Series Moderator: Justin Reich

Justin Reich is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department at MIT and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, and the host of the TeachLab Podcast, which investigates the art and craft of teaching and how teachers can become even better at what they do. He earned his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and is a past Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. His writings have been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other scholarly journals, and public venues.

October 18: “Lateral Reading: How the World’s Best Researchers Evaluate Sources on the Internet”

Speaker: Sam Wineberg

Description: Even if they don’t realize it, many people struggle to evaluate online sources and to separate truth from fiction online. Sam Wineberg and his colleagues have conducted groundbreaking research in order to understand how people can be misinformed online. Using this research, they developed the strategy of "lateral reading," an approach to engaging with online sources used by the world’s best editors and fact checkers.

October 25: “The SIFT Method: Four moves for Evaluating Information”

Speaker: Michael Caulfield

Description: How can we improve our capacity to sort out truth from fiction online? How can we focus our attention on the things that matter and avoid clickbait? Since 2017, Michael Caulfield has been teaching people his “SIFT” (Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage,Trace claims to the original source) method in order to address these issues. The “SIFT” approach provides a short list of things to do when looking at an online source, and links each of those items to highly effective web techniques. Research shows that people who are fluent in “SIFT” dramatically improve at evaluating sources on the web.

November 1: “Civic Online Reasoning How People Learn Media Literacy”

Speaker: Joel Breakstone

Description: In the age of AI and deepfakes, many people have become increasingly unsure about how they should evaluate the accuracy of online information. In order to help address these issues, today’s session will be hosted by Joel Breakstone, head of the Stanford History Education Group and publisher of the Civic Online Reasoning curriculum. Joel has years of experience helping his students evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

November 8: How Our Beliefs and Language Shape Our Internet Searches

Speaker: Francesca Tripodi

Description: People often treat search engines as reliable sources of accurate information. However, what we believe and how we phrase our queries can profoundly influence the results of our searches. For years, Professor Francesca Tripodi has been conducting research to better understand how biases and beliefs shape search results, and how organizations can use the tone reflected in our search terms in order to manipulate our search results.

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