TLDR 7

Digital Friendships and Educational Policy: From Maria Popova to Mixtapes

Published: August 7, 2015 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Too Long; Didn't Read (TL;DR), issue #7. Thank you once again for being one of the first to sign up for this newsletter. In this weekly email, I'll pull together some of the content that I shared out throughout the week. It contains elements from the past week that you should things that you should know & discuss. Please feel free to respond back, and share out with others.

🔖 Key Takeaways

This week I shared a post detailing my workflow as I create, post, and share content online. In the upcoming week, I'll share a new post detailing how I use and share Creative Commons (CC) licensing and the use of open educational resources (OER). This work has parallels to some of the stories I'll share below.

🎧 Listen

The Tim Ferriss Show - Maria Popova

Maria Popova on Being Interesting, Creating More Time in a Day, And How to Start A Successful Blog

Maria Popova has written for amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, and her own blog BrainPickings.org. In this half-hour audio clip from the Tim Ferriss podcast, she answers questions from the audience.

I embedded the YouTube version above to make it easier to access the clip. I skipped forward a bit in the YouTube clip to skip the opening ads. You can also directly access the podcast, and the archive of shared links by clicking here.

📚 Read

Latest Pew Research on Teens, Technology, and Friendships
This report explores the new contours of friendship in the digital age to gain insight into how teens meet and interact with friends. Video games, social media, and mobile devices play a key role. View the complete report here.

Reconnecting Young People with a Bright Future, by Arne Duncan
A call to action from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asking for an "all-hands-on-deck" effort to re-engage youth.

It's interesting that he posted this to Medium.

Explaining Graphic Design to Four-Year-Olds
Excellent primer from Dean Vipond on basics of graphic design. This information is important as we (and our students) continue to write digitally.

EFF Ships Major New Privacy Badger Release
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched version 1.0 of Privacy Badger, an extension designed to prevent trackers from accessing unique info about you and your browsing.

Install Privacy Badger to browse the web free of pervasive tracking.

Coalition Letter to President Obama Calling for OER Policy
An open letter to President Obama to issue a strong Administration policy to ensure that they are made available to the public as Open Educational Resources (OER) to freely use, share, and build upon.

View the letter here. Sign the letter here. I signed as an individual.

A Year of Racial Tumult Brings Potent Lessons — and Risks — to the Classroom
Recent events provide pedagogical opportunities to discuss real world issues. The challenge is that we need to find the entry point in the discussions for students and provide opportunities for them to decompress after the ensuing dialogue.

Towards a Visual Hierarchy of Open Badges
I learned everything I know about badges by working with and learning from people that actually know these things. One of those people is Doug Belshaw.

In this post, Doug outlines his thinking as he scales up a new visual hierarchy for a badge system. I recommend reading the links he shares in the opening paragraph and then review his post. Let it sink in for a couple of days and then re-read.

The best way to learn about badges (IMHO) is to earn, build, and award them.

Is Your Child a "Group Problem Solver?" The PISA Test Will Decide
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) examination is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The assessment system examines reading, math, & science. You may not have heard about the PISA tests...but you should care a lot about these assessments and scores.

The latest version of the 15-year-old exam will include modified instant messaging to encourage/test collaboration. This is some of the work we built into the ORCA assessments while I was at the New Literacies Research Lab.

🔨 Do

Larger Than Life Mixtape
Very cool art project that provides a nice connection between the multitude of spaces to make and share playlists online.

This is a project that will take some time, but could be a powerful opportunity to have students create and share meaningful musical narratives while exploring the intersection of physical and digital media.

🤔 Consider

The Pew research on teen digital friendships reveals fascinating shifts in how young people form relationships. Video games emerge as significant social spaces, challenging traditional assumptions about gaming as isolated activity. As educators, understanding these digital friendship patterns helps us recognize the authentic social learning happening in spaces we might otherwise dismiss.

Maria Popova's approach to content curation also offers lessons for educational practice. Her method of deep reading, thoughtful synthesis, and generous sharing models the kind of intellectual engagement we hope to foster in students.

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Connected concepts:

Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology insights from the early TL;DR era.