it’s no wonder that Christian communities that insist on “biblical inerrancy,” a hallmark of evangelicalism, exhibit abusive dynamics. If you want to understand the Christian extremism that represents the single greatest threat to democracy and human rights in America today, it’s important to understand how authoritarian Christians read the Bible.

True believers become so emotionally invested in their need to be feel justified that they often cannot face the ego threat of admitting that in fact they have not been radically transformed. Adults who join cults or cult-like religious groups such as conservative evangelical churches usually do so in an attempt to address some serious source of trauma in their lives. The children raised in these toxic faith communities then experience generational trauma. Indeed, psychologically, fundamentalism may be described as a misdirected response to trauma perpetuated communally and generationally. All of this is highly conducive to the proliferation of hypocrisy and abuse.

Evangelicals espouse a very dark view of human nature associated with their approach original sin, and sometimes with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. The belief that, without being “saved” by God, we are entirely corrupt, teaches us to doubt our own doubts. Ultimately, authoritarian Christianity leads to us learning to gaslight ourselves, and that is difficult to unlearn.

If you were raised in Jesus Land, even if you were not physically or sexually abused, you were spiritually abused, gaslighted, manipulated, and controlled, though you may find it hard to own this truth. When abuse was your “normal,” it can be difficult to start seeing it. It can also be emotionally fraught to start recognizing your friends’ and family’s behaviors as abusive. Learning to do so is painful but ultimately empowering. Another reason it is never easy to extricate oneself from Jesus Land is that the social and psychological costs of leaving an authoritarian faith community are high. Still. once you begin to see that the abusive ethos of Jesus Land itself is the problem, the source of your inner turmoil, you can begin to relieve the cognitive dissonance and to counter the negative self-talk and harmful old thought patterns with new patterns.

Remember this: you are your own person, you are morally autonomous, and you own your story. The more we talk back about why we reject the fear-based faith of our fathers, finding the voices in which to tell our stories and refusing to allow authoritarian Christians to frame them, the easier it will become not only for us to realize ourselves authentically, but also for others to escape from Jesus Land. If you are struggling with this, be gentle and patient with yourself. Authentic transformation, after all, does not happen overnight. Eventually you will find your way forward, whether in affirming and progressive faith or outside of organized religion and/or spirituality altogether.

Source: Escape from Jesus Land: On Recognizing Evangelical Abuse and Finding the Strength to Reject the Faith of Our Fathers – Not Your Mission Field

I updated “Straws, Neurodiversity, and Disability” with selections from “Why Disabled People Need Plastic Straws – Eater”.

This is my favorite of the strawban pieces. It gets into the problems with accommodation. Here are some favorite passages, but go read the whole thing.

It’s not easy or pleasant asking for help in public spaces like restaurants, because you never know what attitudes you’ll encounter: indifference, pity, or outright rejection. I don’t see these types of help as special treatment or inspirational for someone to surreptitiously post on social media as feel-good clickbait; they’re simply examples of excellent hospitality.

Starbucks’s announcement – and the news that Vancouver and Seattle recently banned plastic straws, with other cities, like New York and San Francisco, contemplating proposals – struck a raw nerve with me for several reasons (and I won’t even get into the problems of recyclable plastics and greenwashing):

  1. Plastic straws are considered unnecessary items used by environmentalists as a “gateway plastic” to engage the public on a larger conversation about waste. According to Dune Ives, executive director of the Lonely Whale Foundation, “Plastic straws are social tools and props, the perfect conversation starter.” But one person’s social prop is another person’s conduit for nutrition. It’s as if people who rely on straws – older adults, children, and disabled people – don’t matter and that our needs are less important than the environment. I feel erased by these attitudes.

  2. Plastic straws are ubiquitous, whether we like it or not. Once you have something that provides access, it is difficult and harmful to take it away from a marginalized community that depends on it. I live in a world that was never built for me, and every little bit of access is treasured and hard-won. Bans on plastic straws are regressive, not progressive.

The plastic straw ban is symptomatic of larger systemic issues when it comes to the continual struggle for disability rights and justice. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) turns 28 next week, on July 26, and yet people with disabilities continue to face barriers at eating establishments. The ADA is considered by many small businesses (and the National Restaurant Association) as a source of frivolous lawsuits brought by greedy lawyers and clients. Ableist attitudes that cast disabled people as “fakers” or “complainers” obscure the very real and painful experiences of not being able to eat and drink freely.

As demand increases for alternatives to plastic, so do the voices from the disability community sharing their concerns about how these bans will create additional labor, hurdles, and difficulties. On social media, many disabled people have been sharing their stories and keeping it 100 percent real. I observed and experienced all sorts of microaggressions and outright dismissal of what disabled people are saying online.

