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DL 238

Worth Our Embrace

Published: March 21, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 238. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 238 of Digitally Literate.

I worked on the following this week:

The Online Learning Collective - Together with a group of new friends, we volunteered to start up a Facebook Group to support educators as they adapt to bringing courses online. As part of this work, we built up a website and a mentored open online course to support a community in need. Several of us were interviewed yesterday.

Technopanic Podcast Special Episode - COVID-19 - This special episode of the Technopanic Podcast shares our thoughts about parenting and teaching in a global pandemic.

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

What's likeliest to kill more than 10 million human beings in the next 20 years? It's probably not what you'd think.

There's something out there that's as bad as war, something that kills as many people as war, and Bill Gates didn't think we were ready for it. Read the whole story on Vox.

Watching this five-year-old prediction unfold in real time is a sobering reminder about heeding expert warnings.

📚 Read

This piece from Jennie Weiner talks about the challenges and concerns parents have as we think we need to recreate school at home.

My husband and I both work full time. Like so many others, we're attempting to keep our family safe and fed during our state's Covid-19 shutdown while simultaneously working to convince our boomer parents to practice social distancing, reaching out to other loved ones and friends and trying not to panic. Even when everything in our life is working the way it should, and with all the privileges we have—our solid health care, our economic stability, our whiteness—we often feel overwhelmed. So this pandemic felt like a bridge too far. We had to meet it head on: holding our breath, crossing our fingers. And not judging ourselves.

Zoom is where we work, go to school, and party these days. There is a lot of discussion about whether we're ever going back to normal. As a result of social distancing, video conferencing apps have swooped in to keep us connected.

A reminder: requiring students to keep cameras on during Zoom calls is bad teaching practice. Zoom has marketed this as a way to build community—it is not. Perhaps the real way to build community is to turn off the cameras.

Instead, identify opportunities to differentiate instruction to support learners. I also recommend this thread from Jenae Cohn on how to build community.

Brian Merchant examines how platform-based monoliths are vacuuming up customers, jobs, and chunks of our economy.

If restaurants, bars, and local shops close permanently while app-based monoliths hoover up the customers and the jobs, the trendline may be very difficult to reverse as we wade out of the wreckage. And this is not a future we want.

John Warner questions many of the policies and "mandatory" edicts that we use to motivate ourselves and others.

The emergent nature of the situation has revealed what is worth valuing and what is worth abandoning. It shows that constraints we are asked to live under are entirely artificial. If these things are worth abandoning in a crisis, what makes them worth adhering to under normal circumstances?

For centuries, Buddhism has offered the teaching called "dependent origination" or "interdependent origination." This means that nothing exists independently in our world. Everything is interconnected in a complex web of life that is continually changing.

We can only thrive as we become aware of how we affect each other. If we're not able to hear each other's feelings and needs, our relationships suffer. We thrive to the extent that we embrace our interdependence.

🔨 Do

Cal Newport with guidance as we strive for balance in these times:

There is, I propose, a simple two-part solution. First, check one national and one local news source each morning. Then—and this is the important part—don't check any other news for the rest of the day. Presumably, time-sensitive updates that affect you directly will arrive by email, or phone, or text.

This will be hard, especially given the way we've been trained by social media companies to view our phone as a psychological pacifier.

The second part: distract yourself with value-driven action. Serve your community, serve your kids, serve yourself (both body and mind), produce good work. Try to fit in a few moments of forced gratitude, just to keep those particular circuits active.

🤔 Consider

Constraints we are asked to live under are entirely artificial. If these things are worth abandoning in a crisis, what makes them worth adhering to under normal circumstances?

John Warner

Warner's question cuts to the heart of what this pandemic reveals. The policies we thought were immovable—attendance requirements, in-person deadlines, rigid schedules—evaporated overnight. This clarity about what's essential versus arbitrary is perhaps the crisis's most valuable gift.

If you made it to the end of this week's issue, perhaps you'd enjoy some Stardew Valley ASMR.

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