pseudo-events

After all, why should the public focus on the real harms documented by Facebook's own internal researchers when we can instead all gawk at the old man misusing internet slang?

From 2015 to 2018 finstas ruled the teenage digital landscape. Slang for fake Instagram accounts, finstas were the first place teens would post photos they didn't want to share on main. Creating a finsta was a rite of passage, and following someone's shadow feed felt like you were really part of their close inner circle. 

Efforts to use AI to predict crime have been fraught with controversy due to the potential to replicate existing biases in policing. But a new system powered by machine learning holds the promise of not only making better predictions but also highlighting these biases.

We should think of it as a bill for a public health measure that was taken on our behalf. And it's our obligation now, whether or not we agreed with those decisions, to pay that bill. We can't stiff our children.

Superintelligence has long served as a source of inspiration for dystopian science fiction that showed humanity being overthrown, defeated, or imprisoned by machines.

To give children with ADHD the best chance to thrive, I believe families, medical professionals and educators should focus on behavioral and academic interventions first and add medication only if needed.

Something has shifted online: We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name anymore. “In the mid 2010s, ambiguity died online—not of natural causes, it was hunted and killed,” the writer and podcast host Biz Sherbert observed recently. Now young people are trying to bring it back. I find this sort of exciting, but also unnerving. What are they going to do with their newfound freedom?

This sort of preconditioning — button-mashing our way through hard opponents before rage quitting — is unregulated, undisciplined, unmatched to the gravity of real conflict. But it conditions us on a haptic level, teaching us to respond to the feel of an object in certain ways. Heidegger makes the case that we cannot come to grasp a hammer’s essence through detached observation, but through its use — only when we’re hammering do we come to an understanding of what a hammer is. Gaming is the means by which the controller is known, revealing the essence of this tool as one of play: we grow to see it as weightless, inconsequential, and the conscious substitution of “fake” tools for “real” ones can’t easily displace the knowledge inscribed into our bodies and hands. The artist Rachel Berger acknowledged this tactile risk when she created an Xbox controller cast in lead and copper to respond to its weaponization. Discussing her piece, she said that the “Xbox controller’s seeming innocence is the key to its danger.” The way it feels in our hands, so light and familiar, makes it unthinkable as a heavy, alien instrument of death.

As I was thinking through this on Friday, Culture Study subscriber and organizer Siena Chiang articulated the framework I needed. In a thread dedicated to the repeal of Roe in the Culture Study Discord, people were asking what so many of us were asking: what do we do. “Get organized,” Siena said. “Not just mobilized, which is showing up at a rally once or twice. Organized means acting in coordination with others who have a long term strategy. Finding a local group doing direct, tangible work and asking them how to help. They’re probably inundated right now so commit to following up in the coming month. Go in person if that’s appropriate, don’t just email. Show up thoughtfully. Be consistent and reliable. Follow their lead.”

Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited

We are unwilling to grapple with the difficult questions of how you educate and pay for the education of a workforce”

Each theses circles around the same basic premise: life online is life lived in the past.

The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

“So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Be outrageous... rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through celebrating the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was!”— Molly Ivins

The thing at the heart of ReAwaken America goes beyond QAnon. Here, disparate conspiracies knit themselves into a single, smothering narrative of good against evil. New prophets have stepped into the void left by the December 20, 2020, disappearance of Q, the movement’s founder, proclaiming they would rather drink bleach than receive a lifesaving vaccine in the name of Jesus. Welcome to QAnon 2.0.

Techno-optimism is the belief that technology will produce more good than bad. To defend techno-optimism, we must first establish what our values are, and then discover the facts that preserve those values. Modest techno-optimism acknowledges the problems in technology, but couples that to an optimism in human institutions and virtues.

But the sites that journalists use most frequently differ from those that the public turns to for news.  

In just a decade, CRISPR has become one of the most celebrated inventions in modern biology. It is swiftly changing how medical researchers study diseases: Cancer biologists are using the method to discover hidden vulnerabilities of tumor cells. Doctors are using CRISPR to edit genes that cause hereditary diseases.

