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Digital Downsizing (part two)

What if we treated time like currency? How would this impact our decisions and behavior? These were the questions posited on a radio talk show a few days ago. The commentator got me thinking about all of the time I waste deleting spam, closing pop-up windows, and scrolling past banner ads. Digital downsizing works. As recently as five days ago, I was receiving dozens of spam email messages each day, following my newly instituted digital diet plan, I now get one or two unwanted messages per day, one from Harry's Razors and one from Facebook - go figure, right?!?


Last week, I published a post about decluttering and securing my digital spaces. I've now shifted my focus to keeping my digital areas clean and safeguarded. Nearly all of my online activities have ties to Google. As I mentioned in my previous post, the DuckDuckGo private browser extension provides tracking information. In other words, which sites are tracking and coalescing my information. Since nearly fifty percent of …
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Learning to Fly with Authentic Feedback

"Autonomy is what distinguishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us."- Stephen Downes


Why is feedback critical to learning processes?Why should the learner be at the center of the feedback process?Where within Schoology can personal feedback be shared and leveraged by learners?What do paper airplanes have to do with personal learning and feedback?
Premise
On the second day of the SchoologyNEXT-19 conference, more than 100 adult learners gathered to build paper airplanes and discuss these questions. Here’s what we learned.

Those who’ve attended my sessions know I subtly push the envelope, taking some risk, in the hopes of the transfer of the unique experience to professional learning activities and classroom adventures. If we don't want passive "sit-n-git" in our classrooms, then we should design conference sessions and staff meetings to model the active learning we desire.
The content of this session…
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Decluttering and Securing Our Digital Spaces

My wife and anyone who knows me well will tell you, I have minimalistic tendencies, and I have a severe aversion to clutter. Granted, my closets and cloud storage could use some organizing. In my world, there are specific places for things, and things left out of position are to be considered clutter. 

Since we recognize Digital Citizenship Week at our schools, my professional learning team has been engaged in conversations about digital privacy and security. These conversations prompted me to take a deeper dive into my digital waters. Do I have vulnerable accounts? Why am I getting so much spam? Who has access to my information?

As Erik Qualman reminds us, privacy in our modern digital contexts doesn't genuinely exist. It's up to individuals to take responsibility for what they're sharing and not sharing on the world wide web. My digital interactions are relatively conservative and limited in scope. Yet, I was surprised to learn several of my accounts, including my personal…
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