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TLDR 47

Too Long; Didn't Read Issue 47

Published: 2016-05-27 • 📧 Newsletter

Welcome to issue 47 of the TL;DR Newsletter. This week we problematize Legos, gender, & grit.

If you have feedback, questions, or concerns...please feel free to the "reply" button and send me a response. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

This week I spent some time cleaning up stuff in the background. One thing in particular that I've been working on is getting my podcast series up and off of the ground.

The Four Questions For podcast is a series of interviews I've conducted with experts in literacy, education, and technology over the past couple of years. You can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or with your favorite podcatcher.

🔖 Key Takeaways

📺 Watch

For those of you into remix and mashups, you know about Kirby Ferguson. I use his Everything is a Remix video to introduce the subject to my students.

If you're a Star Wars fan, and/or remix fan, this latest video is for you. Kirby once again details the elements of remix, and explains why it is a good thing. He also explains why many people were upset that The Force Awakens contain elements of a remix.

Finally...he indicates that remix is not dead. :)

📚 Read

Intriguing post from Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic examining the line between making products children love and informing kids how they should play with them.

The piece starts with a discussion about the reframing of Lego to connect with girls and not be so skewed toward boys only. It continues on with research about stereotyping of toys and gender on play assessment. Finally, it concludes with current initiatives from Lego as they try to make a product that is approachable for all learners without inadvertently informing their practice.

In the current culture, many are open to flexible definitions of gender. Still many others are not and debate rages from the role of transitioning adults to public bathroom designations. I appreciate the focus from Lego (and researchers) on the interactions between play, product, and perception in these spaces.

As we work and research digital spaces, I often wonder about what the "experts" with their tools.

Continuing the theme of working/playing with Lego, this post in FastCo Design discusses an event at the Lego Store in NYC in which professional architects were paired up with students from a local high school. Their task was to rebuild/reinvent New York using monochrome Lego blocks.

Unexpected takeaway:

Still, there were some at the event who felt, if anything, that becoming professional architects had somehow made them worse at Lego. "If anything, being an adult and knowing realistic limits on what can and cannot be realized can actually limit your creativity," Kushner says. So consider the trade-off: If you want to become an architect, it might come at the expense of your Lego skills.

An excellent, wide-ranging post from Chris Gillard and Hugh Culik on Common Sense Graphite.

The authors create parallels between students trying to search online but being limited by firewalls and filters...and redlining that occurred in the US with housing loans. The authors contend that there is a new form of "digital redlining" that informs/creates/reifies artificial patterns of class structure by limiting access to knowledge sources online.

They continue:

Digital redlining is not a renaming of the digital divide. It is a different thing, a set of education policies, investment decisions, and IT practices that actively create and maintain class boundaries through strictures that discriminate against specific groups. The digital divide is a noun; it is the consequence of many forces. In contrast, digital redlining is a verb, the "doing" of difference, a "doing" whose consequences reinforce existing class structures. In one era, redlining created differences in physical access to schools, libraries, and home ownership. Now, the task is to recognize how digital redlining is integrated into edtech to produce the same kinds of discriminatory results. Armed with the history of redlining, and understanding its digital resurrection, we glimpse the use of technologies to reinforce the boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, and gender. Our experience is that this problem is seldom recognized as an urgent educational issue.

Involving page owners in annotation

On TL:DR I frequently share news and info about Hypothes.is, one of my favorite tools for annotating online texts. I use Hypothes.is to annotate and "save" online texts. I use it in classes. I even have it built in to my website to allow readers to mark up my site.

Recent criticisms (here, here, here, and here) have questioned whether we should be able to provide this level of annotation to the web.

This post from Lena Gunn at Hypothe.is shares research with content creators to gain their opinion on the subject. I applaud Hypothes.is for conducting and sharing this research. I look forward to further discussion about the subject.

If you listened to episode 52 of the TIDE Podcast, you know that the topic of "grit" as identified by Angela Duckworth has been critiqued recently. You can read more here and here.

At the root of this critique is a meta-analysis of research by Marcus Crede on grit in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Grit is frequently tossed around in educational circles as we discuss the merit and implications of this construct. It's interesting to see how people are responding to this discussion about grit in our lives. As always, I recommend problematizing all elements and assumptions about our world...even grit.

🔨 Do

One of my favorite tools to use is Canva to quickly make good looking digital designs. I use it to create all of the "Consider" quotes that you see below...and that I publish on Instagram.

Labeley takes a page out of this playbook by improving their web editing portal that you can use to print out your own custom labels.

When I brew my own beer, I design my own labels and print them up on store bought labels. I then cover these up with many layers of hairspray. In the future I'll start using Labeley to not only create better labels...but more stickers for my laptop.

🤔 Consider

"Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines." — Robert H. Schuller

This week: problematize Legos, gender, grit.

Four Questions For podcast launched on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher. Kirby Ferguson on The Force Awakens - remix is not dead. Lego reframing gender play - I appreciate the focus on interactions between play, product, and perception. Architects playing with Lego worse than students - expertise can limit creativity. Digital redlining is a verb creating class boundaries through firewalls and filters. Hypothes.is annotation ethics - I applaud them for conducting this research. Angela Duckworth grit critique - as always, I recommend problematizing all assumptions, even grit. Labeley for homebrewing labels and laptop stickers.

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.

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