Welcome back all. Digitally Literate, issue #311.
This week I helped post the following:
- Towards a Taxonomy of Transdisciplinarity – This paper is being presented at the upcoming LRA 2021 Conference. Our STEAM research team had pre-service teachers develop curriculum guided by transdisciplinary thinking as they created connections between math and music for a summer art camp.
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All About Spoons
You’d be forgiven for wondering, as an adult, why Mister Rogers carries a spoon. As detailed in a new book, (When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids), the journey — from a simple Point A (a spoon) to a deeply human Point B — embodies the magic of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
The effect is that for children, spoons become more than passing intrigues. They become musical instruments, a spark for artistic expression, and even possible career paths. Most importantly, they become points of connection between kids and caring adults. As science has shown, the more of these connections kids have, the better they tend to do.
On Podcasts and Radio, Misleading Covid-19 Talk Goes Unchecked
False statements about vaccines have spread on the “Wild West” of media, even as some hosts die of virus complications.
Evan Greer points out: sadly, most of the “solutions” to this problem are way worse than the problem itself. do people really want deeply flawed AI to listen to every podcast and watch every video uploaded to the Internet, making determinations about what we shouldn’t see/hear?
Robots vs. Fatbergs: High-Tech Approaches to America’s Sewer Problem
Cash-strapped U.S. cities are turning to drones, artificial intelligence, and other innovations to help inspect and fix the country’s aging underground arteries of waste.
The arsenal includes flying drones, crawling robots, and remote-controlled swimming machines. They are armed with cameras, sonar, lasers, and other sensors, and in some cases with tools to remove obstructions, using water-jet cutters capable of slicing through concrete, tree roots, and the giant agglomerations of grease and personal-hygiene products known as fatbergs. Some can also fix leaking pipes using plastics that cure via ultraviolet light.
This sounds like the plot of the new Matrix movie.
An Interconnected Framework for Assessment of Digital Multimodal Composition
Ewa McGrail, Kristen Hawley Turner, Amy Piotrowski, Kathryn Caprino, Lauren Zucker, and Mary Ellen Greenwood present a framework for creating and assessing digital multimodal compositions.
They define the domains that support the development of specific criteria for assessment of digital multimodal writing: (1) audience, (2) mode and meaning, and (3) originality. This is important as we consider the differences and affordances of having students create a written essay, as opposed to a video, as opposed to a video game.
Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading
I’ve been thinking a bit about assessment practices in my classes. This recent piece in the LA Times shares the work of a high school English teacher Joshua Moreno as he explores the same process.
This trend has been accelerated by the pandemic & school closures that caused troubling increases in Ds and Fs across the U.S. & by calls to examine the role of institutionalized racism in schools in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by an officer.
Lego Customers Lose Millions of Pieces a Year. The Company’s 4-Word Response Is the Best I’ve Ever Seen
The LEGO Group has four words that guide all customer service interactions over the last 15 years.
According to Monika Lütke-Daldrup, the company’s director of customer engagement, “We have something that we call freaky. Freaky stands for FRKE, which is short for:
- fun
- reliable
- knowledgeable
- engaging
Are You Problem Solving or Ruminating?
As human beings, we have the capacity to reflect on our past behaviors. Unfortunately, there are many times in which going over the past becomes quite unproductive. The post above discusses how can we know if we are engaging in adaptive self-reflection or maladaptive rumination?
Rumination is sometimes viewed as a negative form of emotional processing.
The defining aspect of rumination that differentiates it from regular problem-solving is the unproductively negative focus it takes. Rumination may involve going over the details of a situation in one’s head or talking to friends about it.
As a general rule, the following can be indicators that you may have fallen into the trap of rumination:
- Focusing on a problem for more than a few idle minutes
- Feeling worse than you started out feeling
- No movement toward accepting and moving on
- No closer to a viable solution
Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.
Fred Rogers
Starting to pay attention to Low-Code Software Maker WSO2 after they received $90 Million from Goldman Sachs. There are not enough skilled developers and engineers to build things so as technology skills demand grows, so does attention to low-code and no-code solutions.
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