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War Over TikTok
The article caught my eye this morning: “US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users” (ArsTechnica, 7 Mar 2024.). It highlights a proposed bill in the US House of Representatives which would require the Chinese government to entirely DIVEST (sell off) TikTok to non-Chinese owners. I have a few…
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Trust Me Documentary
This evening I attended “most” of the March 2024 meeting of “TIP Teachers,” which is “Teachers for an Informed Public.” I’ve been a participant of TIP Teachers for over a year now, although I’m in North Carolina and the majority of the educators involved in TIP are in the State of Washington. Last summer in…
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Teaching the Conspiracies
This week on January 31, 2024, I’m excited to start facilitating a six week online course for educators titled, “Teaching the Conspiracies.” This “anytime learning course” is offered as part of the 2024 MediaED Institute by the Media Education Lab, with whom I’m an affiliated faculty member. The course description is: In this 6 week…
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Engaging with the Duke Polarization Lab
This morning I submitted the “Get Involved Form” shared by the Polarization Lab at Duke University. This two minute video (shared in November 2019) from the Duke University Department of Political Science provides a concise overview of the Lab’s focus and mission. The “Mission” page of their website also provides more details. Submitting this interest…
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Full Text RSS Feeds from Mastodon
Prepare for a “geekier than normal” post: I want to share about a custom GPT I’m trying to build that will extract article link titles, website sources, article dates, and article hyperlinks from a Mastodon account’s RSS feed, and specifically an RSS feed which includes a particular hashtag. I’ve titled my latest iteration, “EdTechSR Podcast…
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Beware of Facebook Event Bad Actors
Scammers and bad actors are not new. The methods which con artists use to try and trick people into giving away their money or sharing private, personal information continue to evolve, however. It can be valuable to learn about some of these new scam techniques, especially in our increasingly DIGITAL world. In this post, I’d…
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Social Media Text Prepper
It is now possible to use generative AI / artificial intelligence platforms, like ChatGPT 4, to create simple to relatively complex web applications without knowing the precise syntax of programming languages. By formulating detailed prompts for the AI chatbot, it is possible to create code in various languages (including javascript and HTML) which the user…
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Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism
We should not only be teaching “traditional courses” like history and social studies in our U.S. schools today, we should be explicitly studying warfare and the multitude of ways nation states as well as non-state actors wage war with each other across at least five dimensions: In extra-terrestrial space, in cyberspace, in the air, on…
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Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs, and Mars Colonization
Today in this blog post (and original video as well as audio podcast) I want to discuss a podcast episode titled, “The Fall of the Aztecs: The Adventure Begins (Part 1)” on “The Rest is History,” by historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. I’m excited to share about this podcast and topics it references for…
