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DL 257

Brave or Savage?

Published: August 1, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 257. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome to issue 257 of Digitally Literate. Each week in this newsletter, I synthesize the news of the week in education, technology, and literacy.

#Aug-Ghosted I'm taking August off from this newsletter and social media. I have a feeling the upcoming month is going to be really hard as I prepare for my kids to enter the school year, my academic year to begin/continue, and finalize my tenure materials. If you've been paying attention to this newsletter over the years, you recognize the fact that we need to find balance in these digital spaces—and understand that social media may not be good for us. In that light, I need to unplug as I prepare for battle. I hope you'll understand.

📺 Watch

To help us prepare for what is next—let us know what is your mantra or guiding principle for the upcoming year?

For me—I need to be Brave.

📚 Read

When I first started researching critical evaluation of online information over a decade ago, I didn't think I'd have to unpack stories like this—but here we go.

We have a portion of our populace that is welcoming to anyone as long as they believe in at least one of the many tendrils that branch out from the theory's heart—that the world is extremely screwed because of bogeymen behind the scenes, and only those smart enough to see through the veil can fight them. We have a lot to learn about how to fight this war.

On Wednesday, four big tech CEOs—Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Sundar Pichai and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg—testified in Congress in a hearing held by the Antitrust Subcommittee. The hearing is one result of a yearlong investigation into whether these four companies regulate more of the U.S. economy than our public officials do.

These four corporations command bridges over which our news, entertainment, goods and services now flow, serving as the digital infrastructure of swaths of the American economy. These dominant platforms, whose market capitalization surpasses the gross domestic product of many large nations, function as the quasi-governmental gatekeepers of America's commerce and communications.

Kids and teachers will bring the virus to school, and nobody will know it until somebody gets sick enough to go get a test, and waits for their results, and the test turns up positive and somebody finally notifies the school.

What Will Schools Do When a Teacher Gets COVID-19? Cases are inevitable. Schools need to plan now.

Parenting has never been easy. But the widespread adoption of smartphones and the rise of social media has introduced a new wrinkle to the challenges of parenthood. Two-thirds of parents in the U.S. say parenting is harder today than it was 20 years ago, with many citing technologies—like social media or smartphones—as a reason according to a Pew Research Center survey.

My focus for my digital spaces as I take time off in August.

We are all constantly bombarded with information, a lot of it is really good information too, but the challenge is absorbing it and applying it to the context of our lives and careers.

🔨 Do

Some great guidance on running better virtual meetings:

🤔 Consider

Be brave enough to be bad at something new.

Michael Brooks

Brooks's words capture the tension of this moment—choosing between brave and savage, between staying engaged and protecting yourself. Taking time away from social media isn't retreat; it's preparation. Sometimes being brave means knowing when to step back.

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