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DL 231

Machine Learning Delay

Published: February 1, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 231. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Last week I posted this piece about talking to youth about privacy, security, & digital spaces. These materials and the related interview were used by Meghan Herbst in a piece for Wired on How to Raise Media-Savvy Kids in the Digital Age.

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

Project Magenta is a Google Research project that uses machine learning to create new tools for artists and musicians. One of these tools is NSynth, a neural synthesizer that generates strange, new sounds like "cat flutes," "beast guitars," and "screaming 3D printers."

In this video from Nat and Friends, they explore how NSynth works, and talk with Andrew Huang about his process creating a song entirely out of NSynth generated sounds.

What makes NSynth fascinating is how it learns the characteristics of different sounds and creates entirely new hybrid instruments—not just mixing audio but generating something genuinely novel.

📚 Read

Facebook's long-awaited Off-Facebook Activity tool started rolling out this week.

While it's not a perfect measure, and we still need stronger data privacy laws, this tool is a first step toward greater transparency and user control regarding third-party tracking. Hopefully other companies follow suit, and allow users to take advantage of it.

This tutorial shows you how to clear your account of off-Facebook activity, and prevent it from being collected in the future. The tool reveals how extensively your browsing and app usage is tracked across the web.

Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski analyze data from 11,884 adolescents in the UK Millennium Cohort Study to examine the association between digital engagement and adolescent sleep. They compare the relative effects of retrospective self-report vs. time-use diary measures of technology use.

Results suggest that negative associations are mainly driven by retrospective technology use measures and measures of total time spent on digital devices during the day—not by more accurate time-use diaries.

This methodological insight is crucial: how we measure technology use significantly shapes what correlations we find, adding important nuance to screentime debates.

There has been a lot of news about Clearview AI, a shadowy facial-recognition-software company providing users access to a database of 3 billion photographs scraped from social media and video streaming sites.

Max Read takes issue with a quote from one of Clearview's investors: "I've come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there's never going to be privacy…Laws have to determine what's legal, but you can't ban technology."

Read pushes back on this narrative that the creep of new technologies is inevitable and attempts to stop or control it is foolish. Society bans and regulates technologies all the time—the question is political will, not technical possibility.

A De-escalation Exercise for Upset Students

A simple technique that takes just a few minutes can help an agitated student regain the state of mind needed for learning:

These steps acknowledge that emotional regulation is a prerequisite for learning and that explicit instruction in calming techniques supports student success.

The College Readiness Collection from Google Applied Digital Skills helps students plan and prepare for college and other education opportunities:

🔨 Do

I blog a lot and share materials openly online. As I build and share materials, I'm always trying to find ways to allow people to respond and critique my materials in a friction-free manner.

In this post from David Wiley, he indicates that at Lumen Learning they are adding a button to the bottom of all webpages that links to a Google Doc version of the content. This is shared publicly, and has Track Changes turned on to allow feedback.

I may add this to my blogging and publishing repertoire—lowering barriers to contribution is how open content improves.

🤔 Consider

I'm reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.

Kobe Bryant

Bryant's words—shared just days before his tragic death—connect to this issue's themes of purposeful iteration. Whether it's machine learning systems improving through training data or educators reducing friction for feedback on OER, reflection without forward motion is incomplete.

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