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TLDR 101

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 101

Published: 2017-06-09 • 📧 Newsletter

Well, we're up over the century mark. Welcome to issue 101 of TLDR.

This week's issue is all about the ties that bind us.

This week I shared:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

This is another great video from the Kurzgesagt - In a nutshell YouTube channel. I love their work, and this video is very timely as it effectively discusses the role of automation in the future of jobs...and what makes it different at this point in time.

This is important as we consider what the future might look like.

📚 Read

This piece in the NY Times by Natasha Singer documents some of the big philanthropic money being spent by Silicon Valley executives.

The piece cautions the fact that these efforts are happening so quickly, there is often little to no scrutiny about how this money is being spent. The main concern is about the democratizing process (or lack thereof) that is occurring behind the scenes with this work.

This piece from Roger Sollenberger in Paste Magazine talks about the money and lack of transparency that is affecting the information that you read online.

We've talked quite a bit over the past couple of months about the challenges that exist as we use the Internet to read, write, and socialize. We need to negotiate misinformation, bots, and paid advertising that is directly trying to misinform. What makes this worse is that these attacks are all custom tailored by the social and personal information corporations like Google have collected about us.

This calls for greater reliance on critical media literacy and emotional intelligence in our educational systems.

This week another series of terror attacks struck the citizens of London. As we often see after terror attacks like this, politicians often use this as an opportunity to indicate a need to weaken or ban encryption.

In this post from Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing you can review a thorough explanation of how and why weakening/banning encryption is a horrible idea.

We've discussed encryption quite a bit in TL;DR over the past couple of months. This is a topic that is definitely hard to understand. But, it is our duty to understand how these digital tools operate if we choose to use them. As indicated by Doctorow, "Aaron Swartz once said, 'It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.'"

This past October, I was sitting in a 6th grade classroom preparing to observe one of my students teach a class. As the class began, the students were watching a quick newscast about the debate for the U.S. Presidential Election the night before. In this debate, some of the dialogue from the politicians made me cringe as I sat in the back of the room. I looked around the room and wondered what effect this dialogue would have on these children.

This post from BuzzFeed shares some insight into recent acts of hate speech, vandalism in U.S. schools following the U.S. Presidential election.

This is a tough topic for me to make sense of. On one hand, I'm very sensitive to the role of language in our classrooms. I also pay attention to the role of culture and protecting all individuals in any learning situation. That being said, I think students in our classrooms need opportunities to learn and make mistakes without missteps, or "stupid things" showing up on the front page of the newspaper.

I'm definitely paying attention. What do you think?

This post by Josh Sokol in Quanta Magazine is the perfect cleanse for your brain after reading too much about politics, technology, or education. This piece from Sokol examines some of the ways in which different organisms may store cognitive information in the physical world.

It's a fascinating read that you should take some time and consume.

🔨 Do

Google launched an educational program designed to teach kids about phishing, Internet harassment, passwords, and other Internet safety issues.

Called "Be Internet Awesome," it includes a classroom curriculum and a video game called Interland. It was developed with help from teachers, YouTube videographers, and internet safety and literacy organizations, and resources are available online for free.

You can learn more from Richard Byrne's post on the topic.

Take some time to play along and learn a ton.

🤔 Consider

"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results." — Herman Melville

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Part of the 📧 Newsletter archive documenting digital literacy and technology.