This is the experience of living in a world that was never built for you: having to explain and defend yourself while providing infinite amounts of labor at the demand of people who do not recognize their nondisabled privilege. There are days when I want to put this on repeat: “Believe disabled people. Period.” I refuse to apologize or feel shame about the way my body works and how I navigate in the world. Everyone consumes goods and creates waste. We all do what we can to reduce, reuse, and recycle. We should recognize that different needs require different solutions. I’m not a monster for using plastic straws or other plastic items that allow me to live, such as oxygen tubes.

What people don’t understand with bans like this is that having to ask for a plastic straw puts an unfair burden, and scrutiny, on people with disabilities. They should not have to prove a medical need or even disclose their disability status when having a fun night out with friends. This is not hospitality.

Source: Why Disabled People Need Plastic Straws – Eater

Equity Literacy and Psychological Safety

Equity literacy and psychological safety, not behaviorism and mindset marketing.

On Twitter, that’s one line standing alone. On a blog, a reductionist aphorism can show its work.

Equity Literacy and Structural Ideology

Psychological Safety

Behaviorism and Mindset Marketing

If I had a desert island EdTech, it would be blogging, and that is not just in a nostalgic sense. No other educational technology has continued to develop, as the proliferation of WordPress sites attests, and also remain so full of potential. I’ve waxed lyrical about academic blogging many times before, but for almost every ed tech that comes along, I find myself thinking that a blog version would be better: e-portfolios, VLEs, MOOCs, OERs, social networks. Sometimes it’s like Jim Groom and Alan Levine have taken over my brain, and I don’t even mind. I still harbour dreams of making students effective bloggers will be a prime aspect of graduateness. Nothing develops and anchors your online identity quite like a blog.

Source: 25 Years of EdTech – 2003: Blogs – The Ed Techie 

No other edtech has continued to develop and solidify (as the proliferation of WordPress sites attests) and also remain so full of potential. For almost every edtech that comes along—e-portfolios, VLEs, MOOCs, OER, social media—I find myself thinking that a blog version would be better. Nothing develops and anchors an online identity quite like a blog.

Source: Twenty Years of Edtech | EDUCAUSE

Blogging is durable, open, and democratic indie ed-tech.

https://rnbn.blog/tag/blogging/
https://boren.blog/tag/blogging/

As Ryan indicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.

Source: Reply to Ryan Boren et al on the WordPress Link Manager, Calypso, and Indie Blogging

Indie ed-tech link bomb:

Bringing Safety to the Serendipity in Digital Pedagogy
http://hackeducation.com/2017/11/30/top-ed-tech-trends-intro
Communication is oxygen. Build a districtwide collaboration infrastructure and an open by default culture.
Mindset Marketing, Behaviorism, and Deficit Ideology
Default to Open: Open Education, Open Government, Open Data, Open Web, and Open Source
Hyperlinks and Education in the Disinformation Age
Feed Readers, Micro.blog, and Digital Pedagogy
Bring the backchannel forward. Written communication is the great social equalizer.

We also believe the path to becoming a better reader relies on becoming a writer. Children excel in production based literacy environments. The critical evaluation of online sources is no different. Any classroom exercise around sourcing must involve readers reflecting on their process and interacting in social spaces for reading. We believe the best way to do have students understand how the web shapes meaning is to use the web to make meaning. Part of any intervention should embrace students publishing on their own domain with parents and students in control of their privacy.

We also believe teachers should be central in educational research. Part of any intervention must encourage educators to build, share and remix resources while reflecting on their learning in the open. We can not tackle critical evaluation alone. Furthermore we must recognize that our teaching corps requires a basic understanding of how you read and write on the web and the lack of skills in our teachers is a national crisis. Students will never be ready for computer science classes in middle school and high school if they are taught by educators who can’t add a link in an email let alone build a web page. By encouraging teachers to network through the use of OER sharing we can address the lack of skills.

Source: Can the #IndieWeb Improve Better Readers and Writers Online? – INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION

And one of the things I came away with from that talk was that there was a counter cultural ethos to the ways things were being done more broadly in ed-tech, and that was often linked to blogging and personal spaces on the web. We wanted faculty and students to own their work, and by extension their data, and we wanted that work to be connected in some real ways to both the web and the institutions we supported. So rather than the great purging of personal university webspace and re-branding efforts of Web Communication departments that gentrified the EDU web, we kept alive the spirit of the university as a space where the personal web mattered and was valued. Not sure if this is just more retrospective self-congratulation on my part-it very well could be, and I certainly have a unique tolerance for such reasoning-but it does resist my own tendency to remember that everyone in ed-tech from 2004-2016 was simply caught up uncritically in the social media orgy that was Web 2.0.

