Feb 25, 2021 12:00 AM

Jan 29, 2025 12:00 AM

DL 280

Courage to Continue

Published: February 25, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #280. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Audio Social Emergence: Clubhouse represents new frontier in social media with live audio conversations and invitation-only exclusivity
Human Exploration Limits: Physics and cosmic expansion create absolute boundaries for humanity's future reach in the universe
AI Education Integration: Cognitive technologies like machine learning and bots have transformative potential for education systems
Human Teachers Essential: Despite technological advances, human educators remain irreplaceable for meaningful learning experiences

Welcome back friends! This was a busy week.

This week I also posted the following:

Recognizing the Details - Learning Event #6 - Hold space and bear witness to the daily interactions that make up our lives.
Development & Validation of the TILT Survey - Behind the scenes of the development and validation of the Technology, Instruction, Learning in Teaching (TILT) survey.
The Future Includes Human Teachers - First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.
Bots, Disruptors, and Frictionless Interactions - Cognitive technologies, such as machine learning, neural networks, robotic process automation, bots, natural language processing, neural nets, and the broader domain of AI, have the potential to transform education.

If you haven't already, please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show up in your inbox. Feel free to reach out and say hey at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

How Far Can We Go? Limits of Humanity (7:44)

Is there a border we will never cross? Are there places we will never be able to reach, no matter what? It turns out there are.

Far, far more than you might have thought…

📚 Read

Can Clubhouse Move Fast Without Breaking Things?

Kevin Roose on Clubhouse, the invitation-only social audio app. Clubhouse has been super hot over the last couple of months.

I'm sharing this link because Roose includes the following piece of gold.

Every successful social network has a life cycle that goes something like: Wow, this app sure is addictive! Look at all the funny and exciting ways people are using it! Oh, look, I can get my news and political commentary here, too! This is going to empower dissidents, promote free speech and topple authoritarian regimes! Hmm, why are trolls and racists getting millions of followers? And where did all these conspiracy theories come from? This platform should really hire some moderators and fix its algorithms. Wow, this place is a cesspool, I’m deleting my account.

Foregrounding Technoethics: Toward Critical Perspectives in Technology and Teacher Education

The Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs) were created to help teacher educators support teacher candidates as they prepare to teach with technology.

Daniel G. Krutka, Marie K. Heath, and K. Bret Staudt Willet offer suggestions for how teacher educators might inquire into technoethical conundrums through ethical, democratic, legal, economic, technological, and pedagogical explorations of technologies.

Lateral reading: College students learn to critically evaluate internet sources in an online course

You might remember the research from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) from 2016 that suggested that students may have trouble judging the credibility of online information.

Some research suggests that students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging the credibility of online sources. But what about asynchronous remote instruction?

The group is back to describe lateral reading, the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site.

What is an “algorithm”? It depends whom you ask

In 1971, computer scientist Harold Stone, defined an algorithm as "a set of rules that precisely define a sequence of operations.”

Lawmakers in the US are defining an algorithm as “automated decisionmaking system” and “a computational process, including one derived from machine learning, statistics, or other data processing or artificial intelligence techniques, that makes a decision or facilitates human decision making, that impacts consumers.”

This is important as algorithms are increasingly impacting our lives. Instead of using an overly broad term like algorithm, we should instead focus on impact, not input.

What matters is the potential for harm, regardless of whether we're discussing an algebraic formula or a deep neural network.

How the iPhone killed the custom ringtone

Before Facebook and Twitter, ringtones were a way to advertise your sense of humor and great taste.

With the rise of 4G networks, coupled with instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, people didn’t have to call someone to have a real-time conversation. The mobile phone was growing up fast, and the custom ringtone turned out to be something of an embarrassing, teenage phase.

Social media now offers far more possibilities for us to curate our public image than snippets of symphonies or tacky jingles ever did. For the computer in our pocket, the bell rarely tolls.

Last week a song came "on the radio" (streamed over my in-car audio from my phone) and it brought me back to a ringtone that I downloaded and edited myself. I tried explaining it to the kids...but... :(

🔨 Do

Simple Techniques to Improve Visuals in Technology Enhanced Learning

I've been trying to more accessible and approachable for almost a decade. This includes the use of my main website and this newsletter.

My next frontier is to be more visually literate. My inspiration in this work is Bryan Mathers and Visual Thinkery.

In this slide deck, Mathers offers some great inspiration on graphic recording of ideas.

🤔 Consider

Success is not final; failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.

Winston S. Churchill

Missed out on buying some art this week. Now I'll look to purchase The Eyemonger, A children's book about privacy.

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