What many of these predictive systems promise is a measure of certainty in situations about which there can be none.

aking up with in the morning, I should investigate this. And I just kind of di

Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, women, in the face of what the fascist leader says is a takeover of the country's media, cultural institutions, schools by these forces. Fascist movements typically, though not invariably, rest on an urban/rural divide. The cities are where there's decadence, where the elites congregate, where there's immigrants, and where there's criminality.

“The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production…. Never read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.”

Reading encourages us to put outside reality on hold, to construct a parallel world in our minds, and retreat into it.

literacy theorists and neuroscientists attest, reading and writing have a profound effect on the way we think

Medical AI’s social impact is not merely a question of practice but also the insufficiency of its promise

Performative design ultimately reduces the practice of design from a wide range of creative, psychological, communication, and problem-solving skills to a narrow practice focused on the reproduction of popular styles and interfaces for the sake of feeling like and being perceived as a skilled designer.

Large companies often have divisions and functions with innovation, incubation and technology scouting all operating independently with no common language or tools Innovation heroics as the sole source of deployment of new capabilities are a sign of a dysfunctional organization Innovation isn’t a single activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons); it is a strategically organized end-to-end process from idea to deployment Somewhere three, four or five levels down the organization are the real centers of innovation – accelerating mission/delivering innovative products/services at high speed The CTO’s job is to: create a common process, language and tools for innovation make them permanent with a written innovation doctrine and policy And don’t ever tell anyone you’re a “short timer”

Stimulated by the creator economy and/or the new Web3 paradigm, and driven by overflowing creativity, these outsiders could well renew the social media model.

Embracing consent as a core topic in psychology requires starting with a working definition of consent. For that, we can look to legal scholars who have identified three main components of consent: competence (an individual must be capable of consenting), knowledge (an individual must be appropriately informed), and freedom (an individual must agree to something voluntarily).

Thinking clearly about technological progress versus technological hype requires us to consider the question of why people buy and adopt new technologies in general. A type of academic analysis called the technology acceptance model identifies two notable factors: perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. That is, we embrace new technologies when they seem easy enough to use and when we believe they will help us do something worthwhile.

We’re either the last generation to ever die, or the first generation to live forever.1

To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

The 1,000 True Fans theory is classic Kevin Kelly. He took something potentially dark—in this case, a long-tail economic model that mashes creatives like a digital-age ore crusher—and found an aspirational alternative narrative.

“replace ‘algorithm’ with ‘audience.'” Instead of positioning videos to perform well for an algorithm, how can they perform best with an audience?

In our current “information age,” or so the story goes, we suffer in new and unique ways. 

that advanced AI is already reflecting our own prejudices and biases.

Social natives ≠ digital natives.

Ms. Herzig started taking these pictures — called 0.5 selfies (pronounced “point five” selfies, and not “half” selfies) — when she upgraded to an iPhone 12 Pro last year and discovered that its back camera had an ultra-wide-angle lens that could make her and her friends look “distorted and crazy.”

few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

Why you NEED to learn Obsidian

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace / John Perry Barlow

We work with students who increasingly crave immediate gratification.

Asking them to do that time and time again all day long is a lost cause. McGonigal calls this willpower fatigue—in essence, our willpower fades the more we use it, so the more frequently we ask students to exert their willpower, the less energy they have to do it next time.

James Clear, who writes about habits and decision-making also discusses this. In his book, “Atomic Habits,” he writes about habits in four stages: cues, cravings, responses and rewards.

What's become clear is that our relationships are experiencing a profound reset. Across generations, having faced a stark new reality, a decades-long trend1 reversed as people are now shifting their energy away from maintaining a wide array of casual connections to cultivating a smaller circle of the people who matter most.

72% of respondents said that the pandemic caused them to reprioritize their closest friends
Young people are most open to using more immersive tech to foster connections (including augmented and virtual reality), though all users indicated that tech will play a bigger role in enhancing personal connections moving forward
37% of people surveyed globally reported reassessing their life priorities as a result of the pandemic

It is far easier to do “crowd control”—to restrain a panicking parent, perhaps—than it is to enter a room currently occupied by a psycho with a semiautomatic rifle.

The goal is to gain “digital sovereignty.”

She briefly notes the idea of “content resisters,” who might consume vinyl records and photocopied zines instead of Spotify and Instagram.

“The more you use the Internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand, and your subjectivity transforms into an algorithmically plottable vector of activity.”

