On new beginnings
TL;DR #179 – 1/5/2019

Hi all, welcome to 2019. Hopefully you’ve started some new intentions for the new year after spending some time reflecting. I know I have.

This holiday break was relatively busy. I sent out two research manuscripts, and an abstract for an upcoming themed issue.

• Pre-Service Educators Developing a Domain of One’s Own – This manuscript details research conducted with a colleague, Tracey Hunter-Doniger, as we explore our work as pre-service teachers develop professional/personal websites. We shared the Google Doc here to allow you to review & comment. Feedback will be used & appreciated. 🙂
• Math, music, & transdisciplinarity: Pre-service teachers’ design of instruction mediated by technology – I conducted this research with my STEAM Research Team at CofC (Nenad Radakovic & Tracey Hunter-Doniger). We conducted this work, and wrote the manuscript together with two of our students.
• Educate, Empower, Advocate: Amplifying marginalized voices in a digital society – This abstract was sent out to CITE for a special call on Technology and Teacher Education in Troubled Times.
• Create a Screentime Contract with your child – As your child receives some new tech, it’s a good time to start a discussion about the use and expectations of this tool.
• Imagine if we could cast aside screentime – A response to a recent NY Times Opinion about avoiding devices for the upcoming year.
• Video – Creating a Domain of Their Own For Educators (& Students) in Early Childhood Education – This year I’m going to steadily work on sharing more content to my YouTube channel. This video is a recording of the keynote I gave to the Early Childhood Summit in 2018.

taking notes in class. with my typewriter (2:52)

This video is cringeworthy…and hilarious at the same time. It is nine years old, but for some reason it popped to the top of my YouTube feed this week.

It’s a great discussion starter for discussions about tech.

Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech

This story came out a week ago, but it’s important to keep our eyes on. Technically, it came out a little more than a year ago, but it’s been bubbling up in our news feeds again.

For better or worse, Facebook is our digital commons. Many of us gather there to communicate, share, and connect. Constantly under fire for stirring up distrust and violence, the social network has vowed to clean up the social network, but leaked documents raise serious questions about its approach.

Facebook’s approach is to outsource this work to contractors, and keep them informed/organized with a stack of PowerPoint slides reducing discussion moderation to a simple equation. My thinking is they’re using this work to teach machine learning algorithms, and will soon automate the process…for better or worse.

The next generation of Scratch teaches more than coding

Mitch Resnick on the launch of Scratch 3.0.

Keep in mind this is much more than making all kids coders and programmers.

But just engaging more students in coding has never been our top priority. Rather, our educational mission is to engage students in thinking creatively, reasoning systematically and working collaboratively—essential skills for everyone in today’s society. From the beginning, we integrated Scratch coding activities into an online community, so that students can provide feedback, inspiration and encouragement to one another. And we took a project-oriented approach so that students can learn to express themselves creatively and develop their creative capacities.

Read more about the announcement from the Scratch Team.

What kids need to learn to succeed in 2050

Urban planners and researchers at MIT found that it’s shockingly easy to “reidentify” anonymized data that people generate all day…especially in cities.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of my favorite authors. His book Sapiens is excellent, and has been gifted many times. His new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is waiting for me as soon as I finish The Three Body Problem.

This essay by Harari shares insight into what will really matter for our futures. The key…reinvention. To keep up with the world of 2050, you will need to do more than merely invent new ideas and products, but above all, reinvent yourself again and again.

Lies, Bullshit and Fake News: Some Epistemological Concerns

A great piece in the Postdigital Science & Education Journal by Alison MacKenzie & Ibrar Bhatt.

MacKenzie and Bhatt start with a simple series of questions, and problematize this while looking at future contexts. What is the difference between a lie, bullshit, and a fake news story? And is it defensible to lie, bullshit, or spread fake stories?

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

From the general WTF section comes this story.

Luddites of the world unite!!! Individuals in Chandler, Arizona are lashing out at driverless cars by slashing tires, pelting them with rocks, and threatening riders with PVC pipes.

KonMari for Digital Clutter

I first heard about Marie Kondo a little over a year ago when she appeared on the Tim Ferriss show. Over the holiday break, her series popped up on Netflix and my Wife has been captured.

At the same time, I’ve been thinking about cleaning up my digital identities. Think about your digital goods and identities. What brings you joy?

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

Seneca

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