Sharpen your saw
TL;DR #170 – 10/20/2018

TL;DR is a weekly review of things that I think you should be reading. A primer of some of the cool things that happened…but you may have missed.

This week I created the following:

• Dispositions in the digital domain: Reader, text, & activity in online environments – This week I applied for a small, internal grant. The work will help with some work I’m starting up with social network analysis. I’m also looking to fund the purchase of two years of web hosting for ten educators from K-12 and up into higher ed. I’d like to help them build a domain of one’s own…and scaffold their use of IndieWeb.

NOT REAL NEWS: Plane did not spin 360 degrees from typhoon

This crazy video is completely fake. Yet it’s been watched 14 million times on Facebook — including by me. Here’s why fake news is still a thriving business.

Friction-free Racism

Chris Gilliard in Real Life Magazine about how surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination.

The end game of a surveillance society, from the perspective of those being watched, is to be subjected to whims of black-boxed code extended to the navigation of spaces, which are systematically stripped of important social and cultural clues. The personalized surveillance tech, meanwhile, will not make people less racist; it will make them more comfortable and protected in their racism.

The History of the Future of High School

Audrey Watters in VICE Magazine’s Power and Privilege Issue.

The problem with American high school education, it seems, is not that students haven’t learned the “right skills.” The problem is that the systemic inequality of the school system has ensured that many students have been unable to participate fully in either the economy or, more fundamentally, in democracy. It’s not that there has been no tinkering, but that those doing the tinkering often have their own interests, rather than students’ interests, in mind.

Early childhood education yields big benefits — just not the ones you think

Kelsey Piper at Vox.

In other words, early childhood education may change children’s lives not by teaching them things they’ll retain in elementary school, but simply by being in a safe, predictable, and consistent environment for them to play in — and by providing their parents with the stability to get and keep better jobs.

What do we actually know about the risks of screen time and digital media?

Cathleen O’Grady in ArsTechnica about games, aggression, and attention, oh my—the evidence on digital media and minds. Some tentative links are in place, but many crucial details are fuzzy.

Can picture books meet the crisis in children’s mental health?

Donna Ferguson in The Guardian. For author Matt Haig, children’s fiction provides a non-threatening way for children to reflect on their lives in a place no one else can reach: their own heads.

Imagination is the flipside of anxiety. Obviously if you’re anxious, you’re imagining stuff all the time. You need to fill that imaginative space with positive, fun, nourishing stuff and books can give you that. Through fiction, you can escape into a world that isn’t your life, but can help you to deal with it. And that applies as much to a seven-year-old as it does to a 70-year-old.

How to make your own two-factor authentication key

I ordered a YubiKey 4 for $10.00 after subscribing to a year of Wired. This price is a lot cheaper than simply ordering one online. Alternatively, follow the guide provided above to make your own…using a USB key you already have.

Once it gets here, I’ll have a series of posts on my experiences setting up stronger security for all of my accounts and passwords.

Turn your actions into concentrated practices.

Belzebuub

TL;DR is a summary of all the great stuff from the Internet this week in technology, education, & literacy. Please subscribe to make sure this comes to your inbox each week. You can review archives of the newsletter here.

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