Category: General

The topics covered here didn't fall into one of my usual categories.

Connection

Posted on by Khürt Williams
a post by Colin WalkerColin Walker

Our opportunities to meet and talk have been removed so we must remake our connections digitally. For some than means social media or video apps, for me it means sharing words and thoughts, their passage from mind to page to screen.

It's not much in the grand scheme of things but it's something I can do every day, something I can control and that's all any of us want at the moment: just to feel like we have something that is within our power to influence seeing as so much is currently denied to us.

For Colin, it’s his words that provide connection. For me, it’s various photography related blogging challenges. We each have our thing to help us get through these interesting times.

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Will Shift to Remote Teaching Be Boon or Bane for Online Learning?

Posted on by Khürt Williams
Will Shift to Remote Teaching Be Boon or Bane for Online Learning? (insidehighered.com)

The reality on the ground is that students and faculty are grasping for support while publishers, technology vendors and solutionist entrepreneurs are clamoring to provide it. “Black swan” may be a fitting description, but so might “disaster capitalism.”

... unfortunately, our lack of institutional planning, support and capacity building up to this point means many institutions will survive the current exigency by replicating and amplifying all the things we know not to do. For example, while we have learned in recent weeks that social distance is a good way to flatten an infection curve, *social interaction* is the key to effective online pedagogy.

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With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People

Posted on by Khürt Williams
With the Coronavirus, Hell Is No Other People by Bill McKibben (The New Yorker)

Everything we can measure, from immune response to the onset of dementia to coronary-artery disease is worsened, often dramatically, in people with fewer friends.

Forget the physical risks, though; it’s the social cost that we should be absorbing, so that we’ll remember it when these days are past. We should use the quiet of these suddenly uncrowded days to think a little about how much we’ve allowed social isolation to grow in our society, even without illness as an excuse.

Via kOoLiNuS.

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The difference between shelter-in-place, physical distancing, quarantine and self-isolation

Posted on by Khürt Williams

Let me get this off my chest. Too many ignorant people are using the terms self-isolation, social distancing, quarantine, and shelter-in-place interchangeably. These terms have specific meanings and are not interchangeable. Here are the CDC and government-defined terms. Do not make up your own meanings and learn to use these word carefully. It leads to…

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