Eichhorn uses the potent term “content capital”—a riff on Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”—to describe the way in which a fluency in posting online can determine the success, or even the existence, of an artist’s work. Where “cultural capital” describes how particular tastes and reference points confer status, “content capital” connotes an aptitude for creating the kind of ancillary content that the Internet feeds upon.

really listening to others might be an act of irrational generosity. People will eat up your attention; it could be hours or years before they ever turn the same attention back on you. Sometimes, joyfully, your listening will yield something new, deliver them somewhere. Sometimes, the person will respond with generosity of their own, and the reciprocity will be powerful. But often, nothing.

Brains learn from other brains, and listening well is the simplest way to draw a thread, open a channel

Rogers held that the basic challenge of listening is this: consciousnesses are isolated from one another, and there are thickets of cognitive noise between them. Cutting through the noise requires effort. Listening well ‘requires that we get inside the speaker, that we grasp, from his point of view, just what it is he is communicating to us.’ This empathic leap is a real effort. It is much easier to judge another’s point of view, analyse it, categorise it. But to put it on, like a mental costume, is very hard.

[W]e are encouraged to listen to our hearts, listen to our inner voices, and listen to our guts, but rarely are we encouraged to listen carefully and with intent to other people.

The flipside of not listening is not questioning

Bad listening signals to the people around you that you don’t care about them

Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently,” Gentzkow argued. “I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it’s all primarily driven by social media, especially when you’re looking at different countries, and across different groups.”

algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.”

“A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” he told me. “The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it’s three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber.” Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks—in the original use of the term—are rarely heterogeneous.

the Google Doc—“Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review”—was made available to the public.

Haidt’s prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.”

To solve creative problems with TRIZ, there are three elements you need to know: It’s been solved before.There are consistent patterns of solutions.Solving contradictions creates breakthrough innovation

TRIZ (a Russian acronym for the ‘Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”). Through TRIZ, Altshuller was now able to demonstrate the science behind creative innovation, not only paving the way for new breakthroughs in technology but establishing a framework of immense value to countless other fields.

Future vertigo gives way to future fatigue

As an autodidact, you will meet many different content formats on the road to understanding. Not all formats are created equal, and some work better than others. Add to that learning preferences, and you’ve got yourself a complicated situation.

To create a culture of vibrant intellectual discovery, getting rid of grades is necessary but far from sufficient.

It is also important to recognize that high-stakes tests are not race-neutral tools capable of promoting racial equality. At their origins more than 100 years ago, standardized tests were used as weapons against communities of color, immigrants, and the poor. Because they were presumed to be objective, test results were used to “prove” that whites, the rich, and the U.S.-born were biologically more intelligent than non-whites, the poor, and immigrants. In turn, the tests provided backing to early concepts of aptitude and IQ, which were then used to justify the race, class, and cultural inequalities of the time.

negative impacts of the use of standardized assessments

Our present-day assessment instruments used by states to measure student achievement are almost invariably developed to measure student content knowledge on a unidimensional scale—a lasting byproduct of the early efforts to order people on an intelligence scale.

Each zebra has its own unique pattern of distinctive stripes, just as humans have their own unique pattern of fingerprints.

So we have a couple of options. We can 1) hurl their electronics to the damn moon or 2) begin to implement some new limits. They won’t like the latter but they really wouldn’t like the former—and there are a few things you can do to make the transition a little less painful for everyone involved.

Nine Changes I Made in the Shift from Busy to Productive

Qanon’s particular kind of literacy is as much about making and sharing content as it is consuming it.

“When rumors start to circulate, they can easily become fodder for a disinformation campaign when politicians and the news pick them up in tandem,” said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “This creates a feedback loop — trading misinformation up the media chain until we all have to reckon with it.”mps._execAd("boxinline",0,1,false);

The earpiece conspiracy theory is an example of what disinformation experts call “trading up the chain,” in which the sheer virality of a meme or a conspiracy theory forces mainstream outlets to cover it, giving it a patina of credibility it otherwise would not have.

specifically

rarely reheat leftover pizza

an O’Byrne,assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “Power and money ultimately influence decisions made by democratic bodies. With growing unrest,citizens can use social media and current/new digital tools to make themselves heard. Ultimately this will be pushed back again by existing powerholders and nothing may ultimately change. The existing powerholders will continue to exert their influence, and citizens will be left to continue to voice their opinions by shouting into the cyberverse.”

