Author Archives: David Truss

My 13th Twitterversary

Today marks 13 years since I sent my first Tweet. Twitter has influenced me enough that I even wrote a short (free) ebook to help people get started on it.

My use of Twitter has evolved considerably. It used to play a bigger role in my life because it was a gateway to learning about using technology and social media as a means to share ideas and seek out others doing the same. Now, I find that I transmit more than I engage, and when I engage it’s usually with people I’ve developed long term digital friendships with.

I also use it for news. I hate watching news, but going to the search page (tab) and seeing the trending hashtags is enough to keep me informed without being sucked into the drama and bias of a single news source on TV. This isn’t a comprehensive way to consume news, but these days I struggle to keep from being sucked into the most recent drama that streams constantly through news headlines, and a simple hashtag summary can succinctly let me know if I should dig deeper.

I have to say 13 years after starting that I romanticize and miss the ‘old Twitter’ days of people sharing links to blog posts they wrote and the marriage between Twitter and blogging that, while still there, is far less what Twitter is about. That said, my consumption of blogs as a primary place to engage online has diminished, while ironically I have become a prolific blogger, writing daily for the past 16 months. It’s easy to romanticize something that you simultaneously aren’t likely to want to return to. And so while I miss ‘old Twitter’ I must admit that as much as Twitter has changed, I have changed too.

Watching Twitter change, I do see some positives that I hope to see continue and here is one area that impresses me:

While other social media sites are permitting widespread sharing of fake and unproven information, Twitter is putting warnings like this on prominent and influential people who are spreading false claims.

And while I’m a huge supporter of free speech, and against censorship, I do believe that bad ideas can spread easily and we have an obligation to warn people when influential people are irresponsible enough to promote bad ideas. While the balance between freedom to share and obligation to inform is a delicate one, I commend Twitter for taking the risk in being a leader in this area.

As an aside, I think there is room for a new form of social media, one where people can have public conversations with only invited guests, and everyone watching can have a separate side conversation. These closed but public conversations can have a moderator who can pull in sidebar comments and/or commenters, and so observers can be invited in and involved, if moderators choose. Or, moderators can delete or even block rude, inappropriate trolls that are disruptive to the side conversation.

Wide open conversations seem to bring out the worst in people, especially anonymous people that hide behind anonymity and say nasty things they would never say if their identity were known. A social media site that was more conversational than a blog, that allowed a healthy debate to happen in public, could be something that really helped to create open dialogue in a way that can’t seem to happen on Facebook or Twitter… without the conversation degrading into a petty, angry pissing match where trolls undermine the conversation.

Until that new social media tool comes along, I’ll just keep plugging along on Twitter, playing with how I use it so that it’s useful to me.

– – –

Happy 13th Twitter Anniversary to me:)

The human family

Humans are divided into different clans and tribes, and belong to countries and towns. But I find myself a stranger to all communities and belong to no settlement. The universe is my country and the human family is my tribe. ~Kahlil Gibran

I shared this quote on Facebook 4 years ago today. It seemed timely with world events. I also shared a graphic I created to try to help two deeply divided groups see less of a divide between them. The image was grossly misunderstood and I ended up taking it off Facebook. The irony isn’t lost on me. I tried to show less divisiveness and I accidentally created something that exposed the differences and widened the gap that I was trying to reduce.

Think for a moment about how borders divide us; how cultures divide us; how religions divide us; how politics divides us. Yet diversity makes us stronger; it teaches us to be tolerant; it enriches our experience.

What if we invested time and energy into the idea that, ‘the human family is my tribe’?

Empty Words

I responded to a post on LinkedIn by Arun Jee, on the topic of “Justice is no less challenging to teach in the classroom” by saying:

“The worst form of injustice is pretended justice.” ~Plato
The world I see today has many people using the word justice… but in defence of unjust ideas.

This is the crazy world we live in.

People talk about defending their freedoms by doing things that undermine the communities they live in… the very communities that offer those freedoms!

No, enforcing a mask policy isn’t an infringement of your rights, it’s preventing a lockdown that will reduce your freedoms while we take care of our community.

No, stricter gun laws in the US are not infringing on your constitutional amendment rights, but they will reduce easy, dangerous, and deadly weapons access to unfit people that are likely to harm your community.

No, your flat earth or QAnon conspiracies based on pseudoscience and fake facts are not counter-arguments to actual science, and don’t get equal footing in an argument.

No, All Lives Matter is not an argument against Black Lives Matter, it’s actually an argument to support the Black Lives Matter movement, “If you truly care about living in an equitable and just world.”

No, right wingers are wrong to think left wing ideals are a path to a socialist controlling government that will strip away your rights. And no, left wingers, being violent against opposing views, because you disagree with them, isn’t a left wing ideal: It’s fascist and authoritarian to block free speech.

No, media outlets you should not be sensationalizing the news by polarizing ideas. You are not reporting news when you do this, you are selling out. You are sacrificing factual reporting for the price of views and clicks. You are not reporting, you are entertaining, angering, and dividing people with bias on the verge of being called propaganda.

