TLDR 175

Finding the Sweet Spot

Published: 2018-11-23 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to Issue 175. Finding the sweet spot.

This week I was involved in the following:

Digital Literacies and the Skinner Box - As I dig in to Behaviorism and digital spaces, this first post examines the behavior modification that exists as we use these online environments.
The Black Box & Educational Technologies - This post is meant to compliment the first post by digging in a bit more and looking at our classrooms.
Screentime Technopanic in the NY Times - This post on the Screentime.me site distills some of the guidance I've shared previously here in TLDR.
How to write a clear, concise, research question - I recorded this video for Leigh Hall's YouTube channel. It's a video accompaniment to this post.

🔖 Key Takeaways

Personalized Learning Paradox: Term has become Janus-faced meaning both software-paced individual progression through predetermined content and genuinely student-centered project-based learning facilitated by adults.
Digital Conditioning: We're being trained as rats in technological black boxes while simultaneously teaching those systems to become smarter creating recursive conditioning loop.
Bot Amplification Speed: Just 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots spread 31% of low-credibility information through automated amplification in 2-10 seconds exploiting trust in crowd consensus.
Writing Joy Decline: Test scores around writing dropping as schools fail to embed joyful writing activities at home and school focusing instead on assessment-driven instruction.
Digital Parenting Framework: Supporting children online requires starting young modeling appropriate use agreeing on family rules providing device ownership and valuing inevitable learning from engagement.

📺 Watch

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Anthony Bourdain on StarTalk

Two of my favorite people, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Anthony Bourdain on StarTalk. They talk about science as applied to the kitchen and different processes used in cooking around the world to achieve the most desirable flavors. This conversation demonstrates how scientific thinking applies beyond labs into everyday creative practices like cooking.

📚 Read

What 'Personalized Learning' Really Means

Anya Kamenetz on the NPR Education blog examines personalized learning and the "future of education." Kamenetz discusses the intersection between the psychology of motivation, learning science, and artificial intelligence.

In speaking with more than a dozen educators, technologists, innovation experts and researchers, she's developed a theory: "Personalized learning" has become a Janus-faced word with at least two meanings in tension:

Software-Paced Learning: The use of software to allow each student to proceed through a pre-determined body of knowledge, most often math, at his or her own pace.
Student-Centered Learning: A whole new way of doing school, not necessarily focused on technology, where students set their own goals. They work both independently and together on projects that match their interests, while adults facilitate and invest in getting to know each student one-on-one, both their strengths and their challenges.

I also recommend this tweet thread from Audrey Watters as she unpacks the points made in the Kamenetz post. The tension between these definitions reveals deeper questions about whether technology serves learning or replaces it.

Computers Have Learned to Make Us Jump Through Hoops

Increasingly we're not only being conditioned to operate as rats in a technological black box, but we're also training the box to make it smarter. "We shape our tools and then our tools shape us" becomes recursive when those tools learn from our conditioned behavior.

Have we been conditioned to accept a world governed by "smart" tech, trading convenience and cheap bliss to the point where we become a bit like machines ourselves? This piece examines how we've normalized jumping through digital hoops—CAPTCHAs, two-factor authentication, algorithm-dictated workflows—training ourselves to conform to machine logic rather than machines adapting to human needs.

Where Has the Joy of Learning Gone and How Do We Get It Back for Our Children?

Edwin Creely and Fleur Diamond in The Conversation discuss recent declines in test scores around writing and ways to thoughtfully embed joyful writing activities at home and school.

When writing becomes purely assessment-driven, students lose connection to why humans write in the first place: to think, to express, to connect, to create. The decline in writing scores may reflect not students' declining abilities but schools' declining focus on writing as meaning-making rather than standards-meeting.

Study: It Only Takes a Few Seconds for Bots to Spread Misinformation

A new study by researchers at Indiana University, published in Nature Communications, suggests that people put greater trust in messages that appear to originate from many people.

Researchers examined 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, spanning the presidential primaries and Trump's inauguration. They found it took just 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots to spread 31% of "low-credibility" information on the social network. The bots managed this feat in just 2 to 10 seconds, thanks in large part to automated amplification.

This exploits a fundamental human heuristic: if many people are sharing something, it must be trustworthy. Bots weaponize social proof at machine speed before human critical thinking can engage.

Supporting Your Child Online - Pointers for Parents

Guidance from the Parenting for a Digital Future blog on helping youth negotiate screentime and develop advanced digital skills they'll need in their lives:

Start young - Digital literacy begins early
Model appropriate use of digital technology - Children learn from what you do not what you say
Agree on family rules about digital technology use - Co-created rules have better buy-in
Provide your child with access to digital technology, ideally that they have ownership of - Ownership enables experimentation
Talk openly with your child about using digital technology - Ongoing conversation not one-time talk
Help your child link up with trusted others who have shared interests - Digital mentorship matters
Recognize and value the learning that will inevitably happen as your child engages with digital technology - Engagement produces learning even when not "educational"

This framework treats digital engagement as inevitable and focuses on maximizing benefits while building critical capacity.

🔨 Do

I've been re-examining my use of social media after spending time researching and writing about it here in TL;DR.

My use of Twitter has slowed down as I've been experimenting more with IndieWeb philosophies. I've also been trying to identify the best mixture for me. This interview with rockstars in EduTwitter is helpful in thinking through these relationships.

Finding the sweet spot means balancing connection with autonomy, engagement with attention protection, community with individual sovereignty.

🤔 Consider

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." — Pablo Picasso

Picasso's observation about transformation applies to how we approach digital tools and pedagogies. Personalized learning can reduce student-centered education to a yellow spot—software pacing through predetermined content—or transform software into genuine student empowerment. Digital spaces can condition us into behavioral rats or we can transform those spaces into platforms for human flourishing. Bots reduce social proof to manipulation or we transform social networks into genuine trust-building. Writing instruction reduces joy to test scores or transforms assessment into meaning-making. The sweet spot lies in transformative vision not reductive implementation.

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🌱 Connected Concepts:

Behaviorism Digital Spaces — Digital environments function as Skinner boxes conditioning users through rewards and behavior modification while users simultaneously train algorithms creating recursive conditioning in Technology Psychology.
Personalized Learning Paradox — Anya Kamenetz identifies Janus-faced definition tension between software-paced predetermined progression and genuine student-centered project-based learning in Educational Technology.
Bot Misinformation Amplification — Study showing 6% bot accounts spread 31% low-credibility information in seconds by exploiting trust in crowd consensus through automated amplification in Information Warfare.
Digital Parenting Guidance — Framework for supporting children online emphasizes starting young modeling use co-creating rules providing ownership and valuing inevitable learning from engagement in Digital Literacy Framework.
IndieWeb Philosophy — Movement toward individual digital sovereignty and distributed web alternatives to platform-controlled social media spaces in Web Architecture.

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