Welcome back. This week I was tenured and promoted…and then bought a house. Oh…and I got the first shot of two of the COVID vaccine. Upgrades!!!
This week I also posted the following:
- Our Magnum Opus – Share a walk in your world. WalkMyWorld Learning Event 8. Our Magnum Opus. The World Is Yours. What will you do with it?
- Writing Myself Into Existence – An update to some changes I’ll make in my blogging focus as a result of nearing the end of the #100daystooffload challenge.
- What Should We Demand of Tech – As we engage online, we leave bits of our personal data strewn across the Internet without a full understanding of what, why, and how this information is being used. If we fully understood what was happening to our data, we would care more and do something about it.
- Toward an Internet Bill of Rights – Given the recent events surrounding rights, freedoms, and literacy on the Internet, I would like to continue to reach out to interested parties to develop an Internet Bill of Rights.
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The Gift
The Gift is the story of an ordinary couple, when he gives her a small sphere pulled out his chest, she can’t separate herself from her new gift… even after they break up.
Classroom Resources and Tips To Address Anti-Asian Discrimination
After Georgia Attacks, Asian-Americans Demand Serious Action on Bias.
Amid the pandemic, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) people continue to experience racism, violence and harassment. Some ways to recognize and speak up against coronavirus racism, and start conversations with even the youngest learners about recognizing and acting to address injustice.
What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum
A curriculum inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is spreading, raising questions about the line between education and indoctrination.
The BLM at School movement, agreeing with the broad slogan implies a particular approach to anti-racist activism. An approach that draws on academic perspectives such as critical race theory and intersectionality; rejects individualism and aspirational color-blindness; and acts in solidarity with projects including decoloniality, anti-capitalism, and queer liberation.
While curricula and teachers will always warrant scrutiny, BLM at School tries to focus on not only the values and beliefs of Black Lives Matter but also the strongest criticisms of the movement’s approach.
The Internet of Landlords Makes Renters of Us All
The Internet of Landlords is based on turning all social interactions and economic transactions into “services” that are mediated by corporate platforms.
The proliferation of platforms fills society with ubiquitous digital intermediaries that spread rentier relations far and wide, at different scales and intensities, while also concentrating control over infrastructure and economic value in a small number of large hands.
Breaking the platform economy’s cycle of extraction and enclosure can redistribute power over data and infrastructure to the public.
Google and the Age of Privacy Theater
Digital privacy is no longer a niche issue, and brands like Google have two choices:
- Change their business model and respect our privacy.
- Appear to do this while continuing to abuse our privacy.
Google is opting for the latter.
Google’s claim “is a classic example of what you might call privacy theater: While marketed as a step forward for consumer privacy, it does very little to change the underlying dynamics of an industry built on surveillance-based behavioral advertising.”
Disinformation goes to Hollywood: four lessons from journalism
Whitney Phillips and Clare Wardle on how lessons learned from the television and movie business that can help build storylines about storylines about radicalization, conspiracy theories and other harms.
These four lessons told by entertainment producers go beyond “just the facts.” They transport audiences into whole other worlds, which is central to narrative persuasion.
- The most obvious place to point the camera often narrows the story. When possible, approach stories about white supremacy and radicalization from the side.
- The more nuance you bring to white supremacist characters, the more risks there are. If you include “bad example” characters make sure that the character is there to reveal more than the self-explanatory claim that “these kinds of people exist.”
- Light doesn’t reliably disinfect. Even if your intention is to prevent radicalization or belief in a particular conspiracy theory, consider how someone might use your story to recruit, justify or merely sand the edges off extremist ideology.
- Tragic personal narratives aren’t automatic public services. Consult a range of experts,to understand how you can entertain audiences without educating them.
A concept from physics called negentropy could help your life run smoother
I mentioned earlier that we bought a house. This means that I have a ton of new projects to complete. To make sense of how to address these challenges, I was thinking about entropy.
Entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system. If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos. Negentropy is how you can can help you fight against entropy and chaos in your daily life.
Here’s five steps to reverse energy loss:
- Find the entropy
- Prioritize the losses
- Come up with a plan
- Try it out and pay attention
- Go beyond fixing and maintenance
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Explore the three major methods of machine learning, which allows computers to write their own rules to problem solve and process data. The three methods are: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning.
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