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DL 243

It's Not About You

Published: April 25, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 243. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 243 of Digitally Literate.

I helped post the following this week:

📺 Watch

I love Flogging Molly, and this song is one of my absolute favorites. It was the last song played at my wedding, and I try to have it played at most weddings I attend. Sadly…the DJ usually has never heard of the group…or song.

This acoustic version from a fireside in their tenement square is wonderful. Music that acknowledges mortality while celebrating life feels especially appropriate right now.

📚 Read

There's a good number of people that believe that COVID-19 is a hoax. It can be hard to talk to them, especially when you need to be responsible for their health…or yours. Perhaps this ultimately is a disorder.

Last week I shared a couple stories about the need for social media to flatten these curves of misinformation. After Facebook indicated that they would begin to tamp down instances of pseudoscience, researchers tested this theory by using the social network to target ads to people interested in "pseudoscience." The results, shall we say, are not surprising.

Perhaps there is a need for receptiveness cues in our conversations as we talk to others.

Three-quarters of U.S. states have now officially closed their schools for the rest of the academic year. While remote learning continues, there are big questions about what happens next fall.

Here are nine possible options:

  1. Stepped-up health and hygiene measures
  2. Class sizes of 12 or fewer
  3. Staggered schedules
  4. Younger kids first?
  5. New calendars
  6. Different attendance policies
  7. No assemblies, sports games, or parent-teacher conferences
  8. Remote learning continues
  9. Social, emotional, and practical help for kids

Kara Swisher had a piece this week that discussed how the tech industry can play a pivotal role in shaping our post-pandemic world and solving some of our societal challenges.

This policy report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change outlines how the COVID-19 pandemic has sent the world into crisis mode. However, amongst the hardship and difficulty there is an opportunity to modernize, to address the power of technologies for social good.

Adam Garfinkle with an interesting long read about deep literacy, and the impacts on our lives. This piece examines the possible erosion, or transformation of literacy as we live and learn in an age of screentime.

Deep literacy has wondrous effects, nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy. It is also generative of successive new insight, as the brain's circuitry for reading recursively builds itself forward. It is and does all these things in part because it touches off a "revolution in the brain," meaning that it has distinctive and describable neurophysiological consequences.

This wonderful graphic by Bryan Mathers illustrates a discussion tool for considering the health of a project. Read more about the retrospective starfish model here.

The model asks teams to consider: What should we keep doing? What should we do more of? What should we do less of? What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? Simple questions that become powerful when asked together.

🔨 Do

A couple tips to keep a strong mindset in trying times:

🤔 Consider

Success is not about your resources. It's about how resourceful you are with what you have.

Tony Robbins

Robbins' observation connects to this issue's exploration of school reopening configurations and digital policy. The resources vary wildly—rural communities lack broadband, some schools lack space for distancing. But resourcefulness in working with constraints may matter more than the constraints themselves.

There's a lot of confusion about the use of masks while out in public. There's also a certain amount of stubborn bravado in not wearing masks while out in public.

The masks are not about you. It is a sign that you're thoughtful about others. "My mask protects you; your masks protect me."

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