Justice, rights, freedoms, and truth are no longer things that have the meaning they intended. They are empty words filled with polarized and rationalized meanings shared by less convincing and less reliable sources. Each ‘side’ believes these words belong to them. But words only have meaning when their definitions are shared.

We are not alone

I love this quote by Arthur C. Clarke:

“Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

When I comprehend the size and scale of the universe, it is inconceivable to me that humans are the only intelligent life that seeks to understand and explore the stars and worlds beyond our own. It just seems staggeringly beyond possible that we could be alone in the universe.

I also think about Arthur C. Clarke’s 3 Laws. From Wikipedia:

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future.

These so-called laws are:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

His most famous of these is the 3rd one. Imagine being born 2000, 1000, 500, or even 150 years ago and being shown an iPhone or a self-driving Tesla. It would surely seem like magic or witchcraft.

I truly doubt that we will have any significant technology leap in my lifetime to see any meaningful human space travel beyond revisiting our moon. Our technology won’t get that magical so quickly. Therefore, if we were to meet aliens in my lifetime, it would be because they poses technology that seems magical to us.

So, at least in the short term, if we are visited, it will be from highly advanced aliens. I wonder what they would think of our divided, polluted planet? Would they see a primitive species? Which, if any, of our cultures would they look at and say, “I think they are on the right track”?

When I think of the idea that we are not alone, and that if we are visited, the visitors will be highly advanced compared to us, what would they say about how we treat each other? How we treat other species? And, how we treat our world?

In Search of a Flat Earth - QAnon-Part 2

Understanding QAnon

Here is an excellent video that helps us understand the lure and draw of QAnon, and it is better than any other video that I’ve seen. I’ve set the second video below up to play starting at 37:50, or Part 2 of the video.

The video is wrongly titled ‘In Search of a Flat Earth‘. The flat earth conspiracy is really just a metaphor for the bigger point about how bad ideas spread. If you want to see fantastic proof that the earth is round, you just need to go to 5:46 of this video, and watch until 12:48.

The 7 minutes of Part 1 you need to see! 

This 7 minutes is all you need to debunk Flat Earthers, then you can go on to the better part of the video, shared below. From the 37:50 point of the video, the really interesting discussion about QAnon begins:

This 30 Minutes at the end of the video is actually about QAnon

I’ll let the last 1/2 hour of this video speak for itself, other than to say that QAnon is not some little cult of no concern, it is a distributed, disruptive network of people spreading bad and dangerous ideas.

How safe would you want everyone to be?

It’s raining heavily and you are driving home. Windshield wipers are going as quickly as they can giving you the best view you can get given the weather conditions. You see car headlights heading your way and before you know it you are in a head on collision. Set aside who’s fault it is for a moment, just know your front bumper hit their front bumper, with both cars travelling at 65km/hr (40mph).

Cars today are designed to take a lot of the impact of a crash away from the people inside them. The front end of the car will buckle in front of the passenger cabin, and take the worst of the impact. That said, two things will help ensure greater safety for the drivers and passengers. First, there are seatbelts, and then there are airbags. But despite safety precautions, an impact like this could easily be fatal.

In this scenario, how safe would you want everyone to be? Would you like to know that both you and the person in the other car both had their seatbelt on, and that the airbags were present and deployed as expected?

Wouldn’t you want to know that you both did the best you could to protect yourselves?

Well, for all you anti-maskers out there, here is a simple analogy:

Poor weather = Pandemic, less than ideal conditions.

Car safety measures = Hospitals

Airbags = social distancing, protective distance between you and danger.

Seatbelt = Mask, personal protection.

The difference between a seatbelt and a mask is that your personal protection of a seatbelt in a car protects you, while a mask protects those in the community around you.

No one plans to get into a serious car accident, but they happen. When they do, the safety precautions you’ve taken might not be the same for the person or people in the other car. No one plans to spread a virus that might inconvenience some people, and kill others. No one wants an elderly family member or friend to die unnecessarily from something that could have been prevented, by something as simple as wearing a seatbelt or wearing a mask.

Don’t be an idiot. Buckle up. Mask up. Do it for your family, for those you love, and for those in the community that you live in. It’s your community. Do you want to be a good community member who shows that you care for those that are less fortunate than you? Or do you want to be thought of as reckless and stubborn? What kind of neighbour do you want to be?

Published and imperfect

My buddy Kelly puts out daily Professional Development (PD) inspirational quotes on Twitter, and I get tagged in one of the shares he does each morning. I love getting these: #MyPDToday

I saw a typo in one of his shares today, and knowing that he shares the tweet more than once a day, I sent a Direct Message to him letting him know. His response: “Thanks. Sometimes those things slip by my editor!! 🤣“

No pretence, just appreciation. I’d want to know if the situation was reversed. Sometimes we don’t get this opportunity on Twitter. We tweet something with a typo and before we know it, it has a dozen retweets and a handful of comments… then we see the typo! This can feel a little embarrassing. But it’s going to happen.

