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TLDR 164

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 164

Published: 2018-09-07 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 164. Making sense of self-assessment.

TL;DR is a weekly look at the news in technology, education, and literacy. I'm seeking to keep you on top of the news so you can be the expert.

The GIF I shared above is from a tweet from Drew Spangler. I love the placement and use of this assessment. I also recommend clicking through to the tweet to identify other physical self-assessments added by educators.

Here's some of what I posted this week:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

I'm in the middle of reading Robin DiAngelo's new book, White Fragility. It's an eye-opening look at systems and society. It's helping me think through my teaching, research, and personal interactions.

I understand that this book is meant for someone like me. DiAngelo states at the beginning of the text that this book is primarily for "white progressives" that think they're not racist, or "see race." I've already had a couple of times in the reading that I've stopped and said...yeap...that's me.

I know this text is not for everyone. I know many family/friends that would be frustrated and put this down immediately. For those that are interested...I recommend the journey. I think it's important.

To learn more, you can also check out this interview DiAngelo conducted with EdSurge.

White fragility describes defensive reactions white people have when their racial worldviews are challenged. These reactions—anger, defensiveness, argumentation, silence, leaving the situation—function to restore racial equilibrium and prevent meaningful examination of racism.

DiAngelo argues that white progressives often exhibit particularly strong fragility precisely because we've internalized narrative that we're "good people" who don't participate in racism. This self-concept makes it especially threatening to examine how we benefit from and perpetuate racist systems, even unintentionally.

The book isn't about individual guilt but about systemic understanding. Racism isn't primarily about individual prejudice—it's about power structures, resource distribution, whose perspectives count as legitimate, whose experiences get centered. White people can oppose racism ideologically while still participating in and benefiting from racist systems.

For educators, this matters because schools reproduce racial hierarchies even when individual teachers oppose racism. Whose histories get taught? Whose learning styles get valued? Whose behaviors get disciplined? Whose parents get listened to? These everyday decisions aggregate into patterns that advantage white students while disadvantaging students of color.

The discomfort white people feel discussing race is real—but it's not equivalent to the material consequences people of color face from racism. Fragility prevents growth. Sitting with discomfort, listening without defensiveness, examining our own participation—these practices enable meaningful anti-racist work.

📚 Read

This week many schools across the U.S. went back for the start of a new year. As the year started at the high school where I used to teach, a suspicious person report sent the campus and community into a lockdown. Over the next couple of days I watched social media as family and friends were at first terrified, then relieved as the threat was identified as a hoax. Finally, I saw as this same group of colleagues went through trauma on social networks as they recovered, and then thought about going back to school.

This post by Jeneen Interlandi in the NY Times identifies the challenges as we think about how we prepare teachers (and students) for this sort of trauma. How do we prepare teachers (and students) to be first responders? Should we have to worry about this?

All of my annotations are available in context here.

The normalization of active shooter drills represents profound shift in what we expect from schools and teachers. Teachers trained as educators are now expected to develop security protocols, identify threats, protect students physically during attacks, and process collective trauma afterward.

The proposal to arm teachers exacerbates this problem. Teaching requires building trust, creating safe learning environments, maintaining relationships with students even through conflict. Introducing weapons fundamentally changes those dynamics. Would students trust teachers the same way? Would teachers interact with students differently knowing they're armed?

The deeper question: Why are we asking teachers to solve through individual heroism what we refuse to address through policy? Active shooter drills and armed teachers treat symptoms while ignoring causes—gun access, insufficient mental health support, cultures of violence and masculinity that produce shooters in first place.

Teachers are experiencing trauma from constant vigilance, from drills that simulate attacks, from actual lockdowns even when threats turn out to be hoaxes, from knowledge that students have been killed in classrooms like theirs. This trauma affects teaching quality, retention, and wellbeing. Yet we keep adding security responsibilities rather than addressing root causes.

The focus on school security also obscures that most gun deaths involving young people don't happen at school—they happen in homes and communities. We fixate on rare but spectacular school shootings while avoiding harder conversations about everyday gun violence.

This research from Richard B. Duque, E.J. LeBlanc, and Robert Rivera asks questions about the motivations, planning, and preparations for these events. The authors present data about recent trends, and discuss opportunities to deter future events.

Full PDF and annotation here.

The research examines patterns in active shooter incidents to identify potential warning signs and intervention points. Findings suggest many shooters exhibit observable behaviors beforehand—acquiring weapons, researching previous attacks, expressing grievances, practicing at ranges.

The challenge is distinguishing signal from noise. Many people exhibit some of these behaviors without ever becoming shooters. Gun ownership is common, interest in weapons doesn't indicate violent intent, grievances are universal human experience. Creating effective prediction without generating massive false positives and privacy violations is extraordinarily difficult.

The emphasis on prediction also places responsibility on individuals who notice warning signs—teachers, family members, peers—to report concerns. This creates surveillance culture where ordinary behaviors become suspect and reporting becomes social obligation. It also ignores systemic factors that make prediction approach insufficient.

Deterrence strategies include reducing access to weapons, providing mental health support, addressing cultures that glorify violence, creating belonging and purpose so fewer people reach point of wanting mass casualty. But these require societal changes that are politically difficult, while prediction and security theater offer appearance of action without confronting root causes.

An Avalanche of Speech Can Bury Democracy

Zeynep Tufekci in Politico Magazine. All annotations in context.

For the longest time, we thought that as speech became more democratized, democracy itself would flourish. But in 2018, it is increasingly clear that more speech can in fact threaten democracy.

But in the digital age, when speech can exist mostly unfettered, the big threat to truth looks very different. It's not just censorship, but an avalanche of undistinguished speech—some true, some false, some fake, some important, some trivial, much of it out-of-context, all burying us.

