Carving out the boring bits
TL;DR #184 – 2/9/2019

Hi all, welcome to TL;DR. My name is Ian O’Byrne. I research, teach, & write about technology in our lives. I try to synthesize what happened this week in tech…so you can be the expert as well. We’ll have some changes upcoming for this newsletter to help achieve these goals. 🙂

I posted a couple of things this week:

• Help Define Digital Literacy – Make your voice heard, and help us revise/rewrite the definitions of digital literacy. Alternatively, you could also go directly to the discussion held here on Flipgrid.
• No real association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use – A new paper examines the widespread speculation around the connections between the use of digital tech by adolescents & psychological well-being.
• Setting up your first assignment face-to-face in class using Peergrade – A quick overview of how I use Peergrade as an activity in class to work through the process and expectations of peer evaluation and assessment.

What’s on my Tech: 2019 (18:29)

I love watching MKBHD to see what apps and tools he’s using on a regular basis. I’d like to put one of these videos together to share my processes and platforms.

Spotify buys Gimlet and Anchor in podcast push, earmarks $500M for more deals

Spotify made some big news this week with their purchase of Gimlet and Anchor. Gimlet is an award-winning podcast studio. Anchor is a great tool/platform to allow you to create and share a podcast.

This is big news in the online space as more and more individuals are listening to, and creating podcasts. I’m thinking that this is a play for Spotify as they try to become the audio equivalent of YouTube. I can see Spotify creating a space where you can find music and playlists, but more importantly high-quality, and user-generated content in the form of audio podcasts. So…just the way that I can upload/record/share video on YouTube…I can log in to Spotify and upload/record/share my audio podcast. Brilliant.

Close the Digital Generation Gap, Unlock the Power of Online Affinity Networks, and Fuel Learning

Following in the footsteps of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (HOMAGO), Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning, a book synthesizing research by the Leveling Up team of the Connected Learning Research Network.

Like HOMAGO, Affinity Online is a multi-year, multi-investigator effort, grounded in ethnographic case studies of youth online engagement. It offers a textured and in-depth look into a delightful diversity of youth online affinity networks to consider how young people have found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age.

How Silicon Valley puts the “con” in consent

Simple question from the NY Times Editorial Board. If no one reads the terms and conditions for the apps, platforms, and spaces we use on a daily basis…how can they continue to be the legal backbone of the Internet?

The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon’s terms and conditions alone out loud takes approximately nine hours.

Why would anyone read the terms of service when they don’t feel as though they have a choice in the first place? It’s not as though a user can call up Mark Zuckerberg and negotiate his or her own privacy policy. The “I agree” button should have long ago been renamed “Meh, whatever.”

There’s no good reason to trust blockchain technology

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned expert on security technologies. His opinions are a mandatory read for me as I consume, curate, and create in digital spaces.

This this post from Wired, Schneier discusses the many reasons we should not implicitly trust the technology behind the blockchain, and derivative technologies.

Read a bit more about commonalities that blockchain technologies have with open source communities in establishing trust.

The political case for more free time

Several weeks ago in TL;DR, I shared because a viral essay for BuzzFeed from Anne Helen Petersen that focused on how we’re the burnout generation.

This piece from Matt Hartman in The Outline extends from this framing to indicate that our jobs suck, and we should spend less time thinking about them.

As a corollary to this piece, check out Let Children Get Bored Again from Pamela Paul.

Pixel-8 your image

The incredible Bryan Mathers released another tool on his awesome Remixer Machine. The Pixel-8 tool is a fun way to upload an image and play with it a bit. You’ll also find a lot of other great tools to play with on the machine.

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”

― Yuval Noah Harari
Mark Manson

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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