War Over TikTok
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
2w ago
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 thoughts. “War Over TikTok” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer First, Here are some key quotations from the article. This first one reflects the broad popularity of TikTok among many people in the United States, and the significant amount of time they spend watch ..read more
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Trust Me Documentary
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
3w ago
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 June I participated in the unique “Teaching for Resilience: FinnishED Workshop” hosted by the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington, and wrote the blog post, “Media Literacy Lesson from Finland” to summarize and share my learning from that fantastic ex ..read more
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Teaching the Conspiracies
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
2M ago
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 course, participants will learn how the SIFT web literacy framework (Stop, Investigate the source, Find trusted coverage, Trace to the original”) paired with lateral reading, offers excellent strategies for interrogating online information to decide what is valid ..read more
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Engaging with the Duke Polarization Lab
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
3M ago
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 form provided an opportunity for me to concisely summarize my professional interests and work at this point in media literacy, reducing political polarization, and (overall) working to support both representative democracy and human rights here ..read more
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Full Text RSS Feeds from Mastodon
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
3M ago
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 Link Prep via RSS.” The background for this is: I co-host an (almost) weekly podcast with my friend, Jason Neiffer, called “The EdTech Situation Room.” Before each episode, which we live-stream to YouTube and Facebook using StreamYard, we add a variety of ..read more
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Social Media Text Prepper
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
4M ago
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 would be unable to create independently, “from scratch.” For me, a middle school STEM teacher with a variety of coding experiences but without a computer science degree or formal pedigree, these are transformative capabilities. In this post ..read more
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Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
4M ago
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 land, and on the seas. We also need to be explicitly studying media literacy, and the ways in which the “information space” is a critical dimension of conflict as well as influence. Yesterday’s New York Times OpEd, “Powerful Forces are Fracking Our Attention. We ..read more
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AI Bionic Blogging
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
4M ago
New tools can provide new opportunities to not only “enhance efficiency,” but (in some cases) “transformatively empower” users to do things which were previously impossible. In the case of artificial intelligence / AI technologies, the combination of speech to text, automated transcription and “content augmentation” services can enable new, transformative content creation workflows. In this post, I want to describe a creative workflow I’m terming, “AI Bionic Blogging.” By “daisy-chaining together” a series of AI services yesterday, I was able to take a 41 minute iPhone video I recorded and tur ..read more
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Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs, and Mars Colonization
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
4M ago
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 several reasons. “Reflections on Hernan Cortes, the Aztecs” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer First, I’m a real history geek, particularly fascinated by the history of the “encounter of cultures” in the Americas in the 1500s, the “Age of Exploration,” the “conquest of the Amer ..read more
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Meet Me on Mastodon (My “Dear John Letter” to Twitter)
Moving at the Speed of Creativity By Wesley Fryer, Ph.D.
by Wesley Fryer
4M ago
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one group of digital communicators to discontinue use of the secure user IDs and passwords which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the the right and responsibility to affiliate with others who are kind and strive to not speak or act in ways that are ugly,  racist or misogynistic, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. This, then, is my “Dear John Letter” to you, Twitter. Oh, how I have loved thee ..read more
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