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Lateral Reading A Skill Against Fake News

Normally when I pick up a book or a journal article, I already have some context about its credibility or relevance. I’ve a newspaper for decades now, which I trust. I check articles on their scientific soundness. I mostly choose a journal article because it’s in a reputable journal or cited by someone you trust.

The web is a different beast altogether. When you land on a webpage, you’re often clueless about its reliability or the authority of the author. Most people’s instinct is to navigate through the site, maybe check the “About” page or look at author bios. Michael Caulfield the writer of the book “Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers,” delves into the concept of “lateral reading,” which contrasts sharply with how we traditionally engage with print media. You can read the book online via the previous link. It’s very interesting.

Lateral reading involves stepping away from the site at hand to see what other, ideally more reputable, sources are saying about it. Lateral readers open multiple tabs and conduct searches about the author, the site’s ownership, and other related commentaries. They piece this information together to get a well-rounded view of the site they’re investigating.

Only after this external validation do lateral readers dive deep into the original content. By then, they’ve got a much clearer sense of whether they can trust the information presented. They’re not just confined to the site’s own narrative; they have a broader perspective that accounts for various viewpoints and reputations.

Read more here on Educator’s Technology

 

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Lists and Awards

At the end of the year bloggers tend to summarize their most read posts of the previous year. Another type of post is lists, mostly the best blog they’ve come across or the best blogs based on your votes. Some of these are just plain simple link baits. You can read more about the dangers of these lists at Laika’s MedLibLog. One exception is the TWIM Awards. The TWIM awards are the best in mental health blogging, as voted by Mental Nurse readers.

Each category includes a winner and up to two runners-up. To qualify as a runner-up, at least three nominations must have been received. If a category has one or no runner-up, that’s why.

Number one psychiatrist blogger according to this election is well earned by Lake Cocytus, also one of my favorites in GReader. Congratulations.

 

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Why do you Blog?


Why does someone write a personal blog and not simply use the Internet for taking in media content? Personal blogs are composed of shorter posts concerning the blogger’s life in contrast to filter blog. Filter blogs are devoted to external information, such as politics or news and are far better researched than personal blogs.

From recent research the following motives in order of importance were discovered for personal blogging:

  • motivate, help, and encourage others by sharing information, as well as to communicate their knowledge and skills
  • to share information with and communicate with friends and family members with whom they may not talk on a regular basis. Participants who blogged for this motive also maintained blogs to send messages to many people at once, rather than one at a time
  • to pass time, to occupy time
  • some people blog for attention, to gain fame, and because they think people like to read things about them
  • blogging to record thoughts and feelings for further reflection, to organize thoughts and feelings, and to read what was written in previous posts
  • out of professionalism, to help get a job, to put their resume on the Web, and because they were required to for a job or school
  • feedback, to get advice and more points of view from others, as well as to get feedback from others who have had similar experiences.

What’s your reason for blogging? Mine is mostly the first motive of this is list.

ResearchBlogging.org
Hollenbaugh, E. (2010). Motives for Maintaining Personal Journal Blogs Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2009.0403

 

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Why Blog?

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Why blog?
Certainly a small part of the fun is hoping for admiration and affirmation. I check my blog stats and google analytics regularly and a peak in readers certainly is another boost for writing more posts. Eventually you get to “know” your colleague bloggers, and human contact grows. The most important reason for me to blog is to keep up with developments in my field and make ideas and these developments known and published. A growing number of professionals have started weblogging to share their personal knowledge.

What factors influence this knowledge sharing with bloggers?

A recent study published the results of their test of a behavior model in terms of why people share knowledge with others within online communities. They conducted surveys in three online communities. Important factors for sharing knowledge is fairness or a trusting climate within the online community, and openness or a climate in which information flows freely. The culture of the community is of importance, identification is not. The feelings of affiliation are based on the shared culture and interests not on identification.

They also found that individuals who enjoy helping others provide more helpful knowledge. The enjoyment related to helping others significantly influenced the sharing of information and knowledge. The climate of sharing information and knowledge itself also increases this climate. The climate can be seen as a motivator for knowledge sharing.

The more valuable the information is the more likely an individual will share it. The perceived need for the information was a strong motivator to provide the information.

This knowledge sharing behavior is linked in important ways to members’ desire to receive feedback from a virtual community that creates, maintains, and enhances an effective knowledge sharing platform.

Limitations of this study
Only three online communities in Taiwan were surveyed. This may introduce a selection bias and limited external validation of the results. In short are these results also applicable to other communities in other countries? What do you think?

