DL 239

Self-Preservation, Not Self-Indulgence

Published: March 28, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 239. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Online Learning Collective Growing: The Facebook group I helped start reached 23,000 members—now expanding to Twitter, Instagram, and a dedicated website
Keep It Human in High Tech: Simplify, be flexible, don't assume reliable tech access, build community, crowdsource ideas, and keep the big picture in mind
What You're Feeling Is Grief: Acknowledging pandemic grief—finding balance in thinking, calming through presence, letting go of uncontrollables, stocking compassion
Work From Home ≠ Work All Time: Designate your spot, use video chat intentionally, practice one-tab working, play with schedule, finish one thing per day
Student Agency Remains Central: Even in crisis, putting student agency first matters more than perfect content delivery

Hi all, welcome to issue 239 of Digitally Literate.

Last week I talked about the Online Learning Collective Facebook Group that I helped start up. As of this morning, there are almost 23,000 members in the group. We're also painfully aware that not all love Facebook. To that end, we're reaching out to Twitter and Instagram. I also moved our website to a new location. We've been getting a lot of traction in the news.

I continue to build out learning events in our mentored, open online learning community:

Moving across screens - Multimodality and teaching materials
Show as opposed to tell - Screencaptures and screencasting
Scaffolding student engagement - Instructional scaffolding & ZPD
Reinventing the wheel - OER and Creative Commons licensing

I also posted two episodes of the Technopanic Podcast:

Digital Schools and Surveillance - The challenges of digital surveillance in my son's school
Self-Care While Social Distancing - Joined by Chris Mazura on balancing parenting, teaching, and being human

📺 Watch

Math Teacher Uses Half-Life: Alyx as VR Whiteboard

Half-Life: Alyx is a virtual reality game.

Meet Charles Coomber, a San Diego-based teacher at Otay Ranch Academy for the Arts, who used Half-Life: Alyx as a makeshift whiteboard to teach math.

Creative problem-solving with available tools—exactly what this moment demands from educators.

📚 Read

Don't Lose High Touch When Moving to High Tech

Here's 5 ways to keep it human:

Simplify and be flexible
Don't assume people have reliable tech, or understand how to use it
Look for ways to build community
Don't be afraid to crowdsource ideas
Keep the big picture in mind

I recommend this resource on 14 tips for connecting with others that have limited Internet resources.

It's important that we think first about student agency in these times. This series of interviews with experts in the field provides valuable reflection.

That Discomfort You're Feeling Is Grief

It's important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how we can find meaning in it. We all have different levels of grief and express it in different ways.

Ways to acknowledge and deal with this anxiety and grief:

Find balance in the things you're thinking
Calm yourself by coming into the present
Let go of what you can't control
Stock up on compassion

What It's Like to Quarantine With Kids

I had a recent interview with Joshua Brustein from Bloomberg. Here's some results from that fun discussion.

On screentime, this piece from Dorian Traube and Ashwini Lakshmanan at The Conversation focuses on tele-health and children.

Make "Work From Home" Work for You

This provides great principles for making "work from home" work. You can find similar info here in a different context.

#1 tip for mental health: Work at home doesn't mean working all of the time.

Designate your "spot" for working
Use video chat like a pro
Practice "one tab working"
Act the part
Play with your schedule and energy
Don't work all of the time
Create "to-do list" the day before
Finish one thing per day
Cut yourself some slack

How to Clean and Disinfect All Your Gadgets

Make time in your schedule to clean and disinfect all of your gadgets this weekend. Seriously. We need you to stay healthy at home.

Whether you want to protect against COVID-19 or just give all your gadgets a deep-clean while you're stuck at home, now's the ideal time.

🔨 Do

As a member of the Online Learning Collective, we'd love to hear your story during these trying times.

We started up a Speakpipe on our website to record 90-second messages about how you've been impacted personally and/or professionally. I'll upload all of these messages to the Internet Archive.

Please take time to document this time. Please share with others.

🤔 Consider

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Audre Lorde

Lorde's words carry particular weight during pandemic. The pressure to be productive, to optimize quarantine, to emerge having learned a new skill—all of it misses what this moment requires. Self-care isn't indulgence when survival is the task at hand.

Find your corner in the forest.

Previous: DL 238 • Next: DL 240 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

Pedagogy — Student agency in uncertain times, high-touch in high-tech transitions, instructional scaffolding
Digital Wellbeing — Pandemic grief acknowledgment, work-from-home boundaries, self-care as survival
Education Technology — Online Learning Collective growth, VR teaching innovation, OER development
Privacy Rights — Digital schools and surveillance concerns
Open Educational Resources — Creative Commons licensing, community-sourced learning materials