Navigating Digital Information: Lateral Reading Vocabulary

Vocabulary terms and definitions from the lecture on digital literacy, lateral reading, and evaluating online information sources.

Complexly

A company owned by John Green and his brother that produces Crash Course, funded partly by Patreon support, advertisements, and grants.

MediaWise

A project out of the Poynter Institute created with support from Google that aims to teach students how to assess the accuracy of information encountered online.

Poynter Institute

A non-profit journalism school that collaborated with the Stanford History Education Group and Google to create MediaWise.

Stanford History Education Group

A university-based research group that developed the MediaWise curriculum based on civic online reasoning research started in 2015.

Vertical Reading

A method of reading web pages like books or articles by starting at the top, looking at the title, and scrolling down, relying strictly on on-page elements to judge authority.

Lateral Reading

The practice of leaving a website and opening new browser tabs to search for external information about the source, its creators, and its funding.

Fidelity Communications

A local commercial internet provider in West Plains, Missouri that secretly created the "Stop City-Funded Internet" campaign website in early 2018.

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

An organization described as America's largest nonpartisan voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to limited government, free markets, and federalism, whose members also include major corporations.

Fact-checking Websites

Resources like Snopes.com and Politifact.com, created by researchers and journalists to evaluate the truthfulness of articles, public statements, and social media posts.

Wikipedia

The largest general reference work on the web, consisting of articles subject to editorial standards and citations that serve as a starting point for lateral research.