ResearchBlogging.org
Yu, T., Lu, L., & Liu, T. (2009). Exploring factors that influence knowledge sharing behavior via weblogs Computers in Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2009.08.002

 

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How to Survive Twitter?

This is not about solutions this is ….a cry for help? And yes I did read the Twitter Survival Guide. Let me start with defining the problem. Every blogger has his routine for writing blogposts. I mostly use a RSS Reader (GoogleReader). This is a collection of subscriptions to other blogs of interest, PubMed searches and content from scientific journals. Next I also check e-mail subscriptions and certain websites. I mostly discuss articles published in medical journals but also link to other blogs and websites. On average writing for my blog takes 1 to 2 hours per day.

Twitter started coming up in all sorts of sources. At first I was in denial, couldn’t figure out what twitter could do for me. Next after exploring some I started using twitter to promote my blog. Even installed several wordpress plugins to automatically publish my posts to twitter. But these plugins were buggy, even posted the drafts I was preparing for my blog. This drove some of my twitter followers to despair (Laikas). This made me deactivate the plugins and now I have to post my blogposts by hand to twitter.

Next I started microblogging. Some entries in my RSS reader of interest I posted directly to twitter, some interesting articles on websites and other links soon followed. These were interesting articles and posts but not interesting enough for my blog or somewhat off topic.

twitter

My number of folllowers grew including bloggers I knew from blogging or other social networks. Interacting with these bloggers was my next achievement on twitter and very rewarding. I received very quick replies on answers and very good solutions as well. @mdbraber even helped me with recovering my blog after a failed upgrade.

I started using TweetDeck, read the survival guide for twitter and another book about twitter recently reviewed on this blog. Next I was text messaging to twitter, showing pictures and would certainly also like to let everybody know were I was. A lot of twitter suggestions from TwiTip quickly found their way to my daily trials.

But after a while I realized that a lot of time and energy was dedicated to twitter and time and attention shifted from my blog to twitter. Now I have a hard time focusing on one or the other. Have to turn off TweetDeck to get some blogging done. Really deep down I prefer blogging.

So were to go from here? Any suggestions, please let me know in the comments, every comment appreciated even when it hurts.

 

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Dr Shock’s popular posts from 2008 and a look ahead for 2009.

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Two most popular posts according WordPress Blog Stats this year were Sex, Video Games and the Brain and How much Chocolate is Good for your Health? Popularity is probably mainly based on the title and keywords (or was it the picture?).

The first post discusses the differences between results of brain imaging in men and women while playing video games.

While playing video games on a computer men generally exhibit greater activation of the mesocorticolimbic reward circuitry and also greater connectivity. Male were more effective in gaining space and learned the implicit goal faster than females. This was the only observed gender difference in performance.

The second post is about researchers that propose chronic inflammation of tissues in the circulatory system is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. A marker for inflammation in the blood is called C-reactive protein. The researchers found a relationship between dark chocolate intake and levels of this protein in the blood of 4,849 subjects in good health and free of risk factors (such as high cholesterol or blood pressure, and other parameters).

These two posts are the top of the bill of 2008, at some distance also popular were a recent post about the disappointing results of Internet addiction research. Most of the critique on this research concerns the design of most of these trials.

previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory data analysis techniques to investigate the degree of association rather than causal relationships among variables.

From all the posts about neurostimulation the most popular is about TMS not being effective in depression treatment. It is a extensive review kind of post, the core being a placebo controlled trial comparing TMS with sham TMS for depression.

Rapid Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) to the left prefrontal cortex is not more effective than sham rTMS for depression. This was the result of a recent published randomized controlled trial with 4 month follow-up.

The use of computers and internet for ehealth is a subject close to Dr Shock’s heart. Gladly the post You’r never to old to learn computer skills was a favorite among the readers of this blog.

What posts were the most pleasurable to write for Dr Shock?

The post about empathy in the doctor patient relationship. This post was part of a series about patient doctor relationship and it’s different aspects such as education, self-disclosure to name a few. Follow the link for a summary of subjects concerning patient doctor relationship posts. The other post written with pleasure was about Why do psychiatrists like detectives?

Enjoyed blogging a lot, have learned even more form writing posts. I have neglected the developments of health 2.0 and medical education, will focus some more on that topic in the coming year 2009. Make medical education more fun for students and teachers. Suggestions for blogs, sites and social networks are very welcome. Already received a suggestion by Bertalan Besko on Twitter about Medical Education Evolution.

What did you like, enjoy would like to read more about? Please let me know in the comments.


 
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