It has been three years since a would-be revolution was televised and simultaneously uploaded to myriad social sites as insurrectionists performed for their audience. It’s still hard to wrap my head around it. It’s hard, too, to contemplate what the year ahead holds for the nation. When I was looking for something else, I bumped … Continue reading unhappy anniversary→| barbara fister
I was invited to speak to librarians at the Lake Superior Library Symposium, a gathering of professionals from all kinds of libraries Up North. Since visiting Duluth is always a good idea, I was happy to be part of the conference program. The theme of the conference was Matter of Fact: Promoting Information Literacy in … Continue reading standing up for the truth→| barbara fister
I left Twitter today. I can’t stay when it will be controlled by a billionaire reactionary who wants to restore “free speech” (meaning Trump and his fellow travelers). He’s popular on Twitter because he’s rich and he’s a mega-shitposter, and it will be his personal plaything, like Mars. I’ve had an emotional go-bag ready for … Continue reading bye bye birdie→| barbara fister
For some reason the phrase “cost per conversion” came into my head the other day. There’s a whole lexicon of internet marketing lingo that is gibberish to me, speaking in tongues while praising the pursuit of wealth. This phrase has to do with how much it costs to place a digital ad that actually results … Continue reading cost per conversion→| barbara fister
As usual, my online mystery reading group collects our top ten crime fiction reads of the year. I’ll note them here out of a sense of tradition, along with some notes on other books I read and enjoyed in 2021. Someday I’ll look back on all of these and map out how my tastes have … Continue reading my year in reading→| barbara fister
Minitex, our local library cooperative (consortium? collaboration?) is fifty years old, and I got to speak at a virtual party, where there were videos submitted by member libraries, some speakers, and a fun breakout Jeopardy game where I got a couple right but otherwise made a fool of myself. All in a good cause – … Continue reading the answer is … Minitex→| barbara fister
Updated: What a fun conversation! Under the able moderation by Gus Andrews, we started out with a big-picture discussion of the problem – it’s not just the fault of technology, it’s social, with social media amplifying messages and those tools being used deliberately by political actors. Then we heard from Christopher Tuckwood about how the … Continue reading a global look at the social life of misinformation→| barbara fister
This is a talk I prepared for ChALS, a Swedish information literacy conference hosted at Chalmers University. Avancez! Thank you for inviting me to be part of this conference, and I appreciate your willingness to listen to an American who has not learned Swedish; my apologies. I am speaking to you from southern Minnesota, in … Continue reading Lateral Reading and Information Systems in the Age of Distrust→| barbara fister
In honor of the tenth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, I’m reposting a piece from Library Journal from when I wrote a weekly column that was open access but is now a bunch of 404: Not Found…| barbara fister
I was invited to speak to writing instructors at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who are in the process of thinking through the information literacy portion of their learning outcomes. Always …| barbara fister
