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Verified

How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online...

Mike Caulfield Sam Wineburg

$22.95

Paperback

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English
University of Chicago Press
23 February 2024
An indispensable guide for telling fact from fiction on the internet—often in less than 30 seconds.

The internet brings information to our fingertips almost instantly. The result is that we often jump to thinking too fast, without taking a few moments to verify the source before engaging with a claim or viral piece of media. Information literacy expert Mike Caulfield and educational researcher Sam Wineburg are here to enable us to take a moment for due diligence with this informative, approachable guide to the internet. With this illustrated tool kit, you will learn to identify red flags, get quick context, and make better use of common websites like Google and Wikipedia that can help and hinder in equal measure.

 

This how-to guide will teach you how to use the web to verify the web, quickly and efficiently, including how to

•     Verify news stories and other events in as little as thirty seconds (seriously)

•     Determine if the article you’re citing is by a reputable scholar or a quack

•     Detect the slippery tactics scammers use to make their sites look credible

•     Decide in a minute if that shocking video is truly shocking

•     Deduce who’s behind a site—even when its ownership is cleverly disguised

•     Uncover if that feature story is actually a piece planted by a foreign government

•     Use Wikipedia wisely to gain a foothold on new topics and leads for digging deeper

And so much more. Building on techniques like SIFT and lateral reading, Verified will help students and anyone else looking to get a handle on the internet’s endless flood of information through quick, practical, and accessible steps. 

 

By:   ,
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 203mm,  Width: 152mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   454g
ISBN:   9780226822068
ISBN 10:   0226822060
Pages:   240
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Introduction 1 Get Quick Context: It Can Take as Little as Thirty Seconds—Seriously!    The Three Contexts    “Do I Know What I’m Looking At?”    Introducing SIFT    Stop! (Or, How to Fail at Source-Checking Even If You’re the New York Times)    Investigate the Source    Find Better Coverage    Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to Their Original Context    Takeaways 2 Cheap Signals: Or, How Not to Get Duped    Easily Fakeable Questions    Gameable Signals of Credibility    First Impressions Matter . . . Except When They Don’t    URLs Matter . . . Except When They Don’t    What about Dot-Coms?       Going Deeper: The “Org” of Dot-Org Is Big Business    Nonprofit Status: “Nearly Anything Goes”    Numbers That Bamboozle    Links That Lead Astray    Takeaways 3 Google: The Bestie You Thought You Knew    Interpreting and Mining Search Results    Why Seeing on the Internet Isn’t Believing    Decoding Google’s Knowledge Panel    Different Sources, Different Purposes       Going Deeper: What Arsonist Birds Teach Us about Different Sources    When Featured Snippets Get It Wrong       Going Deeper: Google’s Three Vertical Dots Are a Great Hack for Lateral Reading    Keywords and Inferred Intent: How to Think like Your Search Engine    Keywords: The Underlying Architecture of Search    Inferred Intent: Providing Google with a “Tell”    Google Is a Mirror Reflecting Back What You Give It    A Search Engine, Not a “Truth Engine”    Takeaways 4 Lateral Reading: Using the Web to Read the Web    Get off the Page!    Lateral Reading: Checking Information like a Fact-Checker    Why Lateral Reading Works    Little Shift, Big Payoff    Lateral Reading Puts You in Control    Avoid Promiscuous Clicking: Practice Click Restraint    The “Vibe” of the Search Engine Results Page    Takeaways 5 Reading the Room: Benefiting from Expertise When You Have Only a Bit Yourself    Why You Can’t “Just Do the Math”    Reading the Room: Quick Assessment of a Range of Expert Views       Going Deeper: Why We Call This “Reading the Room”    Trust Compression, or How to Avoid Info-Cynicism    Reading the Room on the Mask Issue    The Perils of the Single Academic Contrarian       Going Deeper: What Makes a Good Summary Source?    Takeaways 6 Show Me the Evidence: Why Scholarly Sources Are Better than Promotional Materials, Newsletters, and Random Tweets    What’s Peer Review?    Peer Review: “The Worst Way to Judge Research, Except for All the Others”    The Problem of the Single Study    Literature Reviews: A Bird’s-Eye View of Multiple Studies       Going Deeper: Journals That Prey on Unsuspecting Victims    Real History, Fake History: How to Tell the Difference    Using Google Scholar to Find Scholarly Sources    The Vibe of Google Scholar’s Results Page    Using Google Scholar as a Quick Reputation Check    Takeaways 7 Wikipedia: Not What Your Middle School Teacher Told You    What about the Mistakes?       Going Deeper: Wikipedia to Britannica: “He That Is without Sin . . .”    Anyone Can Change Wikipedia, Can’t They?    Isn’t Wikipedia Biased?    Wikipedia as a Tool for Research    Using Wikipedia to Validate Sources       Going Deeper: Quickly Validating a Reference from a Book    Using Wikipedia for Quick Checks of Unfamiliar Websites    Quick Investigation of a Claim    Quick Checks of an Unfamiliar Academic Source    Using Wikipedia to “Read the Scholarly Room”    Using Wikipedia to Jump-Start Your Research       Going Deeper: Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of a Bibliographical Reference    The Messiness of Making Knowledge    Takeaways 8 Video Games: The Dirty Tricks of Deceptive Video    False Context    Exploiting “Seeing Is Believing”       Going Deeper: Online News Is Often More Credible Than You Think    Falsely Implied Date    Connect My Dots, or Creating a False Sense of “Research”    Deceptively Cropped Video    Takeaways 9 Stealth Advertising: When Ads Masquerade as News    The Problem: Stealth Advertising Works    A Con Is Born    Newspapers Become Ad Agencies    The Problem in Three Words: Conflict of Interest    Disappearing Warning Labels    Sponsored Propaganda    Half Truths Are Not Whole Truths    When Stealth Ads Move to Social Media       Going Deeper: How Stealth Ads Lose Their Warning Labels    Protecting Yourself in an Age of Slimy Advertising    Takeaways 10 Once More with Feeling: Using Your Emotions to Find the Truth    Emotion Doesn’t Know the Truth, But It Knows What You Care About       Going Deeper: Man versus Machine    “Compellingness” Tells Us What’s Important to Check    Surprise Is a Sign Our Assumptions Might Be Wrong    Why Compellingness and Surprise Beat the Checklist       Going Deeper: Mutant Flowers    Feeling Overwhelmed? Rethink Your Approach    Takeaways 11 Conclusion: Critical Ignoring Postscript: Large Language Models, ChatGPT, and the Future of Verification Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

