Welcome back all! I hope you and those around you are well.
This week I also posted the following:
- Soundtrack Of Your Life – Learning Event #9 of the WalkMyWorld Project 2021. Music, expression, & identity can come in different forms, languages, and styles.
- What classroom lessons will educators take beyond the pandemic? – I was interviewed by the Charleston City Paper on the lessons educators will take beyond the pandemic.
- The “How” of Teaching Will Forever Change…We Now Need to Change the “Why” – All of my notes didn’t make it into the interview linked above. Here are my full notes and responses that were given during the interview.
- Tidying Up My Digital Practices – As I complete the #100DaysToOffload challenge, I realize my online spaces have gotten a bit messy.
- Privacy Or Power? – As technology changes most aspects of our society, we are presented with opportunities to innovate and transform our lives. The challenge is that these new power brokers want you to believe that these innovations are inevitable.
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Jack Harlow, Pete Davidson, & Chris Redd perform a rap explaining NFTs
This is probably one of the best, although satirical explainers for NFTs.
NFT stands for Non Fungible Token. NFTs are digital assets. Publicly verifiable intellectual property authenticated on a blockchain.
Fungible means something is able to be exchanged or substituted and will hold the same value. It’s interchangeable like the dollar, gold, casino chips, bitcoin, ethereum or frequent flyer loyalty points.
If you want a more serious explainer on NFTs, this video is excellent.
What Is Amazon Doing to Our Country?
Rather than a story of innovation that makes Amazon’s rise to power inevitable, this may be a story of one of “parasitic opportunism, filling the spaces left by the decline of American manufacturing and taking advantage of industrial consolidation.”
As many parts of our society are hurting, Amazon is in the headlines amid a high-stakes union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama.
This has brought about the great lengths Amazon delivery drivers have gone through to pee.
This resulted in a Twitter war between Amazon CEO and critics of the corporation. To address these challenges, Amazon seems to have amassed an army of “ambassadors” that defend the corporations online.
The Little-Known Data Broker Industry Is Spending Big Bucks Lobbying Congress
Data brokers are companies that collect information from public records, online activity, and purchase history and re-sell it to other companies for marketing purposes. The more companies know about consumers, the more targeted (and successful) they can make their advertisements, so data brokers try to collect as much information as they can.
Data brokers have made fortunes from collecting and sharing millions of people’s personal information and tend to fly under the radar. They might not be as familiar to most individuals, but they’re making themselves known on Capitol Hill.
Data brokers are spending millions of dollars in lobbying spending in 2020 rivaled that of some Big Tech firms.
When the Mob Comes
Lyz Lenz with an important interview with author Talia Lavin about online harassment and what you can do about it.
The reality is what gets you on the radar of the mob is nothing, a tweet, a joke, a comment, just existing as a woman, a person of color, a woman of color. Doing your job and doing it well. Sometimes all it takes is being successful.
How Polarization Ate Our Brains
zeynep tufekci with part one of the misinformation trifecta. The trifecta is polarization (eating our brains), bad science (causing terrible policies) and puritanism and moralizing (masquerading as public health).
A deep dive into how and why misinformation, bad science and policy and terrible attitudes are killing people.
As Pandemic Upends Teaching, Fewer Students Want to Pursue It
Few professions have been more upended by the pandemic than teaching, as school districts have vacillated between in-person, remote and hybrid models of learning, leaving teachers concerned for their health and scrambling to do their jobs effectively.
For students considering a profession in turmoil, the disruptions have seeded doubts, which can be seen in declining enrollment numbers.
Black teachers are also leaving the profession at staggering rates. A new study found that compared with other factors, like salary, the level of support provided by school leadership, or a lack of resources, Black teachers’ experiences of racism played a major role in why they wanted to leave the profession.
How to Build a Very Slow Movie Player
An ambient home cinema that uses an e-paper display and Raspberry PI to show films at 24 frames per hour, rather than 24 frames per second.
As we move into our new home, I’m definitely building this with my kids.
Truth is powerful and it prevails.
Sojourner Truth
NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This. They were invented to protect artists. But tech-world opportunism has struck again.
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