Description:
Tech oligarchs increasingly control what news reaches us and shape what we believe, but open-web standards, federated social platforms, and citizen-built tools give ordinary educators the power to take that control back. This session showcases four open-source projects and a practical action plan for “reclaiming your news feeds,” connecting with trusted voices, and modeling digital resistance for students.
Presentation Details
This is the presentation resource page for "Your Feeds, Your Algorithms," an accepted presentation for the August 6-7, 2026 Civics of Technology Conference, "Against Tech Hype."
This session will be offered on Friday, August 7, 2026 from 12:05 - 1:00 as a second presentation alongside:
"Between a Digital Scylla and Charybdis" by Ellie Dimopoulos
Privacy is a community practice, not a skill issue. This session introduces fifteen conversation cards for students, faculty, and patrons alike: small, repeatable conversations that build real skill and confidence over time
Slides and Resources
Presentation slides and additional referenced resources will be added here in upcoming weeks!
Full conference proposal (accepted)
Federated Reader Bot (mastodon.social/@federatedreader) A project that scrapes and reformats newsletter metadata from email as Mastodon posts, with an open RSS feed subscribable in Flipboard and other compatible readers.
News with Wes (news.wesfryer.com) A personal news aggregator auto-updating every four hours from curated Substack newsletters and the presenter's own RSS content feeds. Built without a back-end database, using just HTML and PHP.
AI Cultural Canon / AI Role Models (ai.wesfryer.com/canon) A Firebase-backed web project built for a middle school media literacy lesson on role models and trusted voices. A building-block project on the road to more complex, database-backed projects.
PodCommons (#PodCommons, podcasts.wesfryer.com) A podcast discovery platform offering chronological and AI-categorized episodes from 400+ creator-subscribed and community-recommended podcasts.