Social media research ethics faces a contradiction between big data positivism and research ethics fundamentalism. Big data positivists tend to say, ‘Most social media data is public data. It is like data in a newspaper. I can therefore gather big data without limits. Those talking about privacy want to limit the progress of social science’. This position disregards any engagement with ethics and has a bias towards quantification. The ethical framework Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics (Townsend and Wallace, 2016) that emerged from an ESRC-funded project tries to avoid both extremes and to take a critical-realist position: It recommends that social scientists neither ignore nor fetishize research ethics when studying digital media.Research ethics fundamentalists in contrast tend to say,You have to get informed consent for every piece of social media data you gather because we cannot assume automatic consent, users tend not to read platform’s privacy policies, they may assume some of their data is private and they may not agree to their data being used in research. Even if you anonymize the users you quote, many can still be identified in the networked online environment.

Research ethics concerns issues, such as privacy, anonymity, informed consent and the sensitivity of data. Given that social media is part of society’s tendency to liquefy and blur the boundaries between the private and the public, labour/leisure, production/consumption (Fuchs, 2015a: Chapter 8), research ethics in social media research is par-ticularly complex.

Discourses tend to be intertextual and interdiscursive (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001: 39). They interlink various texts, discourses and contexts. Social media data are therefore not independent from other media but tend to be multimodal and connected with texts in traditional media. An example is that many political tweets tend to link to articles in the online versions of mainstream newspapers. Studying social media therefore does not substitute the study of other media but often requires studying various media’s intercon-nection. Discourses are texts that stand in particular societal, political-economic, histori-cal, cultural contexts. Understanding them requires taking a holistic point of view, that is, to situate them in history and society.

One important aspect of critical social media research is the study of not just ideolo-gies of the Internet but also ideologies on the Internet. Critical discourse analysis and ideology critique as research method have only been applied in a limited manner to social media data. Majid KhosraviNik (2013) argues in this context that ‘critical dis-course analysis appears to have shied away from new media research in the bulk of its research’ (p. 292). Critical social media discourse analysis is a critical digital method for the study of how ideologies are expressed on social media in light of society’s power structures and contradictions that form the texts’ contexts.

Besides conducting qualitative social research with social media users in order to learn about their experiences, interpretations and perspectives, critical digital methods should not completely discard tools for digital data collection and analytics but take their use into a new direction. Critical digital methods should certainly engage in collecting and analys-ing samples of data from social media platforms with the help of tools and services, such as DiscoverText, Tweet Archivist, Netvizz, NodeXL, Gephi, NCapture/NVivo, Sodato, Import.io, InfoExtractor, Google Web Scraper, TAGS, SocioViz and so on.

t has, for example, been common to study contemporary revolutions and protests (such as the 2011 Arab Spring) by collecting large amounts of tweets and analysing them. Such analyses can, however, tell us nothing about the degree to which activists use social and other media in protest communication, what their motivations are to use or not use social media, what their experiences have been, what problems they encounter in such uses and so on. If we only analyse big data, then the one-sided conclusion that con-temporary rebellions are Facebook and Twitter revolutions is often the logical conse-quence (see Aouragh, 2016; Gerbaudo, 2012). Digital methods do not outdate but require traditional methods in order to avoid the pitfall of digital positivism. Traditional socio-logical methods, such as semi-structured interviews, participant observation, surveys, content and critical discourse analysis, focus groups, experiments, creative methods, par-ticipatory action research, statistical analysis of secondary data and so on, have not lost importance. We do not just have to understand what people do on the Internet but also why they do it, what the broader implications are, and how power structures frame and shape online activities

The rise of big data and social media has resulted in particular transformations of academia. Deborah Lupton (2015) has, in this context, coined the notion of digital soci-ology. She argues that digital sociology consists of (a) professional digital practice so that sociologists employ ‘digital tools as part of sociological practice – to build networks, construct an online profile, publicize and share research and instruct students’ (p. 15); (b) the investigation of the use of digital technology; (c) digital data analysis, which has also been characterized as the rise of digital methods (Rogers, 2013); and (d) critical digital sociology, the fourth aspect of digital sociology. Lupton (2015) defines critical digital sociology as the ‘reflexive analysis of digital technologies informed by social and cul-tural theory’ (p. 16).All forms of social analysis reflect society in complex ways. Critical digital sociology is a particular reflexion of and on digital technologies’ role in society. It is a theoretical approach grounded in critical and Marxist theory that tries to understand capitalism and domination as well as their possible alternatives. But one should note that there is a con-tradiction between critical sociology as digital sociology’s fourth dimension and big data analytics that is part of Lupton’s third dimension of digital sociology.

