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DL 250

Do The Work

Published: June 13, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 250. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 250 of Digitally Literate. Each week in this newsletter, I synthesize the news of the week in education, technology, and literacy.

Do The Work - To ensure that we don't fall back to sleep in a state of complacency, we need to prepare for when the protests, social media buzz, and hashtags fade. In short, we need to do the work.

To address these challenges, we are creating a learning community to support individuals as they become allies, and then eventually accomplices for anti-racist work.

Please review and identify the level you believe best suits your needs. We will create safe, brave spaces to support your learning and growth. We need facilitators…so please consider helping out with this work.

📺 Watch

Emmanuel Acho sits down to have an "uncomfortable conversation" with white America, in order to educate and inform on racism, systemic racism, social injustice, rioting, and the hurt African Americans are feeling today.

The series models what it looks like to ask questions from a place of genuine desire to understand rather than debate.

📚 Read

Betsy Morais and Alexandria Neason with a reset of the events that have occurred over the first six months of 2020.

As someone who regularly builds digital content, I really appreciate the style and design of this post. The photojournalism and writing pair nicely. You'll also notice that the background for the page slowly fades to black as you scroll down. Powerful design choices that reinforce the content.

You'll sometimes see people suggest that social media, specifically Twitter, is not "real life."

In this post, Charlie Warzel asks whether social media is a reflection of real life.

I reached out to Doug Belshaw to try and understand this and he suggested reading this to make sense of the society of the spectacle—the idea that social relations are mediated by images.

Misinformation about police brutality protests is being spread by the same sources as COVID-19 denial. In a normal world, instead of worrying about Antifa bus panics, we'd be more concerned about some of the memes come to life in the boogaloo movement.

The troubling results suggest what might come next.

We're in the middle of a widespread misinformation/disinformation war. We know that critical evaluation of online information and media literacy has been a problem for decades. We now have forces that are leaning in on this weakness to put us in different worlds.

For more on this, read this report on source hacking.

Some entry points on applying VPSA (Value, Problem, Solution, Action) to talk about race, racism, and racial justice:

  1. Lead with Shared Values: Justice, Opportunity, Community, Equity
  2. Use Values as a Bridge, Not a Bypass
  3. Know the Counter Narratives
  4. Talk About the Systemic Obstacles to Equal Opportunity and Equal Justice
  5. Be Rigorously Solution-Oriented and Forward-Looking
  6. Consider Audience and Goals
  7. Be Explicit about the Different Causes of Racial vs. Socioeconomic Disparities
  8. Describe How Racial Bias and Discrimination Hold Us All Back

Caitlin Tucker with guidance on keeping it simple as you design online video discussions:

  1. Provide students with an agenda and a list of discussion questions ahead of time
  2. Communicate your expectations for participation and behavior online
  3. Ask students to generate their own discussion questions
  4. Start every virtual conferencing session with an icebreaker question or a quick check-in
  5. Use the chat window strategically
  6. Host shorter sessions with fewer students
  7. Ask students to assess their participation online

🔨 Do

Some signs of performative allyship:

Activism can't begin and end with a hashtag. Here's what you can do instead:

🤔 Consider

Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.

Maya Angelou

Angelou's observation frames the challenge of this moment. The hate driving police violence, the hate in counter-protesters, the hate in misinformation campaigns—none of it solves anything. Doing the work means building something rather than simply opposing. The learning community we're creating aims to channel energy into construction, not just critique.

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