Mike Caulfield is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. Creator of the SIFT methodology, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops. Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and the founder of the Stanford History Education Group, whose state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy has been distributed freely to schools all over the world. He is the author of Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), also published by the University of Chicago Press.  

Reviews for Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online

"“As the value of information literacy becomes increasingly clear, Verified offers timely, research-based solutions to the ever-present and elusive problem of misinformation run amok.”  -- Dan Willingham, University of Virginia ""Verified is the book and mindset that society needs right now. This is, of course, assuming that you want society to survive.""   -- Guy Kawasaki, Host of ""Remarkable People and author of Remarkable Mindset"" ""Anyone who wants to avoid being duped by all the fake news, distorted videos, and stealth ads that populate today's online universe needs this book. Verified offers a multitude of user-friendly tools for navigating our digital new world in which we cannot always trust the seemingly trustworthy sources we encounter.""   -- Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, authors of ""They Say, I Say"" ""Verified is a lifeline. With research-verified and surprisingly simple techniques, the authors show us, step-by-step, how to sift the real, useful, true information from the tsunami of online bogosity. Read it, give it to parents and their high school-age children, give it as high school graduation gifts, and please teach it at colleges and universities."" -- Howard Rheingold, internet futurist and author of ""Net Smart: How to Thrive Online""  ""Caulfield and Wineburg have gone remarkably deep into how our children—and all the rest of us in America—think and learn. At the moment we are losing the battle against ignorance and misplaced assumptions, but this wonderfully written book could save us. Among many wise pieces of advice, they recommend we not only be critical thinkers, but savvy critical IGNORERS. That means learning how to detect crappy sources of information quickly and efficiently. We all need to read this."" -- Jay Mathews, education journalist ""Every educator whose students touch the web—which is to say all of us—needs this book. Verified does more than preach against the dangers of misinformation and online mischief, it provides clear, focused strategies for navigating and researching online that should become part of every literate person’s repertoire of skills."" -- Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Executive Director, National Writing Project ""Under a deluge of disinformation and conspiracism, our modern world faces an epistemological crisis— an inability to parse reality from fiction, truth from lies. Verified offers readers the invaluable tools they need to navigate the flood; to regain clarity and attachment to the real world of facts, logic, and reason; and to restore the foundations of democratic discourse. It's essential reading for our chaotic times.""   -- David Neiwert, author of The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy ""The internet accelerated the spread of misinformation but has also given us veritable superpowers for vetting the information that we encounter. This is the genius of Caulfield and Wineburg's approach. We don’t have to be passive dupes of online misinformation. We can use the wonders of an online world to become better information consumers than ever before.""  -- Carl Bergstrom, coauthor, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World ""In Verified, Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg provide practical advice for navigating all of the bad information on the internet and point to the many ways in which even digitally sophisticated users can be fooled. An indispensable guide for students and citizens of all ages and backgrounds."" -- Francis Fukuyama, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University, and author of The End of History and the Last Man and Liberalism and its Discontents ""Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg are the superheroes of online research! So much more than the lists of tips and tricks found in other books, Verified offers an ethos that can help all of us understand and confidently use what we find online. This book belongs in every backpack, classroom, library, workplace, and home."" -- Phillip Jones, Grinnell College Libraries “This book should be required reading for students, journalists, content creators, and anyone else who regularly consumes and shares information (i.e. pretty much everyone). Rich with actionable guidance and real-world examples, Verified helps readers learn the skills to stay out of the weeds of online misinformation and find the best available evidence for any claim. I’m so grateful to Caulfield and Wineburg for creating this resource.” -- Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, author of The Wellness Trap “Caulfield and Wineburg deliver years of academic research on proven techniques for navigating the web and evaluating online sources with healthy skepticism. With humor, clarity, and real-world examples, they illustrate both simple and nuanced strategies for making sense of an increasingly complex digital realm. They detail many topics that we teach our students (e.g., lateral reading, click restraint, using Wikipedia and Google effectively). Students, everyday citizens, and educators at all levels will find their varied examples relevant and applicable.” -- Andrea Baer and Daniel Kipnis, Librarians at Rowan University “In this accessible and entertaining field manual for fact-checking and truth-seeking online, Caulfield and Wineburg demonstrate how anyone can sidestep partisan propaganda, shady sensationalism, and camouflaged clickbait through straightforward techniques grounded in the structure of the internet itself. As the value of information literacy becomes increasingly clear to society at large, Verified offers timely, research-based solutions to the ever-present and often elusive problem of misinformation run amok.” -- Rob Detmering and Amber Willenborg, University of Louisville"


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