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DL 235

When One Affects Many

Published: March 7, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 235. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 235 of Digitally Literate.

I posted and shared the following this week:

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

Robin is a friendly robot that can express emotions and build interactive dialogues with children. By engaging them in play and peer-to-peer conversations, Robin reduces their feeling of loneliness and mitigates their stress during their hospital stay.

Read more here. The project demonstrates how thoughtfully designed technology can provide genuine emotional support in vulnerable moments.

📚 Read

This week a bipartisan pair of US senators introduced the EARN IT Act. Meant to combat child sexual exploitation online, the bill threatens to erode established protections against holding tech companies responsible for what people do and say on their platforms. It also poses the most serious threat in years to strong end-to-end encryption.

As the bill circulated, the Department of Justice held a press conference about its own effort to curb online child predation: a set of 11 "voluntary principles" that major tech companies have pledged to follow. Though the principles don't specifically impact encryption themselves, the event had an explicit anti-encryption message.

Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, presented these concerns.

This report by UNICEF's East Asia and Pacific regional office and the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention explores social media use among children aged 11 to 18 in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Key recommendations:

  1. Improve support for digital parenting: Integrate digital parenting into evidence-based programs considering differing digital literacy levels among caregivers
  2. Foster online and offline resilience: Children equipped with communication, conflict resolution, and self-efficacy skills make better choices and manage conflict more effectively
  3. Ensure evidence-based messaging: Emphasize approaches that equip children with safety skills rather than fear-based restrictions
  4. Three steps for tech companies: Make profiles private by default, change default contact options from 'everyone' to 'friends of friends', and block photos from people outside contact lists

If tech companies can move to promote truth on a fast-moving public-health crisis, why do they struggle to do the same on other important issues?

Here in the U.S., it appears the government is botching the pandemic response. Colleges and universities are responding with a push for online coursework.

Of course, online learning doesn't mean we just put coursework online. These resources from Google may help as you think about making that transition.

Anouk Ruhaak with an essay on the concept of "collective consent," or ways to collectively decide how to govern data about us. Ruhaak indicates that the informed consent process is broken online, as we collectively decide who to give access and usage rights and what to collect in the first place.

The essay argues that data protection rights need to extend to allow for data rights to be managed collectively—a fundamental shift from our current individual-focused frameworks.

A great resource from Jesse Stommel on "ungrading" and inspiration to rethink our assessment and evaluation policies.

Ungrading is not as simple as just removing grades. This suggests we need to do intentional, critical work to dismantle traditional and standardized approaches to assessment—the structures themselves shape what we value in learning.

🔨 Do

Thanks to a podcast, my wife has been speaking a lot about love languages in our familial relationships. The five languages are:

This framework provides useful guidance as we interact with youth and those around us—understanding how people prefer to give and receive care improves connection.

🤔 Consider

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass

Douglass's words resonate across this issue's themes. The struggle for encryption rights, for collective consent frameworks, for assessment reform—none are simple removals but require active dismantling and rebuilding. Progress demands confronting systems, not just opting out.

If you made it to the end of the newsletter, perhaps you'd be better off playing Minecraft.

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