DL 294
Falling & Breaking
Published: June 19, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter
Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #294. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
🔖 Key Takeaways
- Creative Process Revelation: Memoir writing reveals how disappointment and difficulty provide unrecognized gifts that emerge over time
- Post-COVID Education Focus: Crisis opportunity to re-center peer relationships and meaningful learning goals in student-centered education
- Critical Race Theory Weaponization: Academic framework transformed into cultural warfare tool to discredit anti-racist movements
- Big Tech Antitrust Momentum: Congressional legislation targets platform acquisitions and corporate consolidation with bipartisan support
- Conspiracy Theory Psychology: Understanding why people fall for conspiracies requires recognizing universal human cognitive shortcuts and biases
Hey there! Welcome back all.
This week I posted the following:
- Memoir and the Creative Process - This is a follow-up to my earlier post about mental health and depression. We don’t always recognize the gifts we’re given by suffering through disappointing and difficult times until long after the fact.
- Today Is the Tomorrow We Should Have Prepared for Yesterday - A recent pub in Voices From The Middle looking at Post-COVID and education. As educators, we must focus on how we can use this crisis to re-center what we know to be most valuable about education: the peer and mentor relationships that underpin students’ learning and the opportunities to pursue meaningful social and intellectual goals.
- Application for the WIRED Resilience Residency Program - I applied for the WIRED Resilience Residency but didn't make it past the first round. They received about 200 applications from around the globe. I'm interested to see who makes the cut. I'm sharing my letter of application to promote open scholarship and transparency.
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
My process of making a vinyl set episode
I love the My Analog Journal YouTube channel.
It's basically like having a DJ show up in your house to play a set of music on given theme or genre.
I also love process videos. In this video, they share the whole process of research, finding the records, recording, then finally releasing the video.
📚 Read
Common Challenges When Teaching About Equity and Social Justice
Critical race theory has been studied for decades, but it received relatively little attention in the wider cultural sphere until the past year, when conservatives adopted it as a catch-all term to demonize and discredit the anti-racist, anti–police brutality movements that sprang up in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Its academic context, which is chiefly concerned with the endemic racism in American institutions and power structures, is being wielded as a means to gin up a moral panic.
This resource from Shawna Coppola is a great primer to use as you discuss these topics with others.
Is This The Big Tech Break-UP We've Been Waiting For?
With an ambitious package of Big Tech antitrust legislation, Congress is trying to restrain the power of Big Tech and stave off corporate consolidation.
The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, one of the five bills introduced last week, would effectively put an end to the tech giants’ ability to make acquisitions.
This interview by Kara Swisher provides come context on whether such a broad ban could have serious unintended consequences and lead to less competition, not more.
NTIA's Indicators of Broadband Need
We like to think of the internet as a supremely easy way to connect to people all over the world, and in many regards this is true. For many, though, high-speed broadband is either unaffordable or completely unavailable.
This interactive map from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) shows that the problem is much worse that we initially thought.
Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories
Every one of us has a brain that takes shortcuts, makes assumptions and works in irrational ways. The sooner we recognize that, and stop treating loved ones who have adopted conspiratorial beliefs as lost causes, the better we may be at curbing the beliefs that threaten our democracy and public health. We’re all human after all.
Evolution of the Dad
Most male mammals have little or nothing to do with their kids. Why is our own species different?
Many mysteries remain, though, about how human fathers evolved their peculiar, highly invested role, including the hormonal changes that accompany fatherhood. A deeper understanding of where dads came from, and why fatherhood matters for both fathers and children, could benefit families of all kinds.
🔨 Do
The Top 5 Things 2020 Taught Us About Remote Work
Whatever the future of work holds, use the lessons of the past year to get smarter about how you work and manage employees from home.
- Get more intentional about the things you do
- Hone your relationship-building skills
- Show your team you trust them
- Make writing skills your new superpower
- Find out what individual employees need
🤔 Consider
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
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