Tag Archives: blogging

High versus low trust societies

I love when someone adds to my perspective on social media. That’s exactly what happened after I posted Basic assumptions a couple days ago. The post reflected that, “people no longer give each other the benefit of the doubt that intentions are good. This used to be a basic assumption we operated on, the premise that we can start with the belief that everyone is acting in good faith.”

I shared the post on Twitter and Chris Kalaboukis and I had the following conversation thread:

Chris: Reading your post: could we be transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society?

Dave: Yes, that seems like an appropriate conclusion. Is there an author that speaks of this idea?

Chris: Not that I can recall, however, if you look at the attributes of low-trust societies you see a lot of what is happening now.

Dave: So true! The circle of high trust seems to be shrinking and it really seems like a step backwards… tribalism trumps the collective of a greater community.

Chris: It is. It seems that even our institutions are driving us towards more tribalism and division.

Dave: And how do you suppose we correct this course? I honestly don’t have a clue, and see things getting worse before they get better.

Chris: I think that in reality, most people prefer to live in a high-trust society. We need leaders and media who support that vision.

Dave: I think the biggest problem right now is that most leaders do not want to step into a limelight where both social media and news outlets are only interested in focussing on the dirt. It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.

Chris: If it bleeds it leads. we’ve never been able to communicate with more people at the same time but the only communication which seems to get through is negative. It’s all about keeping your attention to sell more ads.

Dave: I sound like quite the pessimist, that’s not usually my stance on things, but I do struggle to see a way forward from here.

—–

The idea Chris shared that we could be ‘transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society’ seems insightful and really intrigues me. It isn’t happening at just one level, but many!

• Scam phone calls and emails are perfect examples. We used to operate from a position of trust, but now unknown calls and unsolicited emails are all necessarily met with skepticism.

• Sensationalized news leads with misleading headlines that are more about getting attention and clicks than about providing truthful news. And if the news slant doesn’t match your beliefs, it’s ‘fake news’.

• Sales pitches and advertising promises almost everything under the sun, you aren’t buying a product with a basic function, you are buying a product that is going to change your life or transform how you do ‘X’, or use ‘Y’… your results will surprise you and you’ll be amazed!

• If you are even slightly left wing you are ‘woke’ or ‘Antifa’ in the most derogatory way you can use these words. If you are even slightly right wing you are ‘Alt-right’ and racist. No one gets to sit on a spectrum, you are either viewed as an extreme on one or the other side. And even agreeing on one topic on the other side makes you less trustworthy on your side.

These are but a few ways we’ve become a lower-trust society. Ad hominem and straw man attacks get more attention than sound arguments. A well said lie is easily shared while complex truths are not. Saying a situation is complex and sharing nuance does not make for catchy sound bites, and aren’t going to go viral on TikTok, or Instagram Reels. No, but the snarky personal attack will, as will a one-sided, extreme view that packs a powerful punch.

What’s worse is that moderate voices get shut out. And in general many people feel silenced or would rather not share a view that is even slightly controversial. So the extreme voices get even more airtime and attention.

I feel this often. Writing every day, and sometimes picking controversial topics to discuss, I find myself tiptoeing and treading very carefully. I said in my Twitter conversation with Chris above, “It seems everyone is measured by their worst transgressions, regardless of many positive deeds.” I sometimes wonder what one thing I’m going to say is going to get blown out of proportion? If I write one single inappropriate or strongly biased phrase, will it define me? Will it undermine the 1,500+ posts that I’ve written, and make me out to be something or someone I’m not?

This sounds paranoid, but I wrote one post a few years ago that a friend private messaged me about, then called me and said I’d gone too far with my opinion on a specific point. I totally saw his point, went back and adjusted my post to tone it down… but I feel like that one issue, that one strong and overly biased opinion shared publicly put a rift in our friendship. And that’s someone I respect, not some stranger coming at me, not someone that doesn’t know my true character. My opinion in his eyes is now less trustworthy, and holds less value. That said, I appreciated the feedback, and respect that he took the time to share it privately. That’s rare these days.

The path forward is not easy. We aren’t just swaying slightly towards a less trustworthy society, we are on a full pendulum swing away from a more trustworthy society. Tribalism, nationalism, and extremism are pulling our world apart. Who do you trust? What institutions? Which governments? Who do you consider a neighbour? Who will you break bread with? Who do you believe?

The circles of trust are getting smaller, and the mechanisms to share bias and misinformation are growing. We are devolving into a less trusting society or rather societies, and it’s undermining our sense of community. We need messages of kindness, love, and peace to prevail. We need tolerance, acceptance, and more than anything trustworthy institutions and leaders. We need moderates and centrists to voice compromise and minimize extremist views. We need to rebuild a high trust society… together.

