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DL 287

On What We've Lost

Published: April 17, 2021 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue 287. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Welcome back to friends and family.

In 2020 I was selected as one of the winners of the Divergent Award from the Initiative for 21st Century Literacies Research. Because we could not meet for an awards ceremony, honorees submitted video. Here are my responses.

This video was edited into a literacy doczoomentary reflecting on the past twenty years of 21st century literacies and where we go from here.

📺 Watch

It's been exactly one whole year of forest fires, murder hornets, pandemics, isolations, protests, quarantines, elections, vaccines, and riots—and yet here we find ourselves, back at the beginning...

This series of videos from Julie Nolke is funny and terrifying at the same time.

Enjoy Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

📚 Read

Actually, guns DO Kill People.

Research utilizes an online concealed carry forum to critically analyze how firearm proliferation is rationalized in the U.S. The analysis focuses on the Parkland and Philando Castile shootings, and stories of children who find guns and shoot themselves and others.

The "guns don't kill people" argument is flawed because it sidesteps the debate. The issue is not whether guns can spontaneously kill people on their own. The issue involves how incredibly easy a modern weapon makes killing.

From George Floyd to Adam Toledo to Daunte Wright to countless other killings, the world is asking questions about racial injustice and excessive use of force. A patchwork approach to police reform has left the nation at a critical crossroad.

One possible path: restorative justice. In educational contexts, this rests on three pillars:

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with attorney sujatha baliga about whether restorative justice principles are useful after a shooting incident involving police.

For many in education, we're turning the page to summer and fall. As vaccinated adults increase, we begin to imagine a post-COVID world.

In previous posts, I've discussed the need to learn lessons from this global pandemic. Online schools are here to stay—some families have come to prefer stand-alone virtual schools.

Judith Warner suggests we should not refer to this as a "lost year." Also, screen time with friends? It's good for mental health.

Help adolescents process what happened rather than dismissing it. The loss was real, but so was the adaptation.

Despite a string of controversies and the public's relatively negative sentiments about aspects of social media, roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they use any kind of social media site—a share that has remained relatively stable over the past five years.

A majority of Americans use YouTube and Facebook, while use of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok is especially common among adults under 30.

People complain about platforms but don't leave them.

Google has pushed out what it says is Google Earth's "biggest update since 2017" with a new 3D time-lapse feature.

Entering the new "Timelapse" mode lets you fly around the virtual globe with a time slider, showing satellite imagery from the past 37 years. Using the 3D globe, you can watch cities being built, forests being cut down, and glaciers receding.

A powerful tool for understanding environmental change over time.

🔨 Do

The term "gaslighting"—as in psychological manipulation, not the 19th century profession—has been thrown around a lot over the past decade.

Here's how to deal with gaslighting and stand firm in your truth:

🤔 Consider

I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of not trying.

Jay-Z

Jay-Z's distinction between dying and not trying connects to this issue's threads—the loss of a year that wasn't really lost if we learned from it, the work of restorative justice that requires everyone to try, and the timelapse showing what happens when we don't try to protect what matters.

Bonus: Researchers have turned spiderwebs into music—a virtual look into the vibrations spiders sense. Listen here or try the VR version.

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