This week I spent some time actually scrolling through my Facebook feed and came across a post in which a friend shared a video of what was labeled as “Antifa on traffic duty in Portland, Oregon” from the Facebook Page for The Conservative Treehouse. The Conservative Treehouse has been described as posting “conservative-leaning stories that sometimes…
While working as a graduate researcher at UConn, I was in middle school classrooms most of my day, helping teach online reading comprehension to adolescents. For those of you that work with adolescents, you know that there is a certain amount of “drama” associated with the lives of teens. One event in particular has me…
The intersections between learning, technology, and media are often the scene of tumult and change. These digital texts and tools provide groundbreaking advantages, and opportunities to information that cannot be underestimated. The Internet, video and music sharing sites, social media and mobile phones have quite literally changed our world forever. Sadly, this ubiquitous communications technology…
Lately I’ve been conducting a lot of research into the ways in which people engage in discussion or comment online. This includes the ways in which we share and favorite or retweet (RT) content on Twitter. This also includes comments on Facebook and reactions (i.e., like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry). In this work, I’ve found…
In an earlier post, I discussed how to debate with others in real life. As we engage in discussion or debate with others, we often come across the person that wants to argue just for the sake of arguing. Gretchen Rubin identifies this as oppositional conversational style. Oppositional conversational style is a person, who in a…
We’ve all been in that situation where an informal conversation quickly becomes a discussion and then we find ourselves in a debate. A debate is a wonderful opportunity to flex your intellectual muscles and can lead to a deeper level of understanding for all individuals involved. There are excellent opportunities to embed debates in classrooms…