Love, lies, & general half-truths
TL;DR #154 – 6/08/2018

This week I posted the following:

• Creating a domain of their own for educators (& students) in early childhood education – I gave a keynote at the Early Childhood Summit here in Charleston, SC this week. My slides are available at the link. I’ll have a blogpost soon talking about my thinking on this.
• Employing digital spaces to resist harmful discourses:
  Intersections of learning, technology, & politics showing up in the lowcountry – My publication in the Journal of Learning, Media, & Technology was accepted, and revisions were due to this week. The link will take you to the newly submitted version, the original manuscript, & reviewer’s comments.
• The First Principles of Being Digitally Literate – This week I was involved in a wide-ranging discussion on Twitter about many aspects of digital literacy. In this post, I try to distill the most essential elements of what it means to be digitally literate. Get involved on the Google Doc.

Adam Savage’s Maker Tour: Thinkery (15:58)

This tour of Thinkery in Austin, TX by Adam Savage gives you a behind the scenes look at how they build those incredible children’s makerspaces…while keeping them kid friendly and safe.

The lifespan of a lie

Ben Blum on the Stanford Prison Experiment in Medium. The famous psychology experiment was apparently a sham, and yet it continues to inform criminal justice policy, education and more.

Some of the takeaway:

The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.

Facebook’s Latest Higher Ed Push Part of Broader Trend

Facebook is teaming up with community colleges as part of a nationwide effort to teach digital-literacy skills to small-business leaders and others in cities. Facebook’s education strategy focuses on economic enablement and job growth, as well as supporting small businesses with the skills “they need to grow.”

This story spawned a large Twitter discussion as we unpacked the complexity of this initiative.

In a related story, local arsonists are teaching fire safety classes. 🙂

This is real resistance: Teachers strike back against neoliberal assault on public education

Henry A. Giroux in Salon:

Hopefully, this movement will continue to be guided by the kind of energy and insight that Ursula K. Le Guin once articulated: “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.”

The Numbers That Explain Why Teachers Are in Revolt

American teachers are angry. They have taken to the streets in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado — and more recently in North Carolina. Dissent is building in Louisiana and Nevada, too.

Issues like these almost always come down to simple math.

Maker Culture Has a ‘Deeply Unsettling’ Gender Problem

This story has been percolating under the surface for a year now, but it’s good to see some actual data on these trends.

Makerspaces may be one of the most exciting elements on any school’s campus. But a lack of focus around culture and gender inclusiveness are stunting its true promise, according to a new report out of Drexel University.

The report, appropriately titled “Making Culture,” is the result of about a year’s worth of interviews and site visits to around 30 different makerspaces across 12 urban regions. The goal wasn’t to count the number of 3D printers or robotics clubs, but rather to take a more “ethnographic” view of the phenomena, says Youngmoo Kim, the director of Drexel’s ExCITe Center and an author of the study.

Among their findings: a troubling lack of women in makerspace leadership and a pronounced tendency to see boys as more tech-proficient.

Kouridashi-style cold brew tea

This week I started researching opportunities to cold brew tea. I’ve written quite a bit about the cold brew coffee that we always keep in our house. As summer kicks in, I’ve been looking to have a pitcher of tea available as well.

While I was researching, I came across this post, and was intrigued by the mention of
ice brewing (also known as kouridashi-style brewing), a Japanese method of frigid cold water extraction. The best resources on the topic (so far) are this post and this post.

I’m still researching and will know more soon.

The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts

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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