Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #389. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
Thank you to all of the folks that reach out and say hey. Special thanks to Donna Alvermann, the real🐐(greatest of all time) for a message of support this past week.
Stay tuned for more insights and discussions! #Future-of-work #Education #Tech
💥 Distributed Collaboration
The U.S. economy is experiencing a potential surge in productivity, similar to the one seen thirty years ago, with improved productivity data attributed to new technologies like artificial intelligence and hybrid work setups. The comparison with the 1990s highlights the potential impact of current innovations on productivity, such as remote work and artificial intelligence. Invest here
The world’s collective brains have gotten bigger and faster. Disrupting Science explores the impact of remote collaboration on scientific research teams, highlighting a shift towards geographically-distributed teams despite the traditional emphasis on face-to-face interactions.
🏭 Building Talent Pools
Millions of gig workers, including those in various industries, may soon be classified as employees rather than independent contractors under a new rule by the Labor Department. This rule expands federal labor laws to ensure benefits like minimum wage, overtime pay, and insurance for these workers. This is super important as a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 16 percent of Americans had earned income at some point from an online gig platform, such as ride-hailing apps or services that deliver food or groceries.
A new workforce of language experts, creative writers, and nuclear physicists are turning to data labor—and potentially making their future jobs obsolete in the process. This shift towards expert data labor is driven by the need to improve AI accuracy and avoid copyright issues associated with scraping data from the internet. Dive deeper.
⚒️ Frictionless Interactions
Workers generally find that exceeding two hours of meetings per day hampers their ability to focus on meaningful tasks. Companies like Slack and Shopify are implementing strategies to reduce unnecessary meetings and improve focus, with some adopting tools to summarize meetings and outline next steps for employees. Read later
Zoom became a dominant force in video conferencing during the pandemic due to its ease of use, quickly becoming the default choice for many users. However, concerns have been raised about a decline in the platform’s “frictionless” experience, with reports of authentication issues and updates causing user frustration. Buried deep in the post is some questions about dark patterns in the app. A dark pattern is a design feature that is built into the app to force the user into a decision that they normally wouldn’t make…like not being able to unsubscribe from a cost.
📝 Taking Notes
Eminem’s boxes of notes provide a glimpse into the passion and obsession that led him to become one of the greatest rappers of all time. He describes himself as having a “rhyming disease” and writes down his rhymes on various surfaces, including loose leaf, legal pads, and hotel notepads. He sees rap as a puzzle, with all the rhymes he’s collected as the pieces that need to fit together. Thanks to Laura Hilliger for pointing this out.
The Notecard System is a method for capturing and organizing information from various sources like books, articles, podcasts, and videos. It involves creating note cards with key ideas and details, ensuring each can stand alone as a complete thought or concept. Build your own here
🛟 Balanced Life
Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.
Jessye Norman
Thank you for being a part of Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Reach out at hello@digitallyliterate.net or connect on social media.
Cover photo credits.