Marx is certainly not the only relevant critical social theorist who matters for under-standing social media. The critical study of social media should be based on a broad range of critical theories of society. The crisis of capitalism and the devastating social and political effects of austerity and neoliberalism have made evident that political econ-omy can no longer be ignored in the study of society. This does not mean that the econ-omy determines society but rather that all social phenomena have an economy and are economic and non-economic at the same time (Fuchs, 2015a).

There are at least six elements in Marx’s works that are of key relevance for understanding communications today (Fuchs, 2016b; Fuchs and Mosco, 2016a, 2016b):(1) Praxis communication: Marx was not just a critical political economist but also a critical journalist and polemicist, whose writing style can inspire critical thought today.(2) Global communication: Marx stressed the connection of communication technol-ogy and globalization. In an age, where there are lots of talk about both the Internet and globalization, we should remind ourselves that technology-mediated globalization has had a longer history.(3) Dialectical philosophy: Marx elaborated a critical theory of technology that is based on dialectical logic. Dialectical philosophy can help us to avoid one-sided analyses of the media (Fuchs, 2014c).(4) Class analysis: Marx stressed the relevance of the connection of labour, value, commodities and capital. He analysed modern society as a class society. Focusing on class today can counter the positivism of analyses of society as information society, net-work society, knowledge-based society, post-industrial society and so on.(5) Crisis and social struggles: Marx described class struggle and crisis as factors in the historical dynamics of class societies. Class structures and struggles are in complex ways reflected on and entangled into mediated communication.(6) Alternatives: Marx envisioned alternatives to capitalism and domination. Given capitalist crisis and monopoly control of social media today, it is important to envision alternatives to capitalism and capitalist social media.

The term ‘social media’ takes on different meanings depending on what concept of the social is foregrounded. Example understandings of the social are Émile Durkheim’s concept of social facts, Max Weber’s categories of social action and social relations, Ferdinand Tönnies’ notion of community or Karl Marx’s understanding of the social as social problems and social co-production that implies the need for social ownership

Studying digital and social media could take inspiration by the tradition going back to Karl Marx and other critical theorists

Challenging big data analytics as the mainstream of digital media studies requires us to think about theoretical (ontological), methodological (epistemological) and ethical dimensions of an alternative paradigm

Who communicates what to whom on social media with what effects? It forgets users’ subjectivity, experiences, norms, values and interpre-tations, as well as the embeddedness of the media into society’s power structures and social struggles. We need a paradigm shift from administrative digital positivist big data analytics towards critical social media research. Critical social media research combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods and critical-realist social media research ethics.

Jürgen Habermas (1971), we can say that there is a danger that digital positivism advances an ‘absolutism of pure [digital, quantitative] methodology’ (p. 5), forgets about academia’s educational role, falls short of fully understanding ‘the meaning of knowledge’ (p. 69) in the information society at large and is an ‘immunization of the [Internet] sciences against philosophy’ (p. 67).

de-emphasis of philosophy, theory, critique and qualitative analysis advances what Paul Lazarsfeld (2004 [1941]) termed administrative research, research that is predominantly concerned with how to make technologies and administration more efficient and effective.

Big data analytics’ trouble is that it often does not connect statistical and computational research results to a broader analysis of human meanings, interpretations, experiences, atti-tudes, moral values, ethical dilemmas, uses, contradictions and macro-sociological implica-tions of social media.

Such funding initiatives privilege quantitative, com-putational approaches over qualitative, interpretative ones.