Source: Uncanny EdTech | bavatuesdays

When people location trackers are marketed as ‘smart badges’ by trusted brands (like ISTE), when their operations are not explained, and when the technology is obfuscated, people become de-sensitized to practices they may otherwise object to.

Did the people in these pictures know they were socializing and learning in an environment where each of their movements were tracked within a meter of accuracy? Did they understand how these data will be used, how it is secured, and with whom it will be shared? Do they each think the cost-benefit of sharing these location data are worth the yet-to-be-sent conference summary emails? Did the surveillance system actually allow ISTE to make adjustments in real-time to popular sessions that were turning away participants?

Yet, despite the email and the physical signs at the registration desk, many people asserted to me that they never received notice of the use of the ‘smart badge’. Of those that did, many had no idea how it worked. They thought it was just a QR code for vendors to scan. Many didn’t understand that it was a battery-powered transmitter without an off-switch. Not a one was happy upon learning what I discovered.

Did ISTE offer enough information to participants so they could make an informed judgment about the value of wearing the badge vs. the potential risks? Should wearing the badges have been an opt-in vs. opt-out decision for participants? For educators trying to manage the privacy and security risks of edtech in their own classrooms, what lesson does this incident impart about best practices and informed consent?

As ISTE and its members collectively mull through these questions, I look forward to hearing about the reactions to the after-conference reports that participants are slated to receive about their movements and presumed interests. Will folks feel like it added value? I bet for some segment of participants receiving that email will trigger concerns they didn’t even know enough to worry about in the first place. It will be the first time they realized their movements have been tracked.

Source: Hacking the ISTE18 Smart Badge, Part II – K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center

My greatest objection to being tagged like livestock was that it would only be a short matter of time before some bonehead referred to the fantabulous “Smart Badges” as educational technology. When I mentioned this to my friend Chris Lehmann, he told me that it already had.

Q: Why is ISTE using smart badges?
A: ISTE recognizes the value of personalized learning and wants to do all we can to create custom and individualized educational experiences for each of our attendees. Smart badges will allow us to provide you with your own “ISTE 2018 Journey” post conference. The journey will detail the sessions you attended and the resources you collected. It’s like taking notes with your feet! Additionally, this data will allow the ISTE team to further personalize the conference experience now and in the future. This aggregate data, combined with registration information, will provide more comprehensive insights into attendee patterns and activities.

Therein lies the problem. Tracking students legs, bums, or corneas is not education. It is not personalization, a fantasy that after decades has produced little more than dispensing a multiple-choice question based on how well you answered another multiple-choice question. Personalized learning is at best machine-based testing. It has little to do with teaching beyond automation and nothing to do with learning. Yet, ISTE’s largest corporate sponsors profit greatly by this hideous handful of magic beans.

The greatest threat of the ISTE “Smart Badges” is the denaturing of educational computing’s powerful potential and the organization’s misanthropic service of corporate sponsors, often in ways detrimental to its members – the ones who justify its tax-exempt status.

Source: ISTE’s Dopey Dystopia : Stager-to-Go

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising – a declining market for American publishers – goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook – and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.

Source: How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News

Via: Report Shows U.S. Citizens Helped Coordinate Online Disinformation Assault From Macedonia | Techdirt

The fact that an organization that should be leading the effective, thoughtful, responsible use of technology in education implemented such a fad at an event for educators is troubling. The ISTE Expo Halls were a frenzy of Apple, Google, Microsoft and others creating demand for their “learning opportunities” and giveaways with massive lines of early morning attendees hoping for tickets, invites, tokens. The whole time, throughout the Convention Centre, the Big Players deployed troops to frantically scan the QR codes of individuals waiting in line. So what exactly does this evidence tell us about personalized learning and how instructive will it be to ISTE’s sponsors when they receive this data? How will this data shape education? What does it tell us about learning, about institutional deprivation in the teaching profession? Is this about improving learning or the relentless drive of the ed tech industry?

At one expo stand we spoke with a thoughtful educator who asked if we were interested in the “monitor” function of the software on display. We asked what this did. “It allows you to monitor the activities of your students while they use the software. You can see if they are on-task.” We groaned. “Well, you are clearly not American,” came the reaction. Is the mindless use of personal data really going to result in such unfortunate generalisations? As we were leaving the booth the attempt to scan our badges failed. The blank spaces on our badges were noted gravely. Knowing glances were exchanged. We were part of The Others.

Everyone involved in education needs to take a stand against this kind of “personalized learning”. Forego the tee-shirt, the exclusive “hands-on” session invitation, offers to see the School of the Future, the stickbait badges, the free chargers.

Remember who schools are for. Before it’s too late.

Source: ISTE, Digital Tracking, and the Myth of Personalized Learning – maelstrom