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DL 284

Growth & Engagement

Published: March 27, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 284. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back friends and family!

This week I also posted the following:

📺 Watch

Johnny Harris on how video games helped him rethink language learning.

Games create immersive environments where language acquisition happens naturally through context and necessity—a lesson for how we might design other learning experiences.

📚 Read

When Medium first came out, I was in love. I had students write on the space. I developed publications and shared my work there. In nine years since the start, things have perpetually gotten worse.

Things came to a head when Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams sent an email announcing that employees charged with doing journalism should feel free to quit—the company would shift away from professional journalism altogether.

The platform has grown to include writing of every kind: viral posts about COVID-19, generic business wisdom, tech blogging, productivity porn, actual porn.

The key lesson: have a space of your own to write. I've been thinking about moving this newsletter to Substack, but lessons from Medium remind me to keep building our own spaces.

It was quite the week for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before Congress about extremism, hoaxes, and misinformation online.

Zuckerberg suggested Facebook has a great system in place and that their future competitors should be eliminated.

Meanwhile, the Tech Transparency Project found that militia groups still remain and are using the space to build movements. And Facebook's bullying policy explicitly allows users to call for the death of public figures.

Anne Helen Petersen on chronic burnout and exploitation.

"Demoralization occurs when teachers cannot reap the moral rewards that they previously were able to access in their work. It happens when teachers are consistently thwarted in their ability to enact the values that brought them to the profession."

This is chronic burnout and deep demoralization as labor is increasingly under-funded, under-valued, and under-resourced.

Telling teachers they're great isn't enough. If you value them, act, vote, and speak in a way that evidences that value. They have held a crumbling system together for so long.

Four causes and their solutions:

  1. Excessive close-up eye contact is intense. Solution: Take Zoom out of full-screen, reduce window size, use external keyboard to increase personal space bubble.

  2. Seeing yourself constantly in real-time is fatiguing. Solution: Use "hide self-view" button after framing yourself properly.

  3. Video chats dramatically reduce mobility. Solution: External keyboard or monitor allows sitting back and doodling.

  4. Cognitive load is much higher in video chats. Solution: Give yourself audio-only breaks. Turn off camera, turn away from screen.

Check out the Zoom Exhaustion Fatigue (ZEF) scale and take the survey.

Thanks to a friend, I've been fascinated with Ravelry—the community site, organizational tool, and yarn & pattern database for knitters and crocheters. Here's the thing: I don't knit. :)

I'm interested in how they developed this community space focused on making. This post discusses the challenges developers faced when they hoped everyone would just behave in the community.

No online space escapes the tensions of the broader world.

🔨 Do

Had enough Zoom meetings? Can't bear another soul-numbing day of sitting on video calls, the only distraction your rapidly aging face pinned in one corner of the screen like a dying bug?

Zoom Escaper is a free web widget that lets you add an array of fake audio effects to your next Zoom call, gifting you with numerous reasons to end the meeting and escape.

(Use responsibly.)

🤔 Consider

Children should be able to live a life of healthy neglect.

Beverly Cleary

Cleary's wisdom about letting children be connects to this issue's threads—the demoralization of teachers who can't enact their values, the platforms that demand constant engagement, and the Zoom fatigue from perpetual visibility. Sometimes the best thing is to step back and let things breathe.

Bonus: Fagradalsfjall, a volcano dormant for 6,000 years, erupted in Iceland—the first eruption on Iceland's Southern Peninsula in 800 years. Watch it live via webcam or fly through via drone.

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