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DL 259

Beyond Fear, Destiny Awaits

Published: September 12, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 259. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back to Digitally Literate and issue 259.

If you haven't already, please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show up in your inbox. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net. Thank you to all of my friends that reached out via email and the socials to express thanks for coming back…and looking forward to see what changes might be afoot. You are appreciated. ❤️

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

I need you to care that our planet is on fire.

Blazes like the ones currently overpowering the West Coast have become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change. Fire seasons have grown longer, and larger areas of land are going up in flames.

📚 Read

Hate Social Media? You'll Love This Documentary

The Social Dilemma — a new Netflix documentary out this weekend — makes the case that social media is humanity's greatest existential threat.

Social media itself is not the existential threat. Rather, it's the way that social media surfaces and amplifies the worst of humanity.

Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American'

I'm hesitant to share this news as it seems like another example of the President and his administration shouting about something that will never materialize. I do think it is troubling as it creates oxygen for those groups that agree with these narratives.

Trump orders crackdown on federal antiracism training, calling it 'anti-American.'

This pushes back on any training materials "that teaches, trains or suggests the following: (1) virtually all White people contribute to racism or benefit from racism (2) critical race theory (3) white privilege (4) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country (5) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil (6) Anti-American propaganda."

The Department of Education indicated that they plan to scrutinize a wide range of employee activities - including internal book clubs - in search of "Anti-American propaganda" and discussions about "white privilege" as it carries out the White House's demand that federal agencies halt certain types of race-related training.

It's hard to know exactly why people believe what they believe.

When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: "Go online," one woman said. "Dig deep," added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn't reported, they said, and what was reported wasn't true.

Matthew Yglesias trying to identify a possible silver lining to the fact that the global pandemic has pushed our learning environments to virtual spaces.

This desire to "reinvent higher education" is a common narrative that is trotted out every couple of years. I prefer this piece from 2010. I remember being excited about iTunes U when I started up my first program in higher ed.

I do wonder about the lessons we should learn about educational technologies as we head through these times. More to come.

If you'd like to chart out that future, check out the manifesto for teaching online.

Sadly, Zoom is now critical infrastructure. As part of this, we're seeing youth tuning in to courses remotely using a variety of tools.

How are you ensuring that your students and children are not endlessly staring at screens all day?

🔨 Do

This episode of The Art of Manliness podcast focuses on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

…if people don't know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values.

Thanks to Doug Belshaw for the tip.

🤔 Consider

In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.

Buddha

Buddha's observation cuts through the week's chaos—fires labeled "climate hoax," social media blamed instead of its architects, antiracism reframed as propaganda. These distinctions exist because we create them. Beyond the fear we manufacture, destiny awaits.

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