There is a tendency in Internet Studies to engage with theory only on the micro- and middle-range levels that theorize single online phenomena but neglect the larger picture of society as a totality (Rice and Fuller, 2013). Such theories tend to be atomized. They just focus on single phenomena and miss soci-ety’s big picture

"consuming

"literacy"

educator

authors can use their own words as a means of resistance against publishers who technically own the author’s words in today’s ‘property rights’–oriented

However, in the present era of publishing, those rights are consistently being called into question. Gennaro (2012) is particularly frank about how copyright law has come to privilege publishers at the expense of those who created the work in the first place: ‘Once you have transferred copyright to a journal [in order to publish] you cannot ethically use the words that you have written in another journal article; you no longer own those words’ (p. 109). Nevertheless, Bently (1994) remarks on Roland Barthes’ contention that once text has been published, the words no longer belong to that author or anyone else for that matter.

Despite, or perhaps as a result of, this wide variation of what is seen to constitute self-plagiarism, there is much debate about the concept. The very definition of plagiarism as theft causes many to argue that one cannot steal from one’s self, and therefore, self-plagiarism is an oxymoron (Cronin, 2013) which purposefully ‘invoke[s] the pejorative tone of the root-word’ (Clarke, 2009: Section 2, paragraph 4). Some contend that self-plagiarism is academic fraud or misconduct (e.g. Bretag and Carapiet, 2007; Martin, 2013), while others have argued that scholars can, do, and even should reuse their written words and ideas, within reason and without citation

As a form of perceived transgression, self-plagiarism has instigated a change in guidelines of leading professional associations regarding ethical publishing behavior in organization and management studies. Honig et al. (2014) note that the Academy of Management’s code of ethical conduct has changed from ‘an implicit recognition that a certain amount of self-plagiarism is acceptable, as long as “different audiences and outlets” are employed’ (p. 128) to a more stringent and explicit exhortation to cite any and all words and ideas published, unpublished, or electronic, even if they are one’s own (Martin, 2013).

That process is one of the more rewarding aspects of our profession. It's an opportunity to take good ideas and make them better by a series of feedback-and-revision loops. That process, I'm certain, reminds us of some pretty basic truths about learning and the intellectual life: That good ideas must be articulated and tested in public forums, for example, or that every presentation must be tailored to fit its specific audience, or that even our best ideas should be considered provisional ones, always pending new information.

defining literacy as the "ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts".

The key to literacy is reading development, a progression of skills which begins with the ability to understand spoken words and decode written words, and which culminates in the deep understanding of text.

Social justice education does not merely examine difference or diversity but pays careful attention to the systems of power and privilege that give rise to social inequality, and encourages students to critically examine oppression on institutional, cultural, and individual levels in search of opportunities for social action in the service of social change.

include student empowerment, the equitable distribution of resources and social responsibility, and her processes to include democracy, a student-centered focus, dialogue, and an analysis of power.

Simply put, a digital footprint is the record or trail left by the things you do online. Your social media activity, the info on your personal website, your browsing history, your online subscriptions, any photo galleries and videos you’ve uploaded — essentially, anything on the Internet with your name on it.

Be careful when reading about “science” as reported by the news media.

a “techno-panic” is simply a moral panic that centers around societal fears about a specific contemporary technology (or technological activity) instead of merely the content flowing over that technology or medium.

Technopanics have the following characteristics. First, they focus on new media forms, which currently take the form of computer–mediated technologies. Second, technopanics generally pathologize young people’s use of this media, like hacking, file–sharing, or playing violent video games. Third, this cultural anxiety manifests itself in an attempt to modify or regulate young people’s behavior, either by controlling young people or the creators or producers of media products.

“fear appeal arguments

Students with access to a computer and the Internet are able to find the answers to not only simple questions, but also incredibly complex problems.

Students are acted upon,but they are represented as lacking self-determination.

As these examples suggest, activist educators attempt to understand and improve their practices while simultaneously developing new understandings and relationships.

This aspect has led some to claim practitioner research shares many qualities of social movements (e.g., Campano, 2009; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

Activist teacher researchers, by contrast, begin with the assumption that there is much that they don’tknow about students. Like theorists who have highlighted the importance of regarding disability as “a social location, complexly embodied” (Siebers, 2008, p. 14) rather than an individual pathology, activisteducators take social location—their own and their students’—seriously. The normal curve model is by definition generic rather than local: Students are charted and evaluated from a distance

Knowing an injustice is taking place may make educators feel all the more helpless,without a productive avenue of resistance.

