Literacy rickrolled
TL;DR #157 – 7/07/2018

This week I posted the following:

• Three examples of annotations, bookmarking, & sharing in my digital commonplace book – This post is a documentation, and a quick mockup of three ways in which I might be able to more effectively embed Hypothesis in my blogging process.

Gibi ASMR Rick Roll

There’s a lot happening in this clip, and it all connects to different aspects of Internet culture.

First, Rickrolling is a prank, and Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Basically it is a trick in which you think a hyperlink is going to bring you one place, and instead you go to the music video.

Second, ASMR stands for Autonomous sensory meridian response. This is a low-grade euphoria characterized by spine tingling sensation on the skin.

Gibi is a YouTube star that has channels for gaming as well as her ASMR content. You can check out a video of Gibi explaining ASMR here. In the video I shared above, Gibi embedded clips in her videos over 8 months that were ultimately remixed into a rickroll of her fans.

See…it’s easy to understand. 🙂

Stories from experts about the impact of digital life

This latest report from the Pew Research Center shares insight from experts about the social, political, and economic fallout from the spread of digital activities in our lives. You can read more about the general positives and negatives as identified by the experts.

Check out my quote from the report. I also recommend taking a minute to review some of the
from the report.

These academics spent the last year testing whether your phone is secretly listening to you

This is one of those things that I swear is happening. I’ll mention something in a discussion, and then soon after I’ll see an ad or news story pop up in my Google news reader. It turns out that many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fueled the paranoia with an article that declared “Your phone is listening and it’s not paranoia.”

Some computer science academics at Northeastern University ran an experiment testing over 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android to see if they’re collecting information and sending it back somewhere else. They found no evidence of an app unexpectedly activating the microphone or sending audio out when not prompted to do so. Like good scientists, they refuse to say that their study definitively proves that your phone isn’t secretly listening to you, but they didn’t find a single instance of it happening. Instead, they discovered a different disturbing practice: apps recording a phone’s screen and sending that information out to third parties.

‘Access to Literacy’ Is Not a Constitutional Right, Judge in Detroit Rules

Simple question…Do students at poorly performing schools have a constitutional right to a better education? This week, a Federal District Court judge in Michigan decided that they did not when he dismissed a class-action lawsuit filed by students at troubled schools in Detroit.

The suit, filed in September 2016, argued that students at some of the city’s most underperforming schools — serving mostly racial minorities — had been denied “access to literacy” because of underfunding, mismanagement and discrimination.

The complaint described schools that were overcrowded with students but lacking in teachers; courses without basic resources like books and pencils; and classrooms that were bitingly cold in the winter, stiflingly hot in the summer and infested with rats and insects.

Twenty years of EdTech

Martin Weller turned his 25 years of ed tech blog series into a “20 years of ed tech article for Educause. This is a thoughtful overview of where we’ve been over the last couple of decades.

When we look back twenty years, the picture is mixed. Clearly, a rapid and fundamental shift in higher education practice has taken place, driven by technology adoption. Yet at the same time, nothing much has changed, and many edtech developments have failed to have significant impact. Perhaps the overall conclusion, then, is that edtech is not a game for the impatient.

The Fallacies of Open: Participatory Design, Infrastructuring, and the Pursuit of Radical Possibility

One of my favorite learning experiences to level up my skills in digital spaces was the Connected Learning MOOC.

This research from Steph West-Puckett, Anna Smith, Christina Cantrill, and Mia Zamora shares insight on the experience, and fallacies of open learning design. This is an important review of what open means in current educational contexts.

Digital literacy project sets an ambitious goal: Wikipedia pages for 1,000 local newspapers

If you’ve been looking for a way to have students start using Wikipedia more, and employing digital literacies in authentic contexts…this is for you.

Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, plans to work with students around the U.S. to create pages and info boxes for the local newspapers lacking them.

This is a powerful opportunity to work with your students to actively create and curate on Wikipedia.

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.

Brené Brown

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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