(Re)stacking habits

I used to wake up, write a blog post, meditate for 10 minutes, and work out, all before getting in the shower around 6:45-7am. I used the Atomic Habits strategy of stacking my habits one-after-the-other so that I reduced a lot of friction in my mornings. I’d start writing and the rest of the stacked habits just happened one after the other.

A couple things happened to change this. I have been spending more time writing, stopped meditating, and started spending more time stretching. However, it was the writing time that was the big change since both the meditation and stretching were both 10 minutes long. What I’ve noticed is that my workouts and stretching are getting shorter.

So, I need to unstack my current habits. I need to write most or all of my posts at night, then I can start my morning with meditation, cardio, stretch, then a strength routine dedicated to one or two muscles, which is my usual routine. Essentially I’m not really unstacking my habits, I’m re-stacking them in a way that they give me the outcomes I want without compromising any of them at the expense of others… I just changed the title of this post from ‘Unstacking habits’ to ‘(Re)stacking habits’… Because stacking works, but it needs to work for all the habits, not just some of them.

As a good friend said, I won’t know how well this works until I try it for at least a couple weeks, because a few days aren’t long enough for a pattern to be formed, for a habit to truly become a habit. Let’s see how this goes. If I remember, I’ll give a progress report some time later this month.

Web Logging

I went to my LinkedIn profile last night. I hadn’t really looked at it for a while. It could use a bit of an update, but I’m in no rush. Still, while I was there I saw ‘Open Thinker’ under my experience, which is where I describe my blogging. I was surprised to see this:

I’ve been blogging for over 17 and a half years. I also passed 4 years of blogging daily in July. I’m coming up on 1,500 daily posts.

I had no idea 17 years ago that this would be something I would stick with for so long. I could not have fathomed that I’d be writing every single day on a web log, back when I hit the ‘Publish’ button for the first time.

Instead of feeling tired, and wanting to bring this to a close, I find myself wanting to write more. That doesn’t mean it has gotten a lot easier, I still find writing a challenge. I still can’t predict when I will feel the muse and when I will struggle to get past the blank page. I still get pangs before hitting the Publish button, though the feeling is somewhat muted. I still get pissed off when I find a typo or grammatical error after hitting the Publish button.

And I will continue to write. Maybe not for 17 more years, but I don’t see a reason to stop in the foreseeable future. I am keeping a journal. It just so happens that anyone with an internet connection can read what I’ve written…. including you!

Post card from a train

I’m on a Go Train heading to visit a buddy. He offered to pick me up but it would be about an hour and a half each way, and only a 30 minute walk for me to get to the train and less than 5 minutes for him to get me from there. So, I’m on a train heading to his place.

I bought the ticket online, and it has a live countdown showing how long it’s valid for on my phone’s browser:

I just finished listening to a podcast that comes out of Great Britain, and now I’m publishing a blog post to readers from as nearby as Toronto and Texas to far away countries like the Philippines and China… and probably a few more in the Vancouver Lower Mainland.

I’m travelling on a technology developed in the late 1700’s to transport people and freight, while simultaneously connecting to the world with late 1900’s technology. It makes we wonder, will there still be trains in the late 2100’s? I think so. They might be hovering on a superconductive rail, traveling at high speeds with zero cost to run them, but there will still probably be people regularly travelling by train. They will probably still be roughly the same size too. After all, they will likely still use the same infrastructure and track routes that are laid down.

In many ways, trains are like post cards from the past. No, in fact that’s a terrible analogy, because post cards are almost never sent anymore, yet trains persist. I’m writing a kind of post card now. I’m on a train, that is using tracks laid before I was born, but my version of a post card is a relatively new novelty… I can share words, images, videos, and even sounds if I want. I can ask an artificial intelligence to create an image to go with this post card, and share an image of my ticket. And no stamp is required, no waiting for postal delivery.

So in true post card fashion I’ll sign off by saying,

Love to all, and hope to see you soon, XOXOXO

Grammar Police

Today I opened a file in the online version of Microsoft Word and this ‘Editor’ showed up on the right column of the screen:

Of the 4 suggestions, the first one was an acronym that I did not need to explain or change. The second one, conciseness, was a good suggestion. The formality was the use of don’t rather than do not, which I decided to leave in, and the vocabulary suggestion was also something I decided to leave as-is, although the mentioning of it was valid. Had this been a more formal document, I would have made the suggested change.

I find it fascinating that we can now have Artificial Intelligence edit our work as we type. We’ve had it all along with spell and grammar check putting red and blue lines in the text, but this adds a whole new element and nuance to what was previously done. It’s also interesting that ‘Inclusiveness’, and ‘Sensitive Geopolitical References’ were a couple of the refinement options.

