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DL 242

Stepping on People

Published: April 18, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 242. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 242 of Digitally Literate.

I helped post the following this week:

📺 Watch

Kudos to Netflix! They've moved many of their documentaries and educational programming to a YouTube channel to make it easier to share in online learning environments. Read the announcement here.

This is precisely the kind of corporate response that serves the public good—reducing barriers to quality educational content when it's most needed, without complicated licensing negotiations.

📚 Read

There are things we can do as we attempt to move through a global pandemic in an unjust world:

The unprecedented scope of current digital measures is pushing the limits of privacy. How do we balance children's right to privacy with their right to health, both enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

How do we use the technology and data available to combat the outbreak now, without creating a 'new normal' where children's privacy is under constant threat?

The pandemic accelerates surveillance infrastructure that may prove difficult to dismantle once the crisis passes.

This post in Discover Magazine has a clickbait title that does little to assuage parental fears about screentime during current times. If you click through and actually read the piece, it is more measured as it considers how we're still trying to figure out the ultimate effects.

The guidance buried at the end:

In this same vein, perhaps the focus should be on child, content, and context. Research suggests that time on screens may have little impact on kids' social skills.

Joan Donovan with a piece in Nature examining how the pandemic lays bare the failure to quarantine online scams, hoaxes, and lies amid political battles.

This week showed evidence of these challenges as Facebook says it will begin to alert users after they've been exposed to misinformation about the coronavirus. We don't know if this will happen. I'm also interested in why some misinformation is better or worse than others. I guess it matters who is paying for it.

We also see some of this information in social spaces being picked up in online extremist communities.

There is a large corpus of existing research that can help us think through this current moment with regard to the relationship between the civic, the digital, and (not exclusively) youth.

This policy brief synthesizes key trends with an aim to present them in a useful and accessible way for policy makers, administrators, and anyone else interested in this topic.

Two highlights:

  1. Let's work beyond critiques of "clicktivism" and instead apply useful, research-backed frameworks for analysis and scope.
  2. It's incredibly important to heed equity issues and local context.

🔨 Do

Perfect for those times you are supposed to be in the meeting but really don't want to be in the meeting.

If you're looking for different backgrounds for meetings, Unsplash is developing a curated collection. Sometimes a small change in visual environment helps maintain sanity through meeting number seventeen of the day.

🤔 Consider

Hurt people hurt people. That's how pain patterns get passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness.

Yehuda Berg

Berg's observation connects to the issue's title—"stepping on people"—and the misinformation challenge. Those spreading harmful content are often themselves afraid, uncertain, seeking control. Understanding this doesn't excuse the harm but opens paths beyond simply removing posts.

Explaining the pandemic to my past self. Yeap. Awesome.

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