This argument challenges free speech absolutism by distinguishing between censorship era and abundance era. When speech was scarce—limited broadcast channels, expensive printing, gatekeepers controlling access—the primary threat to democracy was suppression of dissent. More speech meant more democratic participation.

Now speech is abundant. Anyone can publish, broadcast, distribute content globally at near-zero cost. The threat shifts from scarcity to overload. When everything is amplified equally, nothing is audible. When true and false claims circulate with equal velocity, distinguishing between them becomes impossible for most people.

This isn't argument for censorship but for curation, verification, and structural changes to platforms that currently optimize for engagement regardless of truth value. The marketplace of ideas metaphor assumes good ideas naturally prevail—but that requires audiences capable of discerning quality, time to evaluate claims, and systems that don't amplify falsehoods as eagerly as truth.

Tufekci points to coordinated disinformation campaigns that flood zones with conflicting claims, making it impossible for citizens to develop shared factual foundation for democratic deliberation. When people can't agree on basic facts, democratic discourse becomes impossible—not because speech is suppressed but because it's drowned.

The solution requires rethinking platform design, algorithmic amplification, verification systems, and media literacy. But it also requires acknowledging that more speech isn't always better for democracy, that quantity and quality trade off, that democratic discourse requires structure not just freedom.

Social media is a weapon of war

David Axe in Motherboard. An interesting look at the larger impact of the Internet as a system, and the power structures that exist behind it.

To 'win' the internet, one must learn how to fuse these elements of narrative, authenticity, community, and inundation... And if you can 'win' the internet, you can win silly feuds, elections, and deadly serious battles.

All annotations in context.

The analysis draws from military thinking about information warfare to understand social media dynamics. Traditional warfare required controlling physical territory; information warfare requires controlling narrative, attention, and belief.

The "likewar" framework identifies four elements:

These elements combine in coordinated campaigns by state actors, extremist movements, and political operations. The same tools that enable grassroots organizing enable sophisticated manipulation. Platform features designed for connection become weapons for division.

The concerning part: These tactics work. Elections get influenced, violence gets incited, public opinion shifts, policy changes. Social media as weapon isn't metaphor—it's description of how power operates in networked age.

Defense is difficult because same freedoms that enable democratic participation enable weaponization. Restricting coordinated inauthentic behavior can suppress genuine grassroots movements. Verifying authenticity at scale is technically impossible. Reducing inundation might silence marginalized voices along with coordinated campaigns.

This connects to Tufekci's speech avalanche argument: When platforms become battlefields where reality itself is contested through information flooding, traditional free speech frameworks become insufficient. We need new thinking about how to preserve democratic discourse while preventing weaponization.

As the semester starts up, I spend time guiding my students as they think about identities they want to have in digital spaces. This post from Sue Beckingham helps identify some possible ways to frame your identity online.

Finding voice online isn't discovering authentic self hidden beneath performed selves—it's choosing which aspects of yourself to emphasize in which contexts. We all contain multitudes; online profiles are selective presentations.

The challenge for students: Academic contexts reward certain voices while social contexts reward others. Professional networking demands different tone than friend communication. Learning to code-switch across contexts—adapting voice to audience and purpose—is crucial digital literacy skill.

Some guidance for developing online voice:

The pressure to be "authentic" online creates paradox: Authentic self-presentation requires curation that's inherently selective. The goal isn't radical transparency but thoughtful choice about which authentic aspects to emphasize.

For students especially, online voice connects to professional identity formation. What they post during college affects future employability. This creates real tensions between current peer relationships and future opportunities, between authentic self-expression and strategic self-presentation.

Teaching digital identity means helping students navigate these tensions thoughtfully rather than hoping they figure it out through trial and error or frightening them into silence through worst-case scenarios.

Doug Belshaw identified this great post from Austin Kleon about "reading with a pencil."

Kleon notes:

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you're existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer.

Marginalia represents thinking made visible. The marks in margins—underlines, questions, connections, arguments—document reader's dialogue with text. This active engagement contrasts with passive consumption where ideas wash over reader without leaving traces.

Reading with pencil changes relationship with text. You're not just receiving author's ideas but constructing meaning through interaction. You're becoming co-creator of reading experience, adding your layer of interpretation to what author wrote.

This connects to Hypothesis and social annotation practices I advocate. Digital marginalia adds social layer—not just your dialogue with text but community dialogue, collective meaning-making, ideas building on each other in margins.

For students, annotation practice transforms studying from memorization to thinking. When you must articulate response—even just "Why?"—you engage differently than passively highlighting. When you connect current reading to previous texts, you build web of understanding rather than isolated facts.

The resistance to marking books reveals interesting assumptions about texts as sacred objects versus tools for thinking. But books are tools. Marginalia honors text by taking it seriously enough to argue with, question, connect, extend.

Digital marginalia offers advantages—searchable annotations, shareable insights, persistent layer across reading contexts. But physical marginalia offers different affordances—tactile engagement, spatial memory, permanence in object itself. Both matter.

The middle ground Kleon identifies—between reader and writer—is where active learning happens. Not consuming what experts say, not yet producing your own finished work, but thinking alongside texts and becoming thinker in process.

🤔 Consider

"We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality." — Seneca

Seneca's observation about fear and imagination resonates profoundly with this issue's theme of making sense of self-assessment. The act of self-assessment requires distinguishing actual threats from imagined ones, real limitations from feared inadequacies, authentic challenges from projected anxieties. Trust in digital spaces involves assessing actual risks rather than letting imagination magnify every possibility.

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