Select a result to preview

TLDR 16

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 16

Published: 2015-10-09 • 📧 Newsletter

Thank you once again for signing up for this newsletter. Please feel free to share with others you believe would benefit from the newsletter. Thanks again for the support. :)

This week I worked on the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

If you've watched the Try Guys on Buzzfeed, their videos focus on the hosts (Eugene, Keith, Ned, & Zach) embarking on adventures to educate themselves...and their viewers. In their latest video, they take on coding with help from Girls Who Code, an organization dedicated to giving teenage girls the skills and resources to pursue science, technology, engineering, & math opportunities.

Throughout the video, the guys hang out and learn from a group of very enthusiastic and knowledgeable young girls. The guys learn basic skills and get a taste of what they're capable of along with learning how they first got interested in STEM. You also need to check out how Girls Who Code responded to a very strange request from one of the Try Guys.

📚 Read

As shared by Kevin Hodgson, the Teaching Channel finished up a great four-part series on Literacy in the Digital Age. Each of the four posts identifies connections between the Common Core State Standards and digital texts/tools that can be used in the classroom. I recommend checking out the tools Kevin highlighted in the link above...or visiting the individual posts below.

The four-part series:

For many of us, Twitter remains an enigma as we try to figure out the firehose of information, tweets, RTs, & DMs. One thing that Twitter is fantastic at doing is breaking news almost immediately and spreading it throughout the globe. In many ways, Twitter is the "dial tone" of a networked society.

In an attempt to make it a bit easier to negotiate this stream of information, and help surface the good parts, Twitter released Moments, the best of Twitter in an instant. What this means is that Twitter will constantly scour and foreground information it believes is the most relevant/interesting at the current moment. It will also curate and surface related tweets to help you follow a story.

Moments is worth checking out. The service could be really interesting if Moments could learn from your tweets, favorites, RTs, and hashtags to curate a list for you. This would be even better if it could already know what you know (and read before) and pick up the story from there.

Great post by Doug Belshaw on the "rules" of email. Most of these rules I repeatedly break. :)

As you consider your use of email, I also recommend this piece from Fast Company on the "9 email mistakes that make people ignore your messages."

Finally...also from Fast Company...take a look at these Gmail add-ons that you can use to make your email time a bit more productive.

Uber + HackingEDU: Gaining momentum in education

This post was shared out by Doug Belshaw this past week and I've been trying to figure it out since then.

For most people, Uber is the taxi, private car, or rideshare service that you can use from your mobile phone. The question is what futures is Uber building through these investments?

From HackingEDU Partnership Director, Clarice Wong:

Uber revolutionized the transportation industry based on a simple concept: press a button, get a ride. HackingEDU aims to help developers revolutionize the education industry by equipping them with the tools they need to take simple concepts and make them transformative. I look forward to working with Uber in developing a joint ambassador program to give back to students who are interested in becoming developers.

Telling a Strange Love Story, Post by Post on Instagram

I'm always interested in new opportunities to create digital content and play with new forms of expression. Author and photographer Rachel Hulin is using Instagram and other venues to tell the story of fraternal twins Harry and Matilda Goodman. Hey Harry Hey Matilda follows their correspondence and possible romance.

Hulin has been slowly rolling out the 200 pages of the novel online through various venues. She even built up a website for Matilda to build up the backstory of her job as a wedding photographer.

Definitely worth following along...and thinking about how you can also create online.

Overview of the challenges and opportunities of writing in a constrained environment...like the 140 character limit on Twitter. After sharing this post out earlier this week, I had a number of colleagues and friends agreeing (grudgingly) that the use of Twitter has changed or modified our writing to a certain extent.

I frequently include assignments in which I have students write poetry, summarize information, or synthesize content in a single tweet. The assignment is painful for some, but also helps them focus on clarity, and brevity in communications.

I also include a "tweetable summary" in the beginning of many of my talks & lectures. It helps gives the audience/classroom an indication of "where this talk is headed" right at the beginning. It also keeps me focused in my presentation. :) I think it fills the same role as the "essential questions" I would post on my blackboard while teaching in middle and high school.

🔨 Do

While teaching middle and high school, I would frequently pull out crayons, colored pencils and coloring books to calm down my students (and myself) after a tough week.

If you're interested in spending some time coloring and de-stressing if you can achieve a meditative state or even just de-stress, you can download mandala patterns here or check out Mental Floss's list of the most unusual adult coloring books.

This post and the relevant links are motivated by this study from the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association looking at the effects of coloring as meditation. Apparently the secret sauce is the coloring of mandalas and geometric patterns to reduce anxiety.

🤔 Consider

"These individuals have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever,' when really the fever has us." — Seneca

Doug Belshaw's email etiquette post highlights rules I repeatedly break. The guilt is real—inbox zero remains aspirational, replies get buried, good intentions turn into weeks of silence. Email etiquette feels like the rules of a game I'm losing.

Twitter Moments attempts to tame the chaos by curating relevant information. The concept is sound: Twitter is fantastic at breaking news, terrible at making it digestible. But Moments could be far more powerful if it learned from your behavior (your tweets, favorites, RTs, hashtags) and picked up stories where you left off. Curation needs personalization.

The Uber + HackingEDU partnership raises questions I can't fully answer: what futures is Uber building through education investments? "Press a button, get a ride" revolutionized transportation. What does "press a button, get educated" look like? The uncertainty makes me uneasy.

Rachel Hulin's Instagram novel experiment fascinates me—telling a 200-page love story through social media posts, building character websites as backstory infrastructure. New forms of expression require new platforms. We're still figuring out what stories can be told when narrative is distributed across Instagram, websites, and other venues.

Twitter's 140-character constraint changed how we write. My students struggle with the assignment. Poetry, summaries, synthesis in a single tweet. But constraints force clarity. The "tweetable summary" at the start of lectures serves the same function as essential questions on blackboards. Both orient thinking.

Seneca's quote cuts: we don't have riches, riches have us. Same with fever. Same with email, Twitter, Instagram. The question isn't whether we use these tools. It's whether they use us.

Previous: TLDR 15 • Next: TLDR 17 • Archive: 📧 Newsletter

🌱 Connected Concepts:

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