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TLDR 165

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 165

Published: 2018-09-14 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 165. Children as customers.

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.

This week has been a jumble as we've been preparing for Hurricane Florence to head into the area. Classes were canceled starting on Tuesday and most people have heeded the evacuation warnings. My family has not heeded these warnings…and decided to stay at home. I've used this as an opportunity to start playing with my 360 camera again.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

Oprah Winfrey's Use of Touch and Eye Contact

Great overview of the use of touch and eye contact by Oprah Winfrey. She uses these techniques to deeply connect with others and build audience.

I've wondered about new opportunities to connect and empathize with others in face-to-face meetings.

Oprah's mastery of nonverbal communication demonstrates how physical presence and attention create connection beyond words. Strategic touch—a hand on someone's arm, leaning in during conversation—signals genuine interest and care. Sustained eye contact communicates "I see you, you matter, I'm fully present with you right now."

These techniques matter in educational contexts where connection precedes learning. Students know when teachers are genuinely engaged versus performing engagement. The physical classroom offers affordances for connection that digital spaces struggle to replicate—though video can capture some elements of eye contact and presence.

The challenge in digital teaching: How do we create equivalent signals of attention and care when we lack physical proximity? Chat responses, video presence, synchronous attention, rapid feedback—these become digital equivalents of touch and eye contact. But they require different skills and awareness.

For educators moving between physical and digital spaces, the question isn't which is better but how to master connection techniques appropriate to each context. Oprah's skills in television interviews translate imperfectly to Zoom calls, which require different proximity dynamics, camera angles, and attention signals.

The deeper point: Connection is teachable skill, not innate charisma. Studying how master communicators like Oprah build rapport reveals techniques anyone can practice and adapt to their contexts.

Thanks to Todd Finley and his Inside Todd's Brain Newsletter for this link.

📚 Read

Hard Words: Why American Kids Aren't Being Taught to Read

Emily Hanford investigative report for American Public Media. Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

A very important report (IMHO) that leads to broader questions about the tension that exists between facts or science, and the experience of experts as they teach others.

All annotations in context.

Hanford's investigation reveals troubling disconnect between reading science and reading instruction. Decades of research consistently shows that systematic phonics instruction—teaching children how letters represent sounds and how to blend those sounds into words—is most effective approach for teaching reading. Yet many teacher preparation programs either ignore this research or actively teach methods contradicted by evidence.

The prevailing approach in many schools emphasizes "balanced literacy" and "three-cueing" systems where children guess at words using context clues, pictures, and initial letters rather than decoding systematically. Teachers encourage students to look at pictures, think about what would make sense, check the first letter—strategies that work for some children but fail many others, particularly those without strong language backgrounds or learning differences.

The resistance to phonics instruction has ideological roots. In the 1980s and 90s, whole language movement positioned phonics as boring skill-and-drill that killed love of reading. Progressive educators embraced child-centered approaches where children would naturally develop reading through exposure to good literature. This appealed to teachers' values about respecting children's natural learning processes.

But romanticizing "natural" reading development ignores that written language is artificial system requiring explicit instruction for most children. Reading doesn't develop naturally like spoken language. Children need systematic teaching about how the alphabetic code works.

The consequences fall hardest on vulnerable students. Children from print-rich homes with strong oral language skills can often figure out reading despite poor instruction. Children without those advantages—disproportionately low-income students and students of color—depend entirely on school instruction. When schools fail to teach phonics systematically, achievement gaps widen.

This represents broader tension between professional expertise and scientific evidence. Teachers develop intuitions through experience—"I've taught reading for 20 years and balanced literacy works for my students." But individual experience can mislead. What seems to work might succeed despite the approach rather than because of it. Confirming evidence gets noticed while contradicting evidence gets dismissed.

Science offers corrective through systematic observation, controlled comparisons, replication. But integrating scientific findings into practice requires humility about limits of experiential knowledge and willingness to change deeply held beliefs about what works. For teachers who've built careers around certain approaches, acknowledging those approaches are ineffective feels like personal failure rather than professional growth opportunity.

The path forward requires changing teacher preparation, providing professional development on reading science, adopting curricula aligned with evidence, and creating cultures where evidence updates practice rather than ideology determining what evidence counts as legitimate.

This week, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos indicated that he's launching a $2 billion fund to help homeless families and build a network of preschools, saying the "child will be the customer" in his philanthropy announcement.

"We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession," he wrote on Twitter. "The child will be the customer." The connection between the "values of Amazon" and bringing this to the lives of children drew a lot of criticism immediately online.

The lead link above is from Audrey Watters and provides the best overview of the problems in this view of education reform.

The framing of children as customers reveals fundamental misunderstanding of education. Amazon's customer obsession means optimizing for consumer satisfaction, reducing friction, personalizing experiences, maximizing engagement and retention. These metrics make sense for commerce—satisfying customers who can choose competitors drives business success.

But children aren't consumers choosing between competing products. They're developing humans whose needs often conflict with their wants. Education requires challenge, discomfort, encountering perspectives that contradict existing beliefs, developing capacities that feel difficult. Good teaching sometimes means not giving children what they want in the moment because educators see longer-term development.