As Brian Street has (1984) noted, literacy practices are neither neutral nor “autonomous,” and as researchers we must be attentive to worldviews and issues of power and identity that underlie them.

Everyday acts of resistance require literacy educators to navigate seemingly indissoluble contradictions.

For literacy educators, consciousness of inequality is only the starting point for resistance, a basis for asking more immediatequestions: What happenswhen literacy classrooms are sites of activism? How do teachers work within and against the systems they are a part of to disrupt or challenge ideologies of social reproduction through the literacy curriculum? How does this involve more capacious understandings of the literate practices students bring to schools? What are the challenges teacher activists face when they strive to work within and against an educational system that is structured around normal curve ideologies? How might we re-envision the variance of student potentials, in a way that is not organized around a hierarchy of academic ability or essentialized notions of intelligence?

Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneously presented information

intentional about learning

can’t be created

Do

global communities

malleable

among members of particular groups

continued evolution

21st Century Skills (21C Skills)

reach and meet the growing number of diverse audiences using the web

Despite the allure of easy-to-follow rules that address parental concerns, screen time recommendations have drawn increasing criticism from a wide range of experts.

Experts like Odgers say we'll never get good answers about the effects of screen time, unless we start asking better questions. And that means being honest with ourselves about what we mean by "screen time" in the first place.

We all know what "literacy" means, right? Well, maybe not.

No, every human needs Vitamin D. While a big library can be very satisfying, do not get bullied into it. That’s as bad as being bullied into getting rid of it.

Right now I’m on a cherry tomato + bagel seasoning kick, but I’ve been known to get nutritional yeast involved.

So if you are tired during the day, check that you’re giving yourself the opportunity to get 7 to 9 hours.

4. Use it as F.U.E.L.When (not if) you experience these trolls, you can either fuel their fire or you can use the experience to fuel your own fire. When 'this' happens, I like to think positive: F - find humor in every obstacle or situation (big smile) U - unleash something new + amazing in your own business E - enjoy your mocha + your own great moments (@#$%@ them) L - love on your clients + your biz even more Summary: never let anyone steal your joy! #unleashthebiz

The truth is, none of us are born scientists. When we say "children are natural scientists", what we mean is that they're naturally inquisitive and willing to experiment in ways adults are generally trained out of. We have to be taught to channel that inquisitiveness into productive pathways, both in STEM and non-STEM fields. And we have to do a helluva lot better at not reinforcing the message that scientists are intrinsically smarter than non-scientists, and that only the geniuses can do science.

By framing "genius" as something intrinsic rather than situational, we deny even the potential for achievement to a huge fraction of the population. As paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Panda's Thumb, where he wrote, "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

The problem is far worse when used to generalize about groups, such as gender and especially race. When combined with the cultural belief that only the "brainy" are worthy of science training, it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: only certain white men are inherently "smart enough", as decided primarily by other white men. You'll hear (and I'll bet cash money that someone will argue in the comments) that African-American underrepresentation in science is because they're not "smart" or "motivated" enough, not that black-majority school districts are often underfunded, lacking teachers, supplies, and other necessities for STEM prep — not to mention daily challenges to their authority and intelligence for those who do earn STEM degrees.

To make matters worse, "intelligence" itself is weaponized by the status quo against people of color and white women. That's especially evident in the continuing battles over the interpretation of IQ test results.

This problem disproportionately affects white girls and children of color. (There's a complicated exception for some children of Asian heritage, who have another set of stereotypes to cope with.) School-aged girls slightly outperform boys in math and science, but men take up a higher fraction of positions at each successive level of academia, from undergraduate science majors to faculty positions to administrative positions with the power to hire and promote. In other words, the message of braininess corresponding to scientific skill is applied more heavily to boys and men than to women.

Science writer Kat Arney delved into this issue in detail in a recent column for the (UK) Royal Society of Chemistry. As she points out, the problems with the "brainy scientist" stereotype are manifold: that science is a meritocracy, and that non-scientists are somehow less valuable.

