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TLDR 4

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 4

Published: July 17, 2015 • 📧 Newsletter

🔖 Key Takeaways

Thank you once again for being one of the first to sign up for this newsletter. In this weekly email, I'll pull together some of the content that I shared out throughout the week. It's basically things that I think you should know & discuss. Please feel free to respond back, and share out with others.

This week I published quite a bit:

I had the privilege of heading back up to UConn to meet with the incoming group of students in the Two Summers program.

I also started up talk with Mozilla again to conduct some work on Version 2.0 of the Web Literacy Map.

📺 Watch

I just came across the In a Nutshell YouTube channel by Kurz Gesagt and immediately subscribed. The motto for the YouTube channel is "One video a month. Quality > Quantity." This video on the "death of bees" is a good example of the informative videos you'll find on the channel.

📚 Read

This latest research report from Pew examines the usage rates of social media for parents. This data is interesting given the challenges we see as adolescents engage in online social contexts. It's also interesting when compared to usage rates on adult non-parents. Main findings available here. Full report available here.

This piece in The Guardian discusses some of the challenges of sharing a bit too much about your kids online...and the steps you should take to protect and monitor your children online (i.e., check privacy settings, and set up a Google Alert in your child's name).

I also recommend reading this commentary by Nikki Williams from the Center for Digital Ethics & Policy.

Excellent post from Doug Belshaw for the DML Central in which he discusses the need to develop a system in your own (and collaborative) workflow in which you allow for differences in workflows. Agile is a term from software development that describes a system in which individuals are empowered to collaborate, self-organize, adaptively plan, and improve.

What could this look like in your classroom, or your daily work process?

The next five billion Internet users will primarily be non-native English speakers. For the most part, the Internet will be a vastly different place. This piece from PSFK discusses the challenges and opportunities that exist as businesses and individuals strive to connect and profit in this transition.

TED Talks and TED Ed lessons are usually fantastic...but there are often times too many to keep track of. That is why I usually take lists like this and immediately save the videos or a playlist on YouTube for a time that I'll need it in the future.

Asymmetrica, a new browser extension groups sentences on a webpage together into segments to support readers. The extension is based on work from neuroscience and looks at forcing the webpage to chunk the parts into discrete parts to make it easier to read and comprehend.

This piece from Hybrid Pedagogy examines the author's quest not to have students gain "digital literacy" but instead find "digital wisdom." Adam Copeland builds off from Marc Prensky's definition of digital wisdom as being "a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities."

Richard Byrne shares a great resource from Common Craft in which they detail steps to create and/or find, and then share explanatory animated GIFs. I teach my students how to create multimodal tutorials that include screencaptures and screencasts. Increasingly I'm using more GIFs to quickly explain to others.

One of my favorite new tools to create GIFs is Recordit...which was recommended by Doug Belshaw.

🔨 Do

Pocket on iOS Finally Lets You Listen to Articles with Text-to-Speech

When I was teaching, I would frequently use audiobooks to help my striving readers dive into the texts. Now as an adult, I'm always looking for great titles on Audible, or for ways to listen to PDFs while I'm driving, exercising, etc.

Pocket is a "read it later" app. Basically, you save materials, it loads it into the app, and allows you to read it when you have time. The Android and iOS (iPad, iPhone) versions will now allow you to listen to the contents you save for later.

🤔 Consider

Digital wisdom is a twofold concept, referring both to wisdom arising from the use of digital technology to access cognitive power beyond our innate capacity and to wisdom in the prudent use of technology to enhance our capabilities.

Marc Prensky

Prensky's framing moves us beyond the tired "digital native" debate toward something more useful. It's not about whether you grew up with technology—it's about whether you use it wisely. This issue's threads reflect that dual challenge: protecting children's privacy while parents share online, adapting agile workflows thoughtfully, preparing for billions of new users who will reshape what the internet becomes. Wisdom requires both capability and restraint.

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