Joel Breakstone

Justin Reich is joined by Joel Breakstone, director of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), and co-lead on Beyond the Bubble and Civic Online Reasoning projects. Together they discuss assessing online information, the research of SHEG, and the methods used by fact checkers to determine the validity of information. “For one thing, when they did a search, they didn't immediately click on the first search result, which is what many of the Stanford students, and even some of the historians did. Instead, the fact-checkers engaged in what we refer to as click restraint. They paused, and they looked at the snippets about the search results. And they took a moment to check out the URLs, and then made a decision about where they should begin their search. Because that initial click often greatly influences the kind of search that you end up conducting.” - Joel Breakstone