Is everybody lying? How can we even know?
Nanobots in medicine? Deepfakes of people doing crazy things? How the heck do we know the difference between disinformation and what is true? Join Alexa and Chris as we talk to the experts so that the rest of us can feel more confident – and safe – on the internet.
Be sure to listen on your favourite podcast platform, at our hosted site, or watch our actual faces on YouTube!
In Season One – The Disinformation Disaster, we speak to Diane Zerr and Nina Verishagen, who literally wrote the book for their students at Saskatchewan Polytechnic to provide really simple tactics for cutting through the crap.
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The Hosts
Alexa Battler is an award-winning journalist, videographer and animator with over a decade working in news, digital storytelling and social media. She’s written for Maclean’s Magazine and designed newspaper pages for the Toronto Star, and more impressively also has over 13 million views on her TikTok video about a salad bowl. She’s spent much of her career as a multimedia staff reporter at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she’s covered breakthrough research and innovations at the university. Her writing has been republished or used hundreds of times in mainstream, educational and scientific outlets, from CBC to The Guardian to Phys.org.
Chris Garbutt is the Managing Director and Founder of VQC Media. He has worked as a writer, publisher, marketing director and is a trail captain for the Toronto Bruce Trail Club. He spent 20 years in the field of higher education, helping to translate complex topics to general audiences, and working with students to build community on campus. He spent close to a decade in the field of publishing, as an editor, writer and publisher, including as Editor/Publisher of Write Magazine, a national magazine for Canadian Writers.
The Experts
Nina Verishagen has a Master of Library and Information Studies from McGill University. She also holds an undergraduate degree in History from the University of Saskatchewan. She began her career as a faculty librarian at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, where much of her focus lied in providing information literacy sessions to students and managing library communications. Her early publications focus on social media in libraries and information literacy instruction. She is now a full-time instructor for the Library and Information Technology program at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, teaching practical skills to those eager to work in the information field. She integrates information evaluation and critical thinking into many of her courses and lessons. She can be reached at nina.verishagen@saskpolytech.ca
Diane Zerr has a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. She also holds an undergraduate Arts degree in Religious Studies from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. She began her career at the Regina Public Library before becoming an Instructional Librarian at Saskatchewan Polytechnic where she created and taught sessions for students on how to find quality information and critically think.
She is a Learning Services Instructor at Saskatchewan Polytechnic, working with students to build their proficiency with technology and their studying and writing skills. She can be reached at diane.zerr@saskpolytech.ca