Sunday with links and short descriptions to media I’ve been consuming or sharing, and things I’m working on. Topics for this edition include:
My “AI Tips and Tricks” document
“Wes and Shelly Share” Podcast
My “Using Technology to Build Community and Tell Our Stories” workshop
My “Brain Hacking InfoPics” Lesson
My “Generative AI and Media Tips” blog post
“Wes' Social Media Text Prepper” (a web application I created with ChatGPT)
Thoughts on WikiPedia, Lateral Reading and Mideast War
1. Wes’ “AI Tips and Tricks”
For a couple months now I’ve watched my “EdTech Situation Room Podcast” show co-host, Jason Neiffer, share and maintain a Google Doc of links to tools and articles relating to Artificial Intelligence / AI. Jason has been sharing a lot of presentations in Montana, online, and in the Pacific Northwest about AI’s impact on education lately.
I’ve been using AI tools like ChatGPT 4 and Claude.ai every week this semester, as a middle school STEM teacher, to create assignment and project rubrics, extract skill lists from Canvas courses for student led conferences, and much more. I’ve created an “AI Guidelines” document for my students, outlining how and when I want them to use AI tools for projects in our class. I’ve also engaged in a variety of AI coding experiments.
To document my different uses of AI as well as AI-related discoveries, I recently decided to follow the lead of Jason Neiffer and maintain my own Google Doc of AI related stuff, which I’m calling, “AI Tips and Tricks by Wes Fryer.” (The short link wfryer.me/tips also redirects there.) If you’re interested in AI and especially its uses / impact in education, you can add this Google Doc to your own Google Drive and follow along with my own AI discoveries and work.
2. Wes and Shelly Share Podcast
My wife, Shelly Fryer, and I become “empty nesters” in January 2023. We started a new podcast that month titled, “Wes and Shelly Share,” in which we share:
about healthy life habits, parenting and marriage, navigating the opportunities and challenges of the empty nest.
The slogan of our show is, “Go Outside. Stay Curious. Keep Exploring!”
We are now up to 22 episodes! We’re not publishing every week, but most weeks we’re able to share a show, which are audio-only and about 40 minutes each. You can follow along by liking our “Wes and Shelly Share” page on Facebook, and find links to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PocketCasts, etc. by visiting www.shellyfryer.com/podcast/.
3. “Using Technology to Build Community and Tell Our Stories”
Yesterday (Saturday, October 28, 2023) I shared a repeated workshop at our Charlotte church’s fall retreat titled, “Using Technology to Build Community and Tell Our Stories.” (Short link: wfryer.me/oct28) The description of this 75 minute session was:
How can we - as individuals and as a church family - use today's technology to connect with each other and with our community?
This presentation built on a lot of work I have done around digital storytelling and family oral history over the past 20+ years. I audio recorded the second session and shared that to YouTube. I used one of my favorite, free iOS audio recording and publishing apps, “Voice Record Pro,” to both record that session and publish the audio as a video file on YouTube.
4. “Brain Hacking InfoPics” Lesson
We need media literacy skills in our classrooms and in our communities! One of the new lessons I’ve developed this semester for my middle school “Computer Applications’ students I’ve titled, “Brain Hacking InfoPics.” Using multiple examples from Renee Hobbs’ outstanding collection of propaganda and advertising examples, the lesson highlights the ways some kinds of media attempt to ACTIVATE OUR EMOTION (hence the visual lesson them from Pixar’s “Inside Out” movie) so we can be become more aware of how organizations / people / groups can seek to manipulate our emotions, thoughts, and actions.
The entire lesson is available on my media literacy lessons website, and licensed CC-BY. (This means you’re free to use and remix the lesson, just provide attribution somewhere that you got some lesson ideas from me!)
