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DL 261

Silence No Longer an Option

Published: September 26, 2020 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 261. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Hi all, welcome back to Digitally Literate and issue 261.

We're making changes here at DL. First off, I reopened the blog feed for the site. That means that you can just scroll down from the homepage and see all of the issues.

Second, I'm building up an open, online course as part of DL. I'll have more info coming soon, but here's a sneak peek of the first wave of learning events. This is for the educator in Pre-K up through higher ed that wants to be digitally literate in terms of teaching, learning, and assessment.

This week I worked on the following:

📺 Watch

Dena Simmons discusses how we might create a classroom that makes all students feel proud of who they are. "Every child deserves an education that guarantees the safety to learn in the comfort of one's own skin," she says.

For more guidance on imposter syndrome, check out this post from TED-Ed.

📚 Read

QAnon and the Attention Economy

For those of you that do not spend their time deep in the online wormhole of conspiracy and misinformation threads, you may not know about QAnon. QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump.

Whitney Phillips on how we need to talk about how a person's existing worldview feeds into and is fed by recommendation algorithms. This is how the attention economy has become possible, profitable, and untouchable.

QAnon seems to be rebranding as they get more attention.

Clint Smith on how our country is made better, not worse, by young people reckoning with the full legacy of the institution.

Such reckoning better prepares them to make sense of how our country has come to be, and how to build systems and institutions predicated on justice rather than oppression. Nothing is more patriotic than that.

Whitney Phillips on how cancel culture can go wrong. But that doesn't mean the objections of far-right trolls and social justice activists should be mistaken for having equal worth.

If you truly want to do something about cancel culture, take the radical step of doing what you do for everyone else. See them.

In February 2020, leading researchers, game developers, educators, policymakers, youth experts, and others convened for an exploration of the forces shaping online game communities and the impact of antisocial interactions on players ages 8-13.

This report from the Connected Learning Alliance synthesizes recommendations focused on cultivating empathetic, compassionate, and civically engaged youth in gaming spaces.

Check out the new English Language Arts Minecraft Pack created in partnership with the National Writing Project. These 10 lessons for Minecraft: Education Edition focus on world-building and engage students in game-based learning to learn about the writing process.

🔨 Do

Synchronous and Asynchronous Discussion Strategies

Synchronous Strategies:

Asynchronous Strategies:

🤔 Consider

Silence is no longer an option.

Trent Reznor in Rolling Stone

Reznor's words frame an issue about speaking up—about conspiracy theories, about slavery's legacy, about cancel culture. The attention economy profits from our silence about how algorithms radicalize. Educators can't stay quiet while platforms reshape reality.

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