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DL 280

Borders We Will Never Cross

Published: February 27, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 280. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back friends! This was a busy week.

This week I also posted the following:

📺 Watch

Is there a border we will never cross? Are there places we will never be able to reach, no matter what?

It turns out there are. Far, far more than you might have thought.

A humbling reminder that even with all our technological progress, some boundaries remain absolute.

📚 Read

Kevin Roose on Clubhouse, the invitation-only social audio app that's been super hot over the last couple of months.

Every successful social network has a life cycle that goes something like:

Wow, this app sure is addictive! Look at all the funny and exciting ways people are using it! Oh, look, I can get my news and political commentary here, too! This is going to empower dissidents, promote free speech and topple authoritarian regimes! Hmm, why are trolls and racists getting millions of followers? And where did all these conspiracy theories come from? This platform should really hire some moderators and fix its algorithms. Wow, this place is a cesspool, I'm deleting my account.

We've seen this pattern before. We'll see it again.

The Teacher Educator Technology Competencies (TETCs) were created to help teacher educators support teacher candidates as they prepare to teach with technology.

Daniel G. Krutka, Marie K. Heath, and K. Bret Staudt Willet offer suggestions for how teacher educators might inquire into technoethical conundrums through ethical, democratic, legal, economic, technological, and pedagogical explorations of technologies.

A comprehensive framework for thinking critically about the tools we introduce to classrooms.

Lateral Reading: College Students Learn to Critically Evaluate Internet Sources

You might remember the research from Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) from 2016 suggesting students have trouble judging online credibility.

Some research shows students in face-to-face settings can improve at judging credibility. But what about asynchronous remote instruction?

The group describes lateral reading—the act of leaving an unknown website to consult other sources to evaluate the original site. This skill can be taught effectively even online.

In 1971, computer scientist Harold Stone defined an algorithm as "a set of rules that precisely define a sequence of operations."

Lawmakers in the US are defining an algorithm as "automated decisionmaking system"—"a computational process, including one derived from machine learning, statistics, or other data processing or artificial intelligence techniques, that makes a decision or facilitates human decision making."

This matters because algorithms increasingly impact our lives. Instead of using overly broad terms, we should focus on impact, not input. What matters is the potential for harm, regardless of whether we're discussing an algebraic formula or a deep neural network.

Before Facebook and Twitter, ringtones were a way to advertise your sense of humor and great taste.

With 4G networks and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, people didn't have to call to have real-time conversations. The mobile phone was growing up fast, and the custom ringtone turned out to be an embarrassing teenage phase.

Social media now offers far more possibilities for curating our public image than snippets of symphonies or tacky jingles ever did. For the computer in our pocket, the bell rarely tolls.

Last week a song came on and it brought me back to a ringtone I downloaded and edited myself. I tried explaining it to the kids...but... :(

🔨 Do

I've been trying to be more accessible and approachable for almost a decade through my main website and this newsletter.

My next frontier is to be more visually literate. My inspiration is Bryan Mathers and Visual Thinkery.

Mathers offers great inspiration on graphic recording of ideas—making thinking visible through simple, evocative illustrations.

🤔 Consider

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston S. Churchill

Churchill's resilience connects to this issue's threads—social networks that fail to learn from predecessors, the ongoing work to teach critical evaluation, and the borders we may never cross. Enthusiasm in the face of limitation isn't naivete; it's how progress happens.

Bonus: Missed out on buying some NFT art this week. Now I'll look to purchase The Eyemonger, A Children's Book About Privacy.

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