These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”

while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

About a third of 18- to 49-year-olds (32%) correctly identified all five of the factual statements as factual, compared with two-in-ten among those ages 50 and older. A similar pattern emerges for the opinion statements. Among 18- to 49-year-olds, 44% correctly identified all five opinion statements as opinions, compared with 26% among those ages 50 and older.

In a survey conducted Feb. 22 to March 4, 2018, the Center asked U.S. adults to categorize five factual statements and five opinion statements. As a previous report revealed, about a quarter of Americans overall could accurately classify all five factual statements (26%) and about a third could classify all five opinion statements (35%).

The idea that researchers can, and should, quantify something as slippery as “engagement” is a red flag for many of the experts I talked to. As Alper put it, “anyone who has spent time in any kind of classroom will know that attention isn’t something well-measured by the face. The body as a whole provides many more cues.”

The NYCLU found nothing in the documents outlining policies for accessing data collected by the cameras, or what faces would be fed to the system in the first place. And based on emails acquired through the same FOIL request, the NYCLU noted, Lockport administrators appeared to have a poor grasp on how to manage access to internal servers, student files, and passwords for programs and email accounts. “The serious lack of familiarity with cybersecurity displayed in the email correspondence we received and complete absence of common sense redactions of sensitive private information speaks volumes about the district’s lack of preparation to safely store and collect biometric data on the students, parents and teachers who pass through its schools every day,” an editor’s note to the NYCLU’s statement on the Lockport documents reads.

A school using the platform installs a set of high-quality cameras, good enough to detect individual student faces, before determining exactly which biometrics it thinks must set off the system. Crucially, it’s up to each school to input these facial types, which it might source from local police and mug-shot databases, or school images of former students it doesn’t want on its premises. With those faces loaded, the Aegis system goes to work, scanning each face it sees and comparing it with the school’s database. If no match is found, the system throws that face away. If one is, Aegis sends an alert to the control room.

It might sound like dystopian science fiction, but this could be the not-too-distant future for schools across America and beyond. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, for instance, have already begun publishing models for how to use facial recognition and machine learning to predict student engagement. A Seattle company recently offered up an open-source facial recognition system for use in schools, while startups are already selling “engagement detectors” to online learning courses in France and China. Advocates for these systems believe the technology will make for smarter students, better teachers, and safer schools. But not everyone is convinced this kind of surveillance apparatus belongs in the classroom, that these applications even work, or that they won’t unfairly target minority faces.

But to assume that even to ponder sharing the results of scholarship amounts to dumbing down, by default, is a new low in this term for new lows. Posturing as if it’s a problem with the audience, rather than with the expert who refuses to address that audience, is perverse.One thing you learn when writing for an audience outside your expertise is that, contrary to the assumption that people might prefer the easiest answers, they are all thoughtful and curious about topics of every kind. After all, people have areas in their own lives in which they are the experts. Everyone is capable of deep understanding.

Like all experts, academics are used to speaking to a specialized audience. That’s true no matter their discipline, from sociology to geotechnical engineering to classics. When you speak to a niche audience among peers, a lot of understanding comes for free. You can use technical language, make presumptions about prior knowledge, and assume common goals or contexts. When speaking to a general audience, you can’t take those circumstances as a given.

Scholars still have a lot of anxiety about this practice. Many of those relate to the university careers and workplaces: evaluation, tenure, reactions from their peers, hallway jealousy, and so on. These are real worries, and as a scholar and university professor myself, I empathize with many of them.

The internet has made it easier than ever to reach a lot of readers quickly. It has birthed new venues for publication and expanded old ones. At the same time, a sense of urgency of current affairs, from politics to science, technology to the arts, has driven new interest in bringing scholarship to the public directly.

These findings reflect a broader discussion about the digital divide’s impact on America’s youth. Numerous policymakers and advocates have expressed concern that students with less access to certain technologies may fall behind their more digitally connected peers. There is some evidence that teens who have access to a home computer are more likely to graduate from high school when compared with those who don’t.

Lastly, 35% of teens say they often or sometimes have to do their homework on their cellphone. Although it is not uncommon for young people in all circumstances to complete assignments in this way, it is especially prevalent among lower-income teens. Indeed, 45% of teens who live in households earning less than $30,000 a year say they at least sometimes rely on their cellphone to finish their homework.