Bill Baker, Ph.D., the Claudio Acquaviva Chair in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education, presented “The Digital Media Transition: Redefining the American Media Landscape,” in which he called for more digital citizenship.

A Fragmented Media Landscape

With hundreds of television channels to choose from, and thousands of on-demand options, Baker said the American populace has become fragmented in its choice of news sources. He contextualized today’s landscape by comparing it to a time, a few decades ago, when the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite provided Americans with their “water cooler conversations” the next day.

“All of our news came from that trusted source: Cronkite told you stuff you didn’t want to hear but needed to hear,” he said. “But not anymore, that’s one of the reasons why we’re so messed up.”

Today’s choice of news sources allows viewers to select news that fits one’s viewpoint, and “we end up reinforcing our own beliefs, and reinforce our own prejudices,” Baker said.

Moreover, during the last presidential election, Baker shared a disturbing statistic: Of the total Facebook engagement for the top 20 election stories, 8.7 million people got their information from fake news while 7.3 million got their news from mainstream established media.

“More [Americans] believed in the fake than real news,” he said. “We have to figure a way to get more trusted mainstream media.”

He said that, in Germany, a no-frills, 15-minute public news broadcast had a larger audience share than all the American news broadcasts combined. German public media is so trusted that the government pours $10 billion into it every year, as opposed to the $400 million contributed to America’s public broadcasting—which is also under threat by the Trump administration, he said.

Baker added that the administration’s opposition to net neutrality is a threat to smaller players, like pubic media, independents, and new startups.

“They will end up being second-class citizens,” he said.

Fighting Back With Facts, and Wikipedia

In the afternoon session, Samantha Weald, outreach manager of the Wiki Education Foundation, encouraged faculty to help shore up fact-based knowledge by incorporating Wikipedia projects into their coursework, particularly on the graduate level.

Once viewed as an unreliable source, Wikipedia’s credibility has grown over the years, she said. Yet, the platform has a “gap” problem.

Part of the reason, Weald said, is that 85 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are young, white males from developed, Western nations—a fact that skews content, she said. For example, only 16.9 percent of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women.

“Information is only as good as how readily available it is,” she said.

College students can fill in those gaps with their original research, while also folding more good-sourced academic material into the free, public, accessible site, she said. According to a Knight Foundation study, Wikipedia is the most-used source of news, with eight billion page views a month.

“Imagine a world in which every human has equal access to knowledge—for free,” she said. “Teaching our students to become digital citizens [can]make that a reality.”

Two Fordham faculty members Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., professor of psychology, and Carla Romney, D.Sc., associate dean for STEM and director of pre-health education
said they’d already used Wikipedia projects in their courses. In his Social Psych course, Takooshian assigned students to come up with 30 biographies of people who were virtually unknown in their field.

“Instead of assigning a paper, I assign[ed]Wikipedia entries,” said Takooshian.

Weald said her foundation works with colleges around the United States and Canada to create Wikipedia-connected courses; to date, some 358 courses are ongoing.

In addition to Baker and Weald, Gardner Campbell, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, gave a talk titled “Exercising the Franchise of Digital Citizenship,” while concurrent sessions examined online textbooks, online teaching techniques, digital copyrights, cybersecurity, multimedia, ergonomics, and social media etiquette.

Janet Sassi contributed to this article. 

Wed., Nov 2 from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.Once considered the ugly stepchild of original source material and the bane of professors, Wikipedia has evolved into go-to source of in-depth information on the internet.

Now, a group of Fordham librarians is spreading the word that Wiki is not only reliable, but continues to evolve into a high-quality source of information sharing.

Next week, the librarians will hold a Fordham-focused edit-a-thon on Wed., Nov. 2 from 12 noon to 3 p.m. The event will take place in Lab 047 at the William D. Walsh Family Library on the Rose Hill campus.

According to Wikipedia, an edit-a-thon “is an organized event where editors edit and improve a specific topic or type of content, typically including basic editing training for new editors.”

In celebration of Fordham’s Dodransbicentennial, the librarians have chosen University history as the topic. The intent is to beef up citations for existing Wikipedia articles, and to add content that may have been overlooked—such as the history of women and minorities at the University, said Shira Atkinson, who works at Quinn Library as the scholarly communications and distance learning librarian.

Another benefit of the event will be three hours of training on Wikipedia for professors, students, and staff. No prior experience is necessary. A representative from Wikimedia New York City will be on hand for the training.

Wikimedia “is a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world.” Through its various chapters, the group has held edit-a-thons on a variety of topics and for a variety of organizations. Last month an edit-a-thon focused on African-American history. In June there are edit-a-thons to build up LGBTQ history.

“At MoMA they held one that helped expose hidden resources at the museum,” said Elizabeth Karg, emerging technologies librarian at Fordham Libraries. “For a large and complex organization like Fordham, this very important. A couple of our schools don’t even have a Wikipedia article and several of our notable faculty are missing.”

Timothy Ryan Mendenhall, metadata librarian at Fordham Libraries, said that participants will start by setting up account and making their first edits. They’ll then move toward best practices and learn how to make entries that meet Wikipedia’s increasingly stringent standards.

“There’s a huge community out there that goes through the cue of articles and decides which ones are good,” said Karg. “Once it’s taken from there it’ll go on the web. After that, simple things like enriching citations make the article better.”

Mendenhall said that edits can be done by anyone with an account at any time. He added that faculty-directed class projects on the site can help build the Wiki community and improve the quality of the site.

The librarians said they understood there is a lingering reticence on the part of the research faculty to encourage students to use Wikipedia, but they insist that the site is a far cry from what it once was.

Mendenhall said that having an article on a topic, person, organization, or event in Wikipedia can greatly increase its prominence in Google search results,

“This make  Wikipedia a crucial gateway for the online representation of an organization like Fordham,” he said. “But beyond the University, it’s crucial that scholars leverage Wikipedia to improve global knowledge of underrepresented topics.”

“The fact is that articles are promoted by Google, and we all use it almost every single day,” said Karg.

“Students may not want to admit they use it, but they do,” added Atkinson. “If you show them how to better use it, they’ll understand what the information limits are.”