DL 282
Life Must Be Lived Forwards
Published: March 13, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter
Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #282. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
🔖 Key Takeaways
- COVID Reflection: Yuval Harari analyzes key lessons from a year of pandemic about science, cooperation, and societal resilience
- Social Media Orbiting: Understanding the phenomenon of digital stalking through social media engagement without direct contact
- Planning vs. Action: Recognition that excessive planning can become a form of procrastination that prevents achievement
- Learning Guides: The importance of having the right mentors and guides when navigating complex learning environments
Welcome back friends! This was a busy week.
This week I also posted the following:
- Where I'm Going - Share a walk in your world. WalkMyWorld Learning Event 7. Where I’m Going. Life must be lived forwards. We have the opportunity to survive, succeed, and achieve.
- Guides In The Monster Factory - A post about learning, seeking awareness, and having the right guides in the process.
- Are You Guilty of ‘Orbiting’? - Orbiting is a phenomenon that describes someone who leaves your life but continues to be involved in your social media. Orbiting is a strategic way to prevent the door from shutting completely on a former relationship.
- When Planning Becomes Procrastinating - Following through is the only thing that separates dreamers from people that accomplish great things.
📺 Watch
The Awesome Anthem
A hilarious, inspirational spoken word video by Sekou Andrews, the world's leading Poetic Voice. It features awesomnacious people - from celebrities and scientists, to social activists and 7 yr olds - hitting the awesome pose to declare their place in the GLOBAL COMMUNITY OF AWESOMENESS!
Please SHARE this with someone you care about who needs to hear and believe the words: "I Am Awesome!"
📚 Read
Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid
Anything that Yuval Noah Harari writes...we need to read.
How can we summarize the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity’s helplessness in the face of nature’s might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.
How right-wing disinformation and conspiracy theories tore one family apart
QAnon is the mass delusion that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. Although it started as a American invention, we're seeing variants throughout the globe.
The media is increasingly sharing these stories of families that are being torn apart as they describe relatives that are living in a fantasy world, or caught between two realities.
Are Your Diversity Strategies Missing the Mark? Nine Ways to Get it Right
A great post by Hedreich Nichols on the Cult of Pedagogy blog. Nichols writes from the perspective of the OBF (one black friend) about the small, intentional changes you can make to better relate to the world around you.
- Read, read, read
- Be open to feedback
- Expand your circle
- Get comfortable with being uncomfortable
- Don't forget gender
- Beware "imperceptible" distance
- Validate code switching
- Embrace the elephant in the room
- Identify and fight bias
Everyone has an eschatology
A great post by Doug Belshaw about eschatology, or the branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or of humankind.
I've been doing quite a bit of reading about risk and climate change over the last couple of months. Belshaw is on this journey as well and our stumbles have led us to the Deep Adaptation paper by Dr. Jem Bendell.
Doug challenges us to realign your work around the 4Rs outlined by Bendell.
- Resilience asks us “how do we keep what we really want to keep?”
- Relinquishment asks us “what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?”
- Restoration asks us “what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies?”
- Reconciliation asks “with what and whom can we make peace with as we face our mutual mortality?”
Lou Ottens, Inventor Of The Cassette Tape, Has Died
Lou Ottens, who put music lovers around the world on a path toward playlists and mixtapes by leading the invention of the first cassette tape, has died at age 94, according to media reports in the Netherlands. Ottens was a talented and influential engineer at Philips, where he also helped develop consumer compact discs.
"Lou wanted music to be portable and accessible," says documentary filmmaker Zack Taylor, who spent days with Ottens for his film Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape.
Born in 1926, Ottens went from building a radio for his family during World War II — it reportedly had a directional antenna so it could focus on radio signals despite Nazi jamming attempts — to developing technology that would democratize music.
🔨 Do
Show your process, not just your product
John Spencer with seven reasons to show your work.
- Showing your work encourages metacognition
- Innovation skyrockets when people show their work
- They become mentors
- It can lead to collaborative partnerships
- You can change the narrative
- Sharing your journey can help build courage
- Students embrace the revision process
🤔 Consider
Life's work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into your life wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
Pema Chödrön
Nature may be getting quieter. But people are getting louder. How is our noise affecting wildlife?
🔗 Navigation
Previous: DL 281 • Next: DL 283 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter
Connected concepts:
- COVID-19 Societal Lessons
- QAnon and Family Division
- Diversity and Inclusion Strategies
- Deep Adaptation and Climate Change
Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.