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DL 254

Setback for Civil Rights

Published: July 11, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 254. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 254 of Digitally Literate. Each week in this newsletter, I synthesize the news of the week in education, technology, and literacy.

This week I was honored (humbled) to be one of the recipients of the Divergent Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies from the Initiative for 21st Century Literacies Research.

This is for recent research on how digital activists and average citizens take advantage of new technologies to provide an alternative way of organizing in order to push back against harmful societal narratives.

Reach out and say hello at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

📺 Watch

As the perfect representative of science, reason, and lyrical flow, Creepio is here to settle some confusion about the Coronavirus using rhythmically applied phrasing (RAP).

You are welcome.

📚 Read

Dozens of teachers, parents and district leaders around the country are embroiled in how to open up schools in a little over a month.

States, districts and the federal government are pushing and pulling in different directions. Scientists are updating their advice to reflect emerging research and the changing course of the pandemic. Parents and educators are finding it hard to make decisions in the confusion.

Ultimately, students will go back to school, but not back to normal.

This primer from Good Housekeeping shares the four risks to consider as you prepare for back-to-school: school and classroom size, population density, local rates of COVID-19 transmission, and age of students.

On a Thursday afternoon in January, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams was in his office at an automotive supply company when he got a call from the Detroit Police Department telling him to come to the station to be arrested. His case combines flawed technology with poor police work, illustrating how facial recognition can go awry.

Last year, a 25-year-old Detroit man was wrongly accused of a felony for supposedly reaching into a teacher's vehicle, grabbing a cellphone and throwing it.

What's happening in Detroit should be a wakeup call for the nation. We can't stop police violence without ending police surveillance.

Rooted in discredited pseudoscience and racist eugenics theories that claim to use facial structure and head shape to assess mental capacity and character, automated facial-recognition software uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other forms of modern computing to capture the details of people's faces and compare that information to existing photo databases.

An independent audit faulted the social network for allowing hate speech and disinformation to thrive—potentially posing a threat to the November elections.

Civil rights groups say company did not commit to concrete plan to address hate speech and misinformation. Facebook thinks that just showing up is part of the solution.

Can You Teach a 'Transformative' Humanities Course Online?

Lee Skallerup Bessette discussing a need to approach online teaching from a willingness to recognize its potential.

Keep in mind, too, that most online courses are not transformative experiences. But neither are most courses taught in face-to-face classrooms. On any campus, you can find in-person classes that are good, bad, or transformative. To expect every online course to be either transformative or not worth your attention is an unrealistic standard that academe doesn't impose on traditional classes.

Open practices in research can challenge assumptions about how to create and share new knowledge. This handbook draws on insights from experienced open researchers to build understanding of research in the open.

Come for the research guidance. Stay for the image collection from Bryan Mathers.

🔨 Do

The kids and I loved this video on Why Americans Eat Dessert for Breakfast. We then followed it up with this video on How I Stopped Hating Breakfast.

One of the breakfast meals that Johnny Harris suggests is hummus. This weekend we're going to make up a fresh batch and enjoy it.

What do you eat for breakfast?

🤔 Consider

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Audre Lorde

Lorde's insight frames this week's collision of facial recognition, civil rights audits, and platform accountability. Technologies built on racist foundations cannot deliver racial justice. Systems designed to surveil and control cannot be reformed into tools of liberation. Genuine change requires building new systems, not repurposing oppressive ones.

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