5. Generative AI and Media Tips (Oct 2023)
I wrote a new blog post last weekend titled, “Generative AI and Media Tips (Oct 2023).” Here’s the first paragraph, as a teaser and enticement for you to read the entire piece:
One of the advantages of sharing ideas and links on your own website, like this WordPress website I’ve maintained since 2005, is that social media and technology companies are less able to restrict the links you can share. In June of 2023, both Facebook and Instagram started blocking access to some news websites and stopping users from sharing many news links in Canada. Analysts are wondering if this is a trend. Moderating user-generated content on a social network is messy and challenging, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter are struggling mightily to figure out a path forward. Since this past summer and those decisions by Facebook, I’ve noticed a few instances of strange link blocking on both Instagram and Facebook, for which there is no readily apparent recourse for users to appeal. Australia just fined Elon Musk’s X platform (“the social media platform formerly known as ‘Twitter'”) $380,000 (US) for failing to adequately address / block content related to “child sexual exploitation.” Taking the dramatic step of blocking ALL user links to news sites is a sign of our changing technological times, and offers us a reminder of why self-hosted blogs remain an extremely useful tool in our digital communication toolkits. In this post, I’d like to share some AI / Artificial Intelligence and media creation related links which Urbie Delgado shared with me this morning via Facebook Messenger. Since I’m sharing the links here on my WordPress blog, they should not be blocked!
6. Wes' Social Media Text Prepper
I need to write a blog post with all these details soon, but last week I spent about an hour and a half with ChatGPT 4 and created this simple web application I’ve titled, “Wes' Social Media Text Prepper.” It’s comprised of just 3 different files: a HTML index file, a styles.css stylesheet, and a javascript logic file.
I’m regularly sharing now to mutliple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, K12Leaders, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, X (Twitter) and less frequently, TikTok and YouTube. (All my channel / subscription links, btw, are listed on wesfryer.com/after.) One of the challenges in sharing posts to these different platforms are the text limit restrictions vary.
This web app allows me (or anyone visiting the link) to convert a block of text into “chunked threads” customized in length for these different social media platforms, with a proceeding “1/3” or “2/3” index, and desired hashtags at the end. Each thread chunk can be readily copied and pasted.
I’m planning to share this as my first project ever on GitHub, and thereby learn some good background about how GitHub projects work, push/pull requests, etc. Since I’m teaching middle school computer programming this year (using primarily Scratch and Microsoft MakeCode in Minecraft Education) this should be some good, practical professional development for me!
I’ll blog about that project and learning soon, and also share an update here in Substack.
7. Thoughts on WikiPedia, Lateral Reading and Mideast War
I will be and have been extremely careful with articles I’ve shared and comments I’ve made on social media about the widening war taking place now in the Middle East, in Israel and the Gaza Strip. This has already been a costly conflict in terms of human lives and financial expenditures for multiple nations and groups. The roots of this conflict literally go back thousands of years, and it would be easy (especially with the limited context provided by social media posts) to share something in this climate that could be misunderstood or taken as offensive by others.
So my first thought to share with you is this: Be cautious as you share ideas and information about the war. We already saw a dramatic example of how important it is to validate and verify information before sharing it, in President Biden’s initial speech about the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. (See the AP article, “Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts,” last updated 24 Oct 2023.)It’s very hard for professional journalists and other media / communication professionals to vet and verify information, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see other examples of missteps as this war continues on physical / kinetic, cyber and informational battlespaces.
My second thought is a tip and recommendation: When international conflict like this takes place, WikiPedia is both an instructive and fascinating website to watch. For example, the English WikiPedia page for “2023 Israel–Hamas war” is being edited by groups with different perspectives and agendas in this conflict. Look at “the talk page” of this article and others relating to the war. Talk pages on WikiPedia are where contributors and editors air and hash out their disagreements about specific content to include or exclude from an article. From a media literacy standpoint, this is instructive and helpful.
I’ve wanted to teach an entire course on WikiPedia, but so far have not been able to do this. The closest I’ve come is my middle school media literacy lesson, “LaunchPad WikiPedia,” which seeks to educate students about how WikiPedia works and both how and why it can be a good starting point for investigations for a specific topic. This is, in part, because of the references / citations section at the bottom of each article. John Green’s video for PBS from 4 years ago, “Using Wikipedia: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #5,” is the primary “media text” for this lesson and is outstanding.
Everyone should know more about and understand WikiPedia better, and one of these reasons is how it can be used to READ LATERALLY to check sources.
The SIFT web literacy framework by Mike Caufield is my favorite strategy to share when it comes to verifying information and avoiding misinformation / disinformation.
So ends our Media Literacy Roundup for October 29, 2023!
Have a great week, everyone! :-)