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DL 241

As Impossible as Possible

Published: April 11, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 241. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 241 of Digitally Literate.

This week's issue is motivated by a brief discussion with Joaquin A. B. Munoz on a post I shared in the Higher Ed Learning Collective Facebook group. Each morning I try to share a positive greeting online, and a post to push our thinking. Joaquin wisely indicated that these stop-gap measures to address our work are nice…but what we really have is an opportunity to rethink our institutions and structures.

You know what Joaquin…you're right. This issue is for you.

This week I also posted the following:

📺 Watch

Michael Grab's mind-bending rock formations aren't held together by glue or steel rods. Shockingly, his rock piles are stacked using only the laws of gravity. Michael's rock formations have taken the internet by storm, and brought greater attention to rock balancing.

Watch his YouTube channel to see him make the seemingly impossible, possible. In a moment when so much feels impossible, watching someone patiently stack stones through sheer understanding of physics offers a meditation on what becomes achievable through patience and presence.

📚 Read

As we've moved to social distancing around the globe, the decision for the most part has been to identify online ways to replace offline behaviors. We're quickly realizing that this is often a poor substitute.

Trying to translate your old social habits to Zoom or FaceTime is like going vegetarian and proceeding to glumly eat a diet of just tofurkey, rather than cooking varied, creative, and flavorful meals with fruits and vegetables. The challenge of adapting to an all-virtual social life may lie in reorienting our interactions around the strengths of the platforms where we can be together.

We can't try to substitute digital for meatspace and assume it'll be a worthy substitute. But we can think about new practices and habits.

As the Coronavirus disrupts and traumatizes most aspects of our lives, there is a clear opportunity to see the vulnerabilities that we have as a global village. We see the social and economic challenges that exist in our systems.

We also see areas of the planet where pollution has simply stopped as the skies clear up. Animals are running wild through city streets as the humans are staying at home.

This post by Julio Vincent Gambuto indicates that we have been given a tremendous gift by this look through the looking glass. We are about to receive an amazing amount of propaganda from governments, advertising, and our neighbors as we're urged to return to normalcy.

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), created with an initial $4.9 billion appropriation in 1935 during the Depression, is commonly associated with the building of roads and bridges. The WPA also employed writers, researchers, historians, artists, musicians, actors, and other cultural figures. This had as profound and lasting impact on the nation as the bridges and roads built by thousands of laborers.

This post from Paula Krebs suggests that as we prepare for a post-pandemic society, we should also develop the philosophical, cultural, and ethnic structures that undergird our societies. Infrastructure isn't just physical—it's the shared cultural narratives that hold communities together.

Are We All Digital Scholars Now?

Much of our response to this global pandemic has been the rapid adoption of digital technologies for all activities that we assumed were necessary and needed to happen face-to-face.

Mark Carrigan considers what transformation of higher education might look like after this rapid institutional change:

There are productive possibilities to be found in the bleak weirdness of our present situation and digital scholarship provides us with a framework through which we can think about how to realise them on a practical and mundane level.

Believing in a better future—while still acknowledging the darkness of our present reality—seems almost impossible right now. Doing so may make all the difference.

The Stockdale Paradox refers to the mindset employed by James Stockdale, a Vietnam veteran who spent seven years as a prisoner of war. Stockdale indicated that even if the situation seems dire, envisioning a way forward—even just an imagined one—can be the key to picking yourself up and moving ahead each day.

If we push beyond blind optimism, we can forge ahead into new territory, carrying with us both an understanding of the world as it is right now and an unwavering hope for the future.

🔨 Do

This week I've been playing with some lacto-fermentation to make my own hot sauce. This video and this video should get you started.

There's something satisfying about creating something through patience and time while everything else feels urgent and rushed.

🤔 Consider

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Dolly Parton

Parton's wisdom connects to the Stockdale Paradox explored above. The pandemic has brought rain—real suffering, loss, and uncertainty. But it has also revealed rainbows: clearer skies, community care, what we actually value. Holding both truths simultaneously may be the essential skill of this moment.

This video led to much needed laughs in my house…which was followed by this video…which led to spending the night beatboxing with my kids.

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