Select a result to preview

TLDR 157

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 157

Published: 2018-07-07 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 157. Literacy rickrolled.

This week I posted the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Gibi's 8-month rickroll

There's a lot happening in this clip, and it all connects to different aspects of Internet culture.

First, Rickrolling is a prank and Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up." Basically it is a trick in which you think a hyperlink is going to bring you one place, and instead you go to the music video.

Second, ASMR stands for Autonomous sensory meridian response. This is a low-grade euphoria characterized by spine tingling sensation on the skin.

Gibi is a YouTube star that has channels for gaming as well as her ASMR content. You can check out a video of Gibi explaining ASMR here.

In the video I shared above, Gibi embedded clips in her videos over 8 months that were ultimately remixed into a rickroll of her fans. The long game—planting pieces across dozens of videos that only make sense when assembled together—represents sophisticated form of participatory media where the creator builds narrative across time and the audience becomes part of the joke through their sustained attention.

See, it's easy to understand.

📚 Read

This latest report from the Pew Research Center shares insight from experts about the social, political, and economic fallout from the spread of digital activities in our lives. You can read more about the general positives and negatives as identified by the experts.

Check out my quote from the report. I also recommend taking a minute to review some of the annotations from the report.

The expert perspectives reveal both optimism about connectivity, access, and democratization alongside concerns about manipulation, surveillance, and inequity. This balanced view resists both techno-utopianism and techno-pessimism, recognizing that digital life creates genuine benefits and genuine harms—often simultaneously and for the same people.

This is one of those things that I swear is happening. I'll mention something in a discussion, and then soon after I'll see an ad or news story pop up in my Google news reader.

It turns out that many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fueled the paranoia with an article that declared "Your phone is listening and it's not paranoia."

Some computer science academics at Northeastern University ran an experiment testing over 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to see if they're collecting information and sending it back somewhere else.

They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but they didn't find a single instance of it happening.

Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone's screen and sending that information out to third parties.

So the paranoia was justified, just misdirected. We were worried about listening when we should have been worried about watching. Screen recordings capture everything—passwords, messages, browsing history, anything visible on screen. This might actually be worse than audio surveillance since screens contain denser information about our behaviors, interests, and private communications.

Simple question: Do students at poorly performing schools have a constitutional right to a better education?

This week, a Federal District Court judge in Michigan decided that they did not when he dismissed a class-action lawsuit filed by students at troubled schools in Detroit.

The suit, filed in September 2016, argued that students at some of the city's most underperforming schools—serving mostly racial minorities—had been denied "access to literacy" because of underfunding, mismanagement and discrimination.

The complaint described schools that were overcrowded with students but lacking in teachers; courses without basic resources like books and pencils; and classrooms that were bitingly cold in the winter, stiflingly hot in the summer and infested with rats and insects.

The ruling raises fundamental questions about what we owe children in educational system. If there's no constitutional right to literacy—to the basic skill required for full participation in democratic society—then what protection do students in failing schools have? The decision suggests that education quality is matter of political will rather than legal obligation, leaving most vulnerable students dependent on advocacy and luck rather than enforceable rights.

Martin Weller turned his 25 years of ed tech blog series into a "20 years of ed tech" article for Educause. This is a thoughtful overview of where we've been over the last couple of decades.

His conclusion captures the paradox:

"When we look back twenty years, the picture is mixed. Clearly, a rapid and fundamental shift in higher education practice has taken place, driven by technology adoption. Yet at the same time, nothing much has changed, and many edtech developments have failed to have significant impact. Perhaps the overall conclusion, then, is that edtech is not a game for the impatient."

This both/and framing is important. Technology has transformed how students access information, submit assignments, communicate with instructors, and collaborate with peers. Course management systems, online videos, digital libraries—all now routine parts of higher education that barely existed twenty years ago.

Yet core pedagogical practices often remain unchanged. Lectures still dominate. Assessment still focuses on exams and papers. Faculty still work in disciplinary silos. The fundamental structure of higher education—semesters, credits, degrees—persists largely untouched.

The impatience Weller mentions refers to recurring cycles of hype around each new technology promising to revolutionize education, followed by disappointment when revolution doesn't materialize. Maybe the lesson is that genuine change happens slowly, unevenly, and often in ways different from what enthusiasts predicted.

One of my favorite learning experiences to level up my skills in digital spaces was the Connected Learning MOOC.

This research from Steph West-Puckett, Anna Smith, Christina Cantrill, and Mia Zamora shares insight on the experience, and fallacies of open learning design. This is an important review of what "open" means in current educational contexts.

The authors examine gaps between rhetoric of openness and reality of participation. "Open" sounds democratic and inclusive, but actual participation often requires significant cultural capital, technical skills, time, and access that aren't evenly distributed. The fallacies emerge when we assume that removing formal barriers (open enrollment, free materials, public platforms) automatically creates equitable participation.

CLMOOC succeeded not because it was simply "open" but because organizers actively worked to build infrastructure supporting diverse participation—creating multiple entry points, modeling practices, fostering community, and recognizing that openness requires ongoing work rather than one-time design decisions.

The lesson applies beyond MOOCs to any "open" initiative: open source software, Wikipedia, open educational resources, open data. Openness is necessary but not sufficient for genuine participation and equity.

🔨 Do

If you've been looking for a way to have students start using Wikipedia more, and employing digital literacies in authentic contexts, this is for you.

Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, plans to work with students around the U.S. to create pages and info boxes for the local newspapers lacking them.

This is a powerful opportunity to work with your students to actively create and curate on Wikipedia. Students learn:

The project connects digital literacy skills with civics education and community engagement. Students aren't just consuming information but building infrastructure that serves public good while developing critical understanding of how knowledge gets created and organized online.

🤔 Consider

"If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive." — Brené Brown

Brown's insight about shame, story, and empathy connects to this issue's exploration of literacy and access in multiple ways. The Detroit ruling suggests some students' stories—of schools without books, teachers, or basic resources—don't legally matter, that their educational experiences aren't violations requiring remedy but unfortunate circumstances to endure. When courts refuse to see denial of literacy as constitutional violation, they're saying these stories don't compel action. But shame can't survive empathy, and injustice can't survive when stories are told and heard. The Wikipedia newspapers project creates space for local stories to be preserved and shared. The CLMOOC research examines how "open" spaces can welcome or exclude stories depending on whose participation is centered. The phone surveillance research reveals we've been telling wrong story about privacy violations—focused on listening when we should worry about watching. Even Gibi's rickroll is about storytelling—planting narrative fragments across time that only make sense when audience assembles them. Digital literacy, at its heart, is about power to tell stories and be heard, to share experiences and have them validated, to resist shame through connection and empathy.

Previous: TLDR 156 • Next: TLDR 158 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

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