We have basically told these companies that the smart thing to do, the shareholder thing to do, is to lie and to break the law.
Now technology is 99% about shareholder value and 1% about the betterment of humanity.
The markets are failing.
Source: Scott Galloway Says Amazon, Apple, Facebook, And Google should be broken up – YouTube
…find a love for identity politics…so that we can draw battle lines between those who want shame to grow on trees and those who want to overcome it.
Source: Video Episode 310: Live from the New York Comedy Festival 2018 @58:30 | Harmontown
Insightful monologue on shame and vulnerability starting @51:00.
Shame is not a weapon. Behaviorism too often forgets that. Drawing lines against behaviorism in education draws lines against shame and for equity literacy.
More on shame:
Shame is toxic. It is the difference between “sorry I did” and “sorry I am.”
Source: Shame is not a Weapon. – Love Learning….
Guilt is feeling bad about something you did, something you can fix. Shame is feeling bad about who you are.
Shame cuts off connection and thrives on hiding.
Dyslexia is a particularly powerful form of shame, and it involves a lot of vulnerability.
Vulnerability can be defined as true courage.
Shame is a very lonely moment.
Reading disabilities often match in intensity the level of shame associated with incest.
Dyslexia is a perfect storm of shame.
- Arrives at the time you are first being evaluated.
- Made harsher by lack of explanation. Fail without context.
- Reinforced by peers and institutions
Source: Ben Foss on Dyslexia and Shame
The closet can only stop you from being seen. It is not shame-proof.
And that is what happens when you soak one child in shame and give permission to another to hate.
Source: Hannah Gadsby: Nanette – Netflix
See also: Hannah Gadsby on Shame, Power, and Comedy
We should spend more time talking about how we change the environment that surrounds people and not the people themselves.
Source: The Gift: LD/ADHD Reframed
“Any authority within the space must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of the community. And this depends on a recognition of the power dynamics and hierarchies that this kind of learning environment must actively and continuously work against. There is no place for shame in the work of education.”
Source: Dear Student
Along with phrases appropriated directly from the so-called alt-right, a small group of neotraditionalist educators have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make their reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary. Criticize a school for how it treats students, and you’re ‘school shaming’. Talk about structural racism and curriculum, and you’re playing ‘identity politics’. Oppose calls to shore up the authority of teachers in the face of supposedly out-of-control youth, and you’re ‘virtue-signalling’.
‘Slut shaming’ is an attack on women and their identity in a patriarchal society; it’s part of a power dynamics meant to keep women in their place. By extension, we might imagine that the phrase ‘school shaming’ similarly works to expose a harmful power dynamic where schools who publicly advocate for ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards students are somehow oppressed by people who criticize those policies on social media. However, the concept of ‘school shaming’ gets the power dynamics exactly backwards: schools that shame students through authoritarian discipline policies should be open to criticism. Ironically, those who use the phrase ‘school shaming’ are looking for a nuanced and sympathetic treatment of ‘zero tolerance’ schools that the students who attend those schools are denied. Unlike the empty concept of ‘school shaming’ which seems to have been invented by Andrew Smith (@oldandrewuk), ‘student shaming’ functions as a critical concept to name what has long been called ‘deficit thinking’ about students. When a school looks for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff”, that’s in effect asking for teachers who know how to shame students.
Source: ‘School shaming’ and the reactionary politics of neotrads – Long View on Education
Along with phrases appropriated directly from the so-called alt-right, a small group of neotraditionalist educators have invented the concept of ‘school shaming’ to make their reactionary politics seem, well, less reactionary. Criticize a school for how it treats students, and you’re ‘school shaming’. Talk about structural racism and curriculum, and you’re playing ‘identity politics’. Oppose calls to shore up the authority of teachers in the face of supposedly out-of-control youth, and you’re ‘virtue-signalling’.
‘Slut shaming’ is an attack on women and their identity in a patriarchal society; it’s part of a power dynamics meant to keep women in their place. By extension, we might imagine that the phrase ‘school shaming’ similarly works to expose a harmful power dynamic where schools who publicly advocate for ‘zero tolerance’ policies towards students are somehow oppressed by people who criticize those policies on social media. However, the concept of ‘school shaming’ gets the power dynamics exactly backwards: schools that shame students through authoritarian discipline policies should be open to criticism. Ironically, those who use the phrase ‘school shaming’ are looking for a nuanced and sympathetic treatment of ‘zero tolerance’ schools that the students who attend those schools are denied. Unlike the empty concept of ‘school shaming’ which seems to have been invented by Andrew Smith (@oldandrewuk), ‘student shaming’ functions as a critical concept to name what has long been called ‘deficit thinking’ about students. When a school looks for teachers who “know how to act appalled over the little stuff”, that’s in effect asking for teachers who know how to shame students.