This weekend I was re-reading a Daily Ink that I’d written over a month ago. While reading it again I found two (careless) errors. I changed them, but was still rolling my eyes at myself for missing them in the first place. It’s going to happen.

The reason it’s going to happen is because Kelly and I are putting content ‘out there’. We are sharing our thoughts and ideas on social media platforms. We are publishing things without publishers and editors. We try to be careful, but we make mistakes. We aren’t publishing books with typos, that have gone through a rigorous processes to prevent those typos from happening. We are re-reading sentences that our brains developed and understand, without seeing every word. We are imperfect editors of our own work.

Then we hit the ‘publish’ or the ‘Tweet’ button.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

There might be some self-professed grammar and spelling police that roll their eyes at what we are doing. For example I completely ignore the idea of writing in full paragraphs here. I’ll routinely have paragraphs with just one, two, or three sentences, and I’m sure that drives some people crazy. That’s how I structure ideas, and if it doesn’t work for someone, they don’t need to read my blog.

Publish your work. It won’t be for everybody. It won’t be perfect. It is still worth sharing.

At the speed of lies

Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time. They have, for years, been spread in small circles, where they fester and rise to prominence every now and then. The first time that I really saw social media have an influence on a conspiracy theory was around the 9/11 tragedy. YouTube videos started to emerge spreading the idea that it was a planned event by US insurgents or a cabal of some sorts, and not just a foreign terrorist attack. I saw videos getting millions of views based on fictional theories and the cherry-picking facts to focus on.

Now, Facebook groups form and millions of people join them. That’s worse than a video, because Facebook groups are not just about watching a single video, but about creating a continual stream of propaganda that feeds the beliefs of a growing community. As seen in this NPR article:

Social media groups have quickly sprung up in the days since voting stopped, to spread disinformation about supposed cheating on the part of election officials, and in some cases organize in-person protests.

“This is the most intense online disinformation event in U.S. history and the pace of what we have found has only accelerated since [Election Day],” said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Facebook’s former chief security officer.

Meanwhile, as I write this, Twitter has put this notice:

On 9 of the last 10 tweets of the sitting President. This notification links to the following statement:

It’s good to see that social media companies are stepping in to try to combat the spread of dangerous propaganda/fake news/lies. Counter to this is the argument of, ‘Who gets to decide what is true and what is not? Is this itself a form of censorship?’

I think there are definitive lines that can be drawn and social media sites do need to act. For example, when an idiot like Alex Jones decides to call a school shooting fake and declare that parents of dead children are actors, he deserves to be silenced on social media. The line is simple: fake and false claims (especially by people of influence) should be immediately flagged, or removed. Immediately.

One of the challenges of dealing with fake news and miss-information is that arguments against it are a win for the propaganda spreaders. The moment a credible person argues the point(s) they either legitimize the value of the opposing points as something worth arguing, or they feed into the conspiracy that they are hiding the truth, or they are widening the platform by bringing attention to it. It’s a losing scenario even if the argument of the credible person is factually sound.

When lies can spread so easily, when they can build momentum, and develop communities around them, they become very dangerous. Especially when the slick videos and arguments are well designed to ‘sell’ ideas, using the same convincing strategies that advertisers have honed for years, to sell products… but these strategies are being used to sell ideas that polarize opinions, anger and enrage, and ultimately brainwash people.

We are living in an era when social media is being used to undermine social cohesion. Lies travel fast and build momentum. Truth won’t slow this down without putting a few walls in the way. We can debate about what those walls look like, but we can’t wait until those walls are perfect before we start putting them up. Kudos to Twitter for doing what they are doing!

Nev-ADDING up them votes

Time for a little comic relief.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole world is watching as a few states count their final votes in the US Presidential Election.

Here are some creative people poking fun at Nevada taking so long…

Warning: This last one is rude, but it cracked me up and it’s where I got the title for this post.

And here’s a news flash, it looks like both Pensilvania and Nevada have finally counted enough votes and the election is now decided… Back to the serious politics we go!

((Source: The Guardian at 9:25am PST, Nov. 7, 2020))

Students following their passion

Last year I didn’t update the students page on the Inquiry Hub website. The past couple weeks I’ve added projects by Senn and Miró, and I’ll add more next week. One of the best things about Inquiry Hub Secondary is getting to see students work on passion projects that they decide on, and that they design their learning around.

Students projects come to life when students get to follow their passions and interests. If you’d like to learn more, we have a website for educators. Even here, you will hear student voice. Soon we will have a digital open house. Students are working on both advertising and content for this event.

We are small, and agile, (and have students working in scrums – more on this later). We have educators who are passionate about what they do and focus on supporting our students. And we have self-directed students who are still taking all the required courses for graduation, and also working on projects they want to work on.

Visit our student page or our educator page to learn more.