The customer model also implies transactional relationship. Amazon succeeds by efficiently delivering what customers order then getting out of the way. Education requires sustained relationship, deep knowledge of individual learners, patient support through struggle, complex judgments about when to support and when to challenge. Teachers aren't service providers fulfilling orders—they're mentors guiding development.

Applying Amazon's data-driven optimization to children raises additional concerns. Amazon's recommendation algorithms, dynamic pricing, and behavioral tracking maximize spending and engagement. Applying these approaches to children means optimizing their behavior, attention, and development according to predetermined metrics. This treats children as systems to be engineered rather than humans to be nurtured.

The deeper problem: Billionaire philanthropy in education typically imports business logics that contradict educational values. Bezos joins Gates, Zuckerberg, and others applying corporate management, metrics-driven accountability, technological solutions, and market competition to education challenges. These approaches persistently fail because education isn't market failure requiring business innovation—it's underfunded public good requiring sustained investment and respect for professional expertise.

The "$2 billion sounds generous" framing also obscures that proper public funding would dwarf private philanthropy. Bezos's wealth comes partly from avoiding taxes that could fund public preschool. Private charity doesn't substitute for public commitment—it gives wealthy individuals outsized influence over social priorities while letting them claim credit for addressing problems their wealth accumulation helped create.

Watters's critique cuts through the cheerleading to expose troubling assumptions embedded in treating children as customers and education as optimization problem suitable for Amazon's values.

I've talked about the challenges and concerns that exist as we allow children and young adults as they consume digital content. This may include viewing YouTube and trusting the videos shared by the algorithms. This also includes many of the free apps available in app stores that lure in and hook kids.

This investigative report details exactly how these companies target, track, and build databases of info about children. If you have a child, or work with children…please review this post before agreeing to hand over your mobile device to a child.

The investigation reveals systematic violations of children's privacy by app developers who collect extensive behavioral data from young users. Apps marketed to children track location, build advertising profiles, share data with third parties, employ persistent identifiers—all practices that violate both legal requirements and ethical principles around children's privacy.

The "free" app model depends on surveillance and behavioral advertising. Apps collect data to personalize ads, optimize engagement, and sell user information to data brokers. When applied to children, this model becomes particularly predatory. Children lack capacity to understand data collection implications, evaluate privacy tradeoffs, or consent meaningfully to surveillance.

Many apps violate COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), which requires parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. But enforcement is weak, penalties are minimal, and app stores do insufficient vetting. Developers can claim apps aren't directed at children despite clearly child-focused design, or collect data before age verification, or obtain meaningless parental "consent" through opaque terms of service.

The behavioral implications matter as much as privacy violations. Apps designed to maximize engagement use psychological manipulation—variable reward schedules, social comparison, achievement systems, artificial scarcity—to keep children interacting. This attention capture interferes with other activities, develops problematic relationships with devices, and trains children that digital experiences should be maximally stimulating and immediately gratifying.

Parents face impossible position. Saying no to devices means social isolation as peer culture moves online. Saying yes means exposing children to surveillance and manipulation. Reading privacy policies and terms of service for every app is unrealistic. Even careful parents lack tools to evaluate app behavior or limit data collection.

The solution requires regulatory action—stronger privacy protections, meaningful enforcement, requirements that app stores verify child-safety claims, default privacy protections rather than opt-in complexity. It also requires cultural shift away from accepting surveillance as inevitable cost of digital services.

For educators, this raises questions about devices in schools. Educational apps often employ similar data collection practices. Districts provide student data to vendors with inadequate protections. The same engagement optimization that concerns parents is sometimes celebrated as "personalized learning" in educational contexts.

Before handing devices to children—whether as parent, teacher, or caregiver—understanding the surveillance and manipulation built into children's digital experiences is essential. This report provides that uncomfortable knowledge.

As an educator, mentor, or even parent/guardian, we often have to straddle a difficult balance as we push someone out of their comfort zone. But, when is this gentle nudge something a bit more of an unreasonable burden?

This week, a tweet posted by a 15-year-old high-school student declaring "Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to" garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening.

The debate reveals tension between educational values and student mental health. Public speaking skills matter for academic, professional, and civic participation. Educators reasonably argue that practicing presentations in supportive classroom environments prepares students for situations where public communication is required. The discomfort is feature, not bug—learning happens through manageable challenge.

But students describe experiences that go beyond productive discomfort into debilitating anxiety. Physical symptoms—shaking, nausea, panic attacks—interfere with both performance and learning. For students with anxiety disorders or social phobia, mandatory presentations aren't growth opportunities but traumatic experiences that reinforce fear rather than building confidence.

The growing willingness of students to name anxiety and advocate for accommodations reflects broader cultural shifts around mental health. Previous generations were told to just get over it, that anxiety was weakness or excuse. Current students increasingly understand anxiety as legitimate medical condition requiring accommodation like any other disability.

This creates genuine pedagogical dilemma. How do we maintain educational rigor while supporting students with mental health challenges? Eliminating all presentations removes learning opportunity for students who'd benefit from practice. But mandatory presentations with no alternatives harm students for whom the anxiety is genuinely disabling.