Source: ‘School shaming’ and the reactionary politics of neotrads – Long View on Education
“Any authority within the space must be aimed at fostering agency in all the members of the community. And this depends on a recognition of the power dynamics and hierarchies that this kind of learning environment must actively and continuously work against. There is no place for shame in the work of education.”
Source: Dear Student
HR folks at my company are including their pronouns in their email signatures. Nice.
I asked them to invent things for us, the cyborgs who are already here, already alive.
Most cyborgs are disabled people who interface with technology. We depend on a computer for some major bodily function. The tryborg – a word I invented – is a nondisabled person who has no fundamental interface. The tryborg is a counterfeit cyborg. The tryborg tries to integrate with technology through the latest product or innovation. Tryborgs were the first to wear Google Glass. Today they wait in line for Snapchat Spectacles. The tryborg adopts the pose of a cyborg. But no matter how hard they try, the tryborg remains a pretender.
The tryborg may be an early adopter, a pro gamer, a TED Talker, a content creator or a follower. The tryborg may be an expert who writes about cyborgs for screenplays, lab reports or academic journals. The tryborg may just be a guy named Bob who works in I.T. and collects Real Dolls. Whatever the case: Tryborgs can only imagine what life is like for us.
The tryborg is always distanced by metaphor, guesswork and desire. When my leg suddenly beeps and buzzes and goes into “dead mode” – the knee stiffens; I walk like a penguin – the tryborg is alive without batteries. When I sound like a bomb in a liquor store, the tryborg hurries on, nonelectronic.
Source: Opinion | The Dawn of the ‘Tryborg’ – The New York Times
Ed-tech mindfulness, like other mindset marketing, disguises the ways they kill us.
A great example of how to check that you are accommodating diverse learners was shared in the Panel at the end of the conference: Walk through your learning environment as different personas (think different ethnicities, students in wheelchairs, someone with ASD etc.) and see how inclusive it is. Do the spaces allow for you to move easily through, have a sense of belonging, provoke great thinking?
Source: Learning Spaces Aotearoa – Steve Mouldey
Even better, instead of just adopting a persona, find neurodivergent and disabled people to patrol flow.
Even better than designing for is designing with. Neurodivergent & disabled students are great flow testers. They’ll thoroughly dogfood your school UX. There are great opportunities for project & passion-based learning in giving students agency to audit their context and design something better.
Source: Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism – Ryan Boren
Parallel to the topic of who designs for children lies a bigger question: Do children need design at all? Or, rather, how might they be enabled to design the toys they need and experiences they desire for themselves? The act of making that designers find so satisfying is built into early childhood education, but as they grow, many children lose opportunities to create their own environment, bounded by a text-centric view of education and concerns for safety. Despite adults’ desire to create a safer, softer child-centric world, something got lost in translation. Jane Jacobs said, of the child in the designed-for-childhood environment: “Their homes and playgrounds, so orderly looking, so buffered from the muddled, messy intrusions of the great world, may accidentally be ideally planned for children to concentrate on television, but for too little else their hungry brains require.” Our built environment is making kids less healthy, less independent, and less imaginative. What those hungry brains require is freedom. Treating children as citizens, rather than as consumers, can break that pattern, creating a shared spatial economy centered on public education, recreation, and transportation safe and open for all. Tracing the design of childhood back to its nineteenth-century origins shows how we came to this place, but it also reveals the building blocks of resistance to fenced-in fun.
We cannot build an effective, an empathetic, a working User Experience unless we build a User Interface that kids won’t turn away from. And our schools are User Interfaces. Our schools are the “how” our children interact with education. Every door, wall, room, teacher, rule, chair, desk, window, digital device, book, hall pass are part of the User Interface, and that User Interface defines the User Experience.
And we cannot begin to understand the User Experience we need until we get fully into the heads of our users. That’s true in web and programming design, its true in retail and restaurant design, and its absolutely true as we design our schools. This understanding can have complex analytical paths – and those are important, and it has a committed caring component – but it also has an essential empathetic underpinning, and maybe you can begin working on that underpinning in a serious way before this next school year begins.
Source: SpeEdChange: Writing for Empathy
The irony of turning schools into therapeutic institutions when they generate so much stress and anxiety seems lost on policy-makers who express concern about children’s mental health.
Source: ClassDojo app takes mindfulness to scale in public education | code acts in education
rnbn 