For Friday, 9/20

`A few of you asked if there was any homework at the end of class. Let’s be clear: beyond any particular written assignments, you always have homework — namely, doing the assigned reading! If you look over these assignments and you decide that it’s too long or looks too difficult, then you haven’t done your homework. And that’s not a good strategy for doing well in (or even passing) this class. Come to class prepared.

Prep

• Review Michael A. Caulfield, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers (2017), Part I (‘Four Strategies and a Habit’); Part II (‘Look for Previous Work’), Chs. 4 (‘How to Use Previous Work’), 5 (‘Fact-Checking Sites’), 6 (‘Wikipedia’); Part III, Ch. 7 (‘Going Upstream to Find the Source’); Part IV (‘Reading Laterally’), Chs. 16 (‘What Reading Laterally Means’), 17 (‘Evaluating a Website or Publication’s Authority’), 18 (‘Basic Techniques: Web Domains, WHOIS’); 20 (‘Stupid Journal Tricks’); 21 (‘Finding a Journal’s Impact Factor’); 22 (‘Using Google Scholar to Evaluate Author Expertise’), 23 (‘How to Think About Research’), 24 (‘Finding High Quality Secondary Sources’), 25 (‘Choosing Your Experts First’), 26 (‘Evaluating News Sources’), 27 (‘What Makes a Trustworthy News Source?’), 28 (‘National Newspapers of Record’); Part V (‘Field Guide’), Chs. 42 (‘Avoiding Confirmation Bias in Searches’), and 44 (‘Finding Old Newspaper Articles’)
• Rebecca Jones, ‘Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic?’, Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Vol. 2 (2011), focusing on pp. 156-71.
  • Here’s an optional audio clip on writing that you might check out. It’s an interview with Trish Hall, who for many years edited the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.

In Class

1. 1. Attendance
   2. Web Literacy and Fact-Checking
   3. BREAK
   4. Logical Argumentation
   5. For Next Time

For Next Time

• William Little and Ron McGivern, Introduction to Sociology, Ch. 18 (‘Work and the Economy’), esp. Section 18.1 (‘Economic Systems’)
• Matthew Desmond, ‘In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation’, Times Sunday Magazine(14 August 2019