Week 6 | 2026 Fall

tl;dr

• Read, watch, and learn
• Learning Pod 4th meeting
• Submit a Blog Post for Formal Feedback – by Sat, Oct 17
• Engage substantively with at least 2 peers – by Mon, Oct 19
  (To ensure all students receive feedback, please leave your first two comments on posts that have fewer than three replies)
• Begin thinking about the Social Learning Platform Analysis – due Sun, Oct 25

I hope that everyone had a great long weekend! This week we’re going to explore deeper a certain affordance of social media: the spread of (incorrect) ideas. This will be a theoretical dive into some of topics you may already hear about: ‘fake-news’, ‘fact-checking’, ‘post-truth’, etc. I highly recommend you listen the bonus podcast episode (add it into a chore like commuting, cleaning, or cooking). Blog post deadline is pushed back a day to make up for starting the week on Tuesday and only two peer comments this week.

Read, Watch, & Learn

• CHAPTER 15: Media Democracy in Action: Truth Emergency and the Progressive Media Reform Movement in Media and Social Justice (Huff & Phillips, 2011) [16 mins]
  This chapter links patterns across media discussing embellishment, promoting emotionally charged issues, and lack of meaningful coverage.
• Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles (Thi, 2020) [22 min read]
  This paper analyzes in detail how socially held beliefs may be wrong. It is more on the philosophical side, try your best, discuss, and ask questions. Note: episteme can be conceptualized as ‘understanding’ in a philosophical lens: how we know what we know.
• Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making pp. 20 – 29 (finish Part 1 as extra) (Council of Europe, 2017) [20 min read]
  This report outlines various types of information disorder and utilizes a helpful framework of analysis for communication that can be applied elsewhere: agent, message, interpreter
• Extra Recommended source:
  • What Up Holmes? (RadioLab, 2021) [48 min podcast]
    This is not only a great, conflicting discussion of socially developed ideas and ‘truth’, but is also a fantastic example of tracing the influence of a PLN and is an incredibly well told story
  • Cambridge Analytica: how did it turn clicks into votes? (Hern, 2018) [15 min read]
    All this theory we’re discussing has real world implications. This is a brief look into the Cambridge Analytica story: how a Facebook data breach, personality assessment, and targeted ads exploiting individuals beliefs influenced politics

Learning Pod

This week, I want you to self-organize a meeting. Choose a popular topic, prevalent in in the news and all together, research it and discuss:

• Who is contributing to the narrative?
• How do you know what is factual? How can you be certain?

Connect theories from the reading as you ask these questions, to understand deeper the why or how.

Please share something silly that emerged from your discussion to the Community Contributions channel (this is in addition to your individual post). Only one person from your learning pod needs to post but they must include everyone’s name on the post.

Community Contribution Formal Feedback

Post by Sat, Oct 17

Full assignment details, including a rubric can be found here.

This week’s community contribution is a bit different than usual. You will submit a ~500 word blog post from anything we’ve covered so far this term for marking. This can be revisiting and refining a previous blog post you have completed or starting from fresh from this week’s content or other concepts you have yet to write about. I encourage you to review the discussion in Microsoft Teams in contributing to your post.

This post will be marked and contribute to your overall Community Contributions grade. I have also updated the Community Contributions page to be more clear, see under the ‘Assessment’ section.

Community Contribution – Being an Active Member

Engage substantively with at least 2 peers by Tue, Oct 13
To ensure all students receive feedback, please leave your first two comments on posts that have fewer than three replies.

Being part of a learning community doesn’t stop at sharing a blog post. It also involves engaging with one another’s ideas. You can learn a lot from each other by taking the time to listen, respond, and exchange perspectives.

Be sure to visit the Community Contribution page to learn more about providing feedback.

As always, you can reach me by email, Teams, or by booking a meeting.

Take care,
Adrian