Possible middle grounds include:

The broader question: What constitutes reasonable accommodation versus lowering standards? This same tension appears around homework, testing conditions, attendance policies. As understanding of mental health evolves and students advocate for themselves, educators must thoughtfully distinguish between productive challenge that promotes growth and demands that cause harm.

The massive social media response suggests many students feel unheard about their anxiety experiences. Taking those concerns seriously—even while maintaining educational goals—models the respect and flexibility that effective teaching requires.

This week Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel release a book they've been working on for years. This text seeks to sketch out what critical pedagogy looks like in a digital context.

I believe that technology, and these new networked spaces should force us to problematize or reframe our thinking about most of our assumptions and perspectives. This book is a giant step forward as we examine what this means for teaching and learning.

Morris and Stommel argue that digital spaces don't just add new tools to existing pedagogies—they fundamentally disrupt traditional power relationships between teachers and students, institutions and learners, knowledge producers and knowledge consumers. Networks enable horizontal relationships, collective knowledge production, and challenges to institutional authority that require rethinking educational foundations.

Critical digital pedagogy asks: Who benefits from current educational structures? Whose knowledge counts as legitimate? Who has power to define learning outcomes, assessment criteria, acceptable forms of participation? Digital tools can reproduce existing hierarchies—surveillance through learning management systems, standardization through automated assessment, control through restrictive acceptable use policies. Or they can enable resistance, alternative voices, and democratic participation.

The urgency comes from recognizing that educational technology is never neutral. Every platform choice, every policy decision, every pedagogical approach embeds values about learning, knowledge, and human relationships. Failing to examine those values means accepting defaults designed by corporations optimizing for profit, institutions optimizing for control, or technologists optimizing for efficiency.

The book calls for teachers to reclaim agency in digitally mediated learning. This means questioning rather than accepting ed-tech narratives, centering student voices in technology decisions, using digital tools to redistribute rather than consolidate power, and maintaining critical stance toward innovation rhetoric that too often serves corporate interests over educational values.

Key themes include:

For educators navigating digital transformation of education—which is all of us—this text provides critical framework for making thoughtful choices aligned with educational values rather than being swept along by technological determinism.

The book models critical digital pedagogy through its open access publication, inviting engagement and remix rather than treating knowledge as property to be protected. This practice-what-you-preach approach demonstrates that alternatives to corporate ed-tech are possible.

If you're looking for a way to get involved and build your digital skillset, and possibly your digital identity through blogging…a MOOC is a great opportunity to write, share, connect, and play.

Equity Unbound was initiated by Maha Bali (American University in Cairo, Egypt), Catherine Cronin (National University of Ireland, Galway), and Mia Zamora (Kean University, NJ, USA) for use in their courses this term (September-December 2018), but it is open to all. It's a powerful example of global and local nodes of learning. Come join us. :)

Equity Unbound represents alternative model for open online learning that centers equity, connection, and critical pedagogy rather than content delivery and credential completion. Unlike traditional MOOCs optimized for scale and automation, Equity Unbound emphasizes relationships, dialogue, and attention to how power and privilege shape learning experiences.

The course connects students enrolled in formal classes at multiple institutions with open participants from around the world. This global/local hybrid creates opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue, challenges parochial assumptions, and surfaces how context shapes perspectives. Egyptian students, Irish students, American students, and global participants bring different experiences, priorities, and constraints to shared conversations.

The equity focus asks participants to examine how their identities, privileges, and positions affect their learning and interactions. Who speaks? Who gets heard? Whose knowledge counts as legitimate? What barriers prevent participation? These questions rarely get explicit attention in educational spaces, but Equity Unbound makes them central rather than peripheral.

The open participation model democratizes access while creating interesting complexities. Open participants aren't bound by institutional requirements, grades, or schedules—they choose their level of engagement. This freedom can enable deeper investment for intrinsically motivated learners. But it also creates uneven participation and different stakes for enrolled versus open participants.

For educators, Equity Unbound offers professional development through practice. Participants develop digital literacies through blogging, connecting via social media, engaging with open educational practices. But they also develop critical consciousness about how technology platforms, pedagogical choices, and facilitation practices include or exclude different voices.

The MOOC-as-community model contrasts sharply with MOOC-as-course model that dominated early 2010s hype. Rather than replacing traditional education with automated content delivery, this approach uses digital networks to augment and transform education through connection, dialogue, and collective learning. It's messier, less scalable, more labor-intensive—and far more aligned with educational values.

If you're curious about open learning, critical pedagogy, or building digital presence through writing and connection, Equity Unbound offers welcoming entry point.

🤔 Consider

"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men." — Frederick Douglass

Surveillance creates digital environments that shape young people through manipulation and data extraction rather than building capacity for critical engagement, self-regulation, and thoughtful participation. The question isn't just what children need right now but what adults we're building through the choices we make about education, technology, privacy, challenge, and care. Children as customers optimizes for immediate satisfaction. Building strong children requires longer view, deeper commitment, and willingness to prioritize development over consumption, relationship over efficiency, justice over profit.

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