The Great Debate

| By Tracey Matthews, K12 Content Strategist , Gale | Complete your debate prep for the National Speech & Debate Tournament with Research In Context! With several portals (or topic pages) on social issues, Research In Context helps middle schoolers make connections to the world beyond the classroom, write persuasive research papers, and prepare well-informed … Read more

Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Digital Literacy

By Traci Cothran

There was a time when we didn’t need to define what a fact was – or rather, we all understood that it meant the same thing. It was a fact – it was the truth; the rest was fiction or opinion. There were clear, credible sources, and there were those that weren’t. Now students, teachers, and librarians (as well as the rest of the American populous) must grapple with distinguishing fact, fake news, and “alternative facts” on a near-constant basis. While the Internet gives us a plethora of easy-to-access information, it’s up to us to discern what is factual and what is not.

To do that, we need to start asking hard questions of everything we read and hear – such as:

  • Where did that Facebook “news” post originate?
  • Is this news or a “newsvertisement?”
  • Are these statistics or this sound bite taken out of context to distort their meaning?
  • Who penned this article? Do they have a specific agenda that influences their writing?
  • Who created this website and how are they getting paid for their content?
  • When you reverse-search the image used in the article, do you find different source content?

Read moreAlternative Facts, Fake News, and Digital Literacy

We Love Analytics!

Posted on February 19, 2016

We love our work on the Gale Databases team, as we continuously add informative and engaging new content – this includes keeping up with the latest current events (World History In Context, Global Issues In Context), health news (Science In Context, Health and Wellness Resource Center), business developments (Business Insights), and topics being studied in school (Student Resources In Context, Research In Context, Kids InfoBits), to name just a few.

But we also love finding out how the content is actually used in these databases once we load it – and we look at many metrics, including:

  • Top Searches
  • Top Media
  • Most Popular Articles and Journals
  • Number of Users
  • And many others

Read moreWe Love Analytics!

Content Updates for Gale’s In Context (week ending 10/9/2015)

Posted on October 8, 2015

New content has been added and existing content updated in a number of Gale’s In Context products.

Biography In Context
New homepage spotlights have been posted that include the “hotspot” feature. This feature allows users to hover over portions of an image on the home page enabling a pop-up window to appear with fast facts about the topic or links to additional content.

Spotlights for October are:

Read moreContent Updates for Gale’s In Context (week ending 10/9/2015)