Little Worlds

Welcome back. Take a look around.

This week I worked on the following:

• Little Things Add Up to Big Things – Focus on the little things, the practices that lead to the behaviors and build habits.
• Learning Strategies – My students asked for an overview and synthesis of learning strategies to include in their finals. Here you go… 🙂

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The Smallest Monkey In The World Is Fascinated By Insects

This is a clip from Apple TV’s “Tiny World”.

It features the pygmy marmoset, the smallest monkey in the world, completely fascinated by a leaf insect.

What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers

Faecbook is a cesspool.

The problem isn’t communication, in and of itself. It’s the ability to create an echo chamber. Humanity was not built for this.

Even with the best intentions, these digital texts, tools, and spaces are too powerful and they’re breaking the social connections of users. It’s too much for human psychology to bear, and it’s ruining us. We need to do something about this, fast, but I have no idea what.

Right-Wing Social Media Finalizes Its Divorce From Reality

Fox News acknowledged Trump’s loss. Facebook and Twitter cracked down on election lies. But true believers can get their misinformation elsewhere.

There have always conspiracy theorists out there, and they always find ways to share, circulate, and amplify narratives. The problem with the age of social media is that reporting by actual journalists is showing up in your Facebook feed right alongside nonsense. The mulitple narratives look similar to the average consumer. Many users give these very different things identical levels of credence.

Perhaps this isn’t a question about ‘information literacy’ and ‘critical thinking’ but a need to have information sources that are a bit more bifurcated.

Perhaps an exodus of certain users to different spaces is a good thing?

The Mistake Imperative—Why We Must Get Over Our Fear of Student Error

Students often see mistakes as a source of embarrassment, stress, or even humiliation. The human brain is agnostic, however, and makes good use of the data—mistakes are crucial pieces of information that force a cognitive reckoning, pushing the brain to reconcile contradictory information and build more accurate, durable solutions.

Here are six ways to make this a reality:

• Acknowledge the fear is real
• Work in the zone of proximal development
• Tap into passion and curiosity
• Actively model mistakes
• Encourage “rough draft thinking”
• Grade fewer things

Just remember that your brain is not for thinking.

Helicopter pilot finds ‘strange’ monolith in remote part of Utah

A mysterious monolith has been discovered in a remote part of Utah, after being spotted by state employees counting sheep from a helicopter.

The structure, estimated at between 10ft and 12ft high (about 3 meters), appeared to be planted in the ground. It was made from some sort of metal, its shine in sharp contrast to the enormous red rocks which surrounded it.

A College Student Behind A Massively Popular Paint-Mixing TikTok Page Was Fired From Sherwin-Williams

An Ohio University senior who worked a part-time job at a local Sherwin-Williams store was fired after the company discovered his popular paint-mixing TikTok channel @tonesterpaints, which currently has over 1.2 million followers.

Tony Piloseno said that for months he’d been pointing to his viral account as an example of what Sherwin-Williams could do on social media and by marketing its brand to a younger audience.

But instead it led corporate personnel to investigate his social media account, and they ultimately fired him after determining he was making “these videos during [his] working hours” and with company equipment.

Piloseno received job offers from major paint companies like Benjamin Moore and Behr, but announced in a video released on Nov. 24 he had agreed to a full-time position with the Orlando-based Florida Paints.

Perhaps I’ve got this content construction thing all wrong. 🙂

Make Turkey Bone Broth

I love cooking, so this past week was a joy for me. Everything turned out great.

This week I also took time at the end to create some turkey stock using the instant pot.

I froze the stock using ice cubes trays and bagged them up to last me for some time.

A small world where people know each other, and still so deep, able to get lost.

Anthony Liccione

I’ve really enjoyed watching Nate create and share illustrated quotes for friends and followers on Twitter.

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