I’ve already used Chat GPT to edit an email for me, simply rephrasing what I’d already written, but I haven’t asked it to respond to any emails for me… yet. I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that right now. But I do like these features that make my writing look better. At some point I know I’ll be putting these blog posts into an AI editor, but for now, I like the process of writing and publishing in a limited time and being both creative and quick. If I start a long editing and proof-reading process for my daily blog, I doubt that I would maintain the daily nature of it. So, I’ll hack away, and you’ll find the occasional errors, and more than occasional run-on sentences. Because while I like these grammar and editing tools, I also like the free-flow of writing and I’m not publishing a book that can’t be edited later when an error is pointed out. For now, I’d rather spend my time thinking and writing, and leave the editing for more formal work. Still, it’s nice to see these tools get better, and I’m sure I’m make more use of them in time.

Basically, right now I’m thinking of these grammar police tools as a traffic stops, and soon I’ll see them as friendly traffic cops helping me get on my way more smoothly.

Missed a day

I think I missed my first day of blogging since I started writing daily in early 2019. I’m making up for it by posting twice today. It was a pretty good streak and I’m basically just going to continue on with no intention to let this minor slip change my commitment.

First thing yesterday morning I went to the hospital to visit my dad, came back to my parent’s house at about 5pm with my back/shoulder nerve pain at a high level. I self medicated and then my buddy picked me up to go out for dinner where I had a couple Guinnesses to add to my self-medicating. When I got home I fell asleep on the couch and slept through the night fully clothed from the day.

I’m not sure I could have written anything if I tried at the end of the day. Not blogging first thing in the morning for more than a weekend has made it a bit easier to forget, and I’ve written a few posts just before midnight this past week.

Still, to respect the commitment, I’ll blog again later today… my way of keeping the streak alive. But missing yesterday makes me ask myself, should I keep doing this? Do I need to blog every… single… day? The answer that comes to mind is ‘Yes’. I still find joy in being forced to to think and be creative daily. Like my blog byline says,

“Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”

It’s not about the streak, it’s about daily practice, and committing to a task. And so… onwards with the blogging. Apologies to those that receive these via email for the double hit to your inbox in a single day.

Good head space

After writing History Repeats yesterday I’ve had a couple people ask if I’m feeling ok, or in a good head space? Reading it again today I can see how that post can be interpreted as gloomy and dark. But that was just a mood after watching Fidler on the Roof and hearing the dedication afterwards to the people of Ukraine. It isn’t an overarching mental state.

But being asked makes me realize that by sharing a daily blog, I probably give readers a sense of my overall head space by the tone and temperament of the things I share… and writing a post about how we are no more civilized than an ant colony can certainly come off as a gloomy disposition.

Well in this case it’s not. I’m in a good space. I’m getting over a nasty cold, and am slowly but incrementally better each day. As a result I’m exercising regularly again (something I couldn’t do without a coughing fit two and three weeks ago). And I’ve had some good quality time with my wife and friends that I haven’t had when I couldn’t talk without coughing.

So, yes, yesterday’s post was gloomy, but it was a momentary mood, and not a state-of-the-nation address forecasting dark and gloomy days ahead. It was a reaction to an experience, and even though it was kind of dark, the experience of seeing Fiddler on the Roof performed live, with friends, was wonderful.

Overall head space right now: pretty good! 😁👍

Everything is so political

I’ve got the song ‘Political‘ by Spirit of the West going through my head, even though this song is about a relationship breakup and not politics.

Chris Kennedy’s recent post, ‘My “Top 3” List for 2022‘ on his blog, Culture of Yes, got me thinking about being political. Here is the section that inspired my thoughts:

Top 3 Issues that I see in US media that I am keeping an eye on (and worried about):

  1. Book bans

  2. Limits on classroom discussions

  3.  ‘Parents Rights’ push

I know there are some, largely isolated for now, examples of these topics in Canada, but we see them regularly in our news feeds with the constant volume of US media.  The book banners are back, taking on many of the classics again.  There are many lists that circulate, including this one from CBS News of the 50 most banned books in the United States.  Also in the news a lot is discussion over what topics teachers can and can’t talk about.  Here is an article from earlier this year indicating 1/4 of all teachers were in positions where they were being asked to limit discussions on certain topics.  Finally, the parents rights push is one that gives parents greater control over what their children are taught.  It is actually related to the other two issues, as all three are coming out of a conservative legislators in the United States.  I am always hesitant to write about what is happening in the US, as I find some people are already believing we are in the same position.  We have very different systems, but it is regularly on our televisions and in our social media feeds so it is worth following.

I commented:

Season’s greetings Chris!

