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DL 230

How You Do Everything

Published: January 25, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 230. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 230 of Digitally Literate.

This week I spent time behind the scenes working on a couple projects. Some of this includes starting to blog again for our Screentime Research Group. If you would like to get involved in that work…please send me a note.

I also posted this piece about talking to youth about privacy, security, & digital spaces. I was recently interviewed and asked to respond to the following prompt: Can you give a concrete example of a situation you could create to teach kids about digital security/algorithms? This is my response.

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 let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

We often make assumptions about the things that make us lonely. But research shows that the amount of time you spend with other people, and the quality of our social skills don't really make a difference. So why is it that nearly half of the U.S. population reports feeling lonely regularly?

Glad You Asked hosts Alex Clark and Christophe Haubursin set off to discover what causes loneliness, how it affects our health, and what to do to address it.

The counterintuitive finding—that social time doesn't prevent loneliness—suggests the problem runs deeper than simple isolation.

📚 Read

Tom Wilson and Kate Starbird with a mixed-method, interpretative analysis of an online, cross-platform disinformation campaign targeting the White Helmets.

The research investigates how disinformation campaigns work across online platforms to achieve their strategic goals. Wilson and Starbird also examines how governments and other political entities support disinformation campaigns.

Findings suggest that a comprehensive understanding of disinformation requires accounting for the spread of content across platforms and that social media platforms should increase collaboration to detect and characterize disinformation campaigns.

This publication also alerted me to the Misinformation Review Journal from the Harvard Kennedy School. Definitely a great resource to add to your feed reader.

Candice L. Odgers and Michaeline R. Jensen with a review of data from three sources: (a) narrative reviews and meta-analyses conducted between 2014 and 2019, (b) large-scale preregistered cohort studies and (c) intensive longitudinal and ecological momentary assessment studies.

Their goal is to summarize what is known about linkages between digital technology usage and adolescent mental health, with a specific focus on depression and anxiety.

The review highlights that most research to date has been correlational, focused on adults versus adolescents, and has generated a mix of often conflicting small positive, negative and null associations. The most recent and rigorous large-scale preregistered studies report small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents' well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect and, as estimated, are unlikely to be of clinical or practical significance.

This week, Britain unveiled sweeping new online protections for children, issuing expansive rules despite widespread objections from a number of tech companies and trade groups.

The new rules, called the Age-Appropriate Design Code, are intended to give minors in Britain special rights and protections online — much like in the real world where children generally have the right to attend school and are prohibited from going to bars.

The new rules will soon be submitted to Parliament, which called for online standards for children as part of a 2018 data protection law and is unlikely to change them. The code should go into effect eight to 10 weeks after it is sent to the lawmakers.

This represents significant regulatory movement on children's digital rights—something the US has been slow to address comprehensively.

The most recent What's Hot in Literacy report from the International Literacy Association was released this week.

This year's report listed the following as the "most important" topics to follow:

This is the first year that digital literacy did not show up in the top spots in any category. It did show up highly in "requested professional development" as the majority of respondents indicated they wanted support in using digital resources to support literacy instruction.

The disconnect is notable: educators want digital literacy PD but the field doesn't rank it as most important.

We Sell Your Data, and the accompanying Twitter account is the project of Sarah Dapul-Weberman.

The company is a satire of an innovative new company that aims to make selling your personal data as simple as possible.

Our company doesn't attempt to provide you a service in exchange for your data. Instead, you voluntarily give us your data, and you receive nothing in return.

The satire works because it's barely exaggerated—this is essentially what happens with most "free" services, just without the pretense.

🔨 Do

Doug Belshaw with a great piece on the actions and dispositions behind being a great leader.

Belshaw problematizes our historical determinants of what makes a good leader, and contextualizes this in future contexts as individuals seek to make a dent in the universe.

🤔 Consider

Instead of falling for people who are confident, narcissistic and charismatic, we should promote people because of competence, humility and integrity.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Chamorro-Premuzic's reframing of leadership criteria connects to this issue's themes. We're drawn to confident voices in the disinformation landscape, charismatic tech leaders promising connection while delivering loneliness, flashy apps over substantive protection. What if we valued competence, humility, and integrity instead?

If you stick around to the end of the newsletter…check this link out. Be warned…eye candy incoming.

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