Finding the sweet spot
TL;DR #175 – 11/23/2018

Hey all, welcome to TL;DR. Each week I synthesize the news of the week that I think you need to know in education, tech, & literacy.

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 bot 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.

Anthony Bourdain and “the Sweet Spot” (3:03)

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.

The future of learning? Well, it’s personal

Anya Kamenetz on the NPR Education blog on personalized learning, and the “future of education.” Kamenetz discusses the intersection between the psychology of motivation, learning science, and artificial intelligence. Anya posits the following:

In fact, in speaking about it with more than a dozen educators, technologists, innovation experts and researchers, I’ve developed a theory: “Personalized learning” has become a Janus-faced word, with at least two meanings in tension:
   – 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.
   – 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.

Computers have learned to make us jump through hoops

Increasingly we’re not only being conditioned to operate as rats in an technological black box, but we’re also training the box to make it smarter. “We shape our tools and the our tools shape us.”

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?

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. They talk about recent declines in test scores around writing, and ways to thoughtfully embed this in activities at home and school.

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. They examined 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, spanning the presidential primaries and Trump’s inauguration. And they found it took just six percent of Twitter accounts identified as bots to spread 31 percent of what they term “low-credibility” information on the social network. The bots managed this feat in just two to 10 seconds, thanks in large part to automated amplification.

Supporting your child online – pointers for parents

Guidance from the Parenting for a Digital Future blog on helping youth negotiate screentime and the development of advanced digital skills they’ll need in their lives.

• Start young
• Model appropriate use of digital technology
• Agree on family rules about digital technology use
• Provide your child with access to digital technology, ideally that they have ownership of
• Talk openly with your child about using digital technology
• Help your child link up with trusted others who have shared interests
• Recognize and value the learning that will inevitably happen as your child engages with digital technology

Step up your Twitter literacies with these secrets from the Edu-Twitter influencers

I’ve been re-examining my use of social media after spending time researching/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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

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