Like you I’m always hesitant to share US concerns, but there has been a definite creep of bad ideas into our country. Example: I’ve chosen every election since becoming an educator to be non-partisan and just promote voting, but this year I openly spoke out against a very conservative and dishonest group of candidates for Board of Education Trustees in our district. It seems we only have two choices these days, allow bad ideas to seep in, or be openly political and speak up before those ideas take hold. The coming year is not one to wait and watch what happens without participating in the conversations of ideas that concern us. We can not be a silent majority, we can not be apolitical. We must be active participants in a system that, while better than the one south of the border, is not immune to the influences of a very dichotomous and politically charged neighbouring country.

It’s not fair to say that this is just a US issue. Italy has a new far-right government, and nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment can be felt in many other countries. The reality is that there is a very vocal minority who seem to garner too much attention and interest because the counter opinion is either silent, or an equally small opposing minority that are extreme in their opposing views. In fact some of the views coming from the far left are actually more fascist than the views on the right. For example, choosing violence to combat opposing views to a point where free speech is no longer truly free. 

2023 will be a year to speak up and speak out. You don’t have to support a political party, but if you think you can be vocal and not also be political, you are probably mistaken. Your politics will permeate your point of view, and choosing to be silent is no longer just non-partisan or apolitical; it’s choosing to allow lesser, more biased people to share their minority points of view as if they are the majority. The silent majority can be silent no more.

___ ___ ___

If you are interested in education, it’s worth taking the time to read Chris’ post, ‘My “Top 3” List for 2022‘, especially these three sections, ‘Top 3 Shifts in BC Education in 2022’, ‘Top 3 Education Topics We Should Talk More about in 2023’, and ‘Top 3 Education Topics from 2022 that need long-term fixes’. And while you are at it, subscribe to his blog.

15 years of Twitter

It was 15 years ago today when I finally decided to start Twitter. I say ‘finally decided’ because I was in a network of bloggers who were already on board and it seemed every day I was reading some new convert’s blog post about what a great tool it was. And they were right! I loved it so much, I wrote an ebook about how to get started:

But Twitter has changed, and I’m not just talking about Elon Musk’s blue verification fiasco. No, the changes started long before that. For educators, the glory days were 2007-2010 or 2011. That’s when there were amazing resources being shared for their value to teachers rather than businesses. That’s when educators shared ideas on blog posts and full conversations about the post would happen in the blog comments and on Twitter.

After that there was a shift. The tone went from ‘look at this great resource or interesting post’ to look at my post or my tweet, and corporate tweets seemed to be promoted by the same people. I’d share a blog post and it would be auto-retweeted by educators who used to read my posts before they were shared. And less conversations happened because the next tweet was more important than the previous one.

For the last few years Twitter has been more of a one-way distribution of my blog rather than a place I engage in. When I hit ‘Publish’ on this post, it auto-posts to Twitter, my blog’s Facebook page, and LinkedIn without me having to go to any of those sites… and sometime I won’t go to them for a few days at a time.

I long for the days of old-Twitter. I’d happily put up with the Fail Whale again (which popped up when servers couldn’t meet demand) just to get the old, exciting engagements back. But I’m afraid those little Twitter birds aren’t keeping the whale up like they used to. Twitter might survive the fiascos it faces today, but it won’t ever recapture what it lost long ago.

School 2.0 Participant’s Manifesto

I wrote this on February 5th, 2007. It was one of my early blog posts as I immersed myself in blogging and using Twitter to connect with educators around the world. It was an exciting time to be an educator. New online Web 2.0 tools were coming out all the time: Photo sharing, wikis, live chat boxes on blogs, live video streaming, and many other tools that gave you access to be a creator on the web in ways that were unimaginable just a couple years earlier.

I saw the potential of getting students not just to participate, but to be creators of content on the Brave New World Wide Web.

And I saw the walls of the classroom disappearing:

But it wasn’t just about the web and using these tools. It was about looking at the classroom differently. It was about creating a space where everyone in the community was an active participant. So, without further ado, here is my (15 year old)

School 2.0 Participant’s Manifesto

When I enter our learning space I will be prepared to learn, to participate, to engage, to discover, to play, to inquire, to create.

We are all different. Our opinions are different. We all learn differently. Our learning will be differentiated.

Respect makes all the difference.

We are not all equal, but we must all be ethical, just and fair.

Classes are not rooms; they are learning communities.

Our community will use technology effectively, affectively and appropriately.

Curriculum describes and directs; it is not to be prescribed or directed.

Knowledge is static. Synthesis is dynamic. We create meaning.

Collaboration is a series of learned skills.

Grades are measurements; Rubrics offer feedback.

Self-reflection is mandatory.

When I leave I will be more literate, more resourceful, more involved, more collaborative, more connected, more thoughtful and less willing to accept injustice of any kind.

I will make a positive difference in my world.