27 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
  2. Feb 2024
  3. Aug 2023
  4. Jul 2023
    1. In their article, Scientist Spotlight Homework Assignments Shift Students’ Stereotypes of Scientists and Enhance Science Identity in a Diverse Introductory Science Class,” Jeffrey Schinske, Heather Perkins, Amanda Snyder, and Mary Wyer created a “scientist spotlight” weekly homework assignment to introduce counter stereotypical examples of scientists and provide a diverse representation of contributions to science. Each week, students reviewed a resource regarding these scientists’ research and personal history in lieu of other textbook readings. Through their analysis, the scholars were able to study and detect shifts in both scientist stereotypes and the students’ ability to see their possible selves in science.

      This same sort of structure could be useful for introducing students to fellow college students and also professionals who eschew a hyper-connected, frenetic, algorithmic, hustle mindset.

      A way to normalize digital minimalism and slow productivity

  5. May 2023
  6. Feb 2023
    1. I am skeptical of the tech inevitability standpoint that ChatGPT is here

      inevitability is such an appropriate word here, because it captures a sort of techno-maximalist "any-benefit" mindset that sometimes pervades the ed-tech scene (and the position of many instructional designers and technologists)

  7. Dec 2022
  8. Aug 2022
    1. Meanwhile, the share of teens who say they use Facebook, a dominant social media platform among teens in the Center’s 2014-15 survey, has plummeted from 71% then to 32% today.

      This is a tremendously important shift. I can remember 5-7 years ago when the Facebook is for old people talk was starting that data still bore out the reality that teens said they did not use it but were still on it constantly.

      That is no longer true.

  9. May 2022
    1. You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

      imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

      Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

      Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

      Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.


      Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

      How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

      Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

  10. Dec 2021
    1. She thinks the companies themselves are behind this, trying to manipulate their users into having certain opinions and points of view.

      The irony is that this is, itself, somewhat a conspiracy theory.

      Though, I think a nuanced understanding may be closer:

      • The real purpose is not to influence people to believe anything. It's money. It's ad spend and data collection to sell. We need to demonstrate to advertisers that their ads are actually getting seen. The more they get seen, the more money we make. And, the more time is spent on the service, the more data we have to sell... which is as valuable as the add spend.
      • Companies jigger algorithms to maximize time spent on the service.
      • As the Bible is clear, the heart of man is wicked, and the kinds of things that maximize time spent are themselves attitudes of evil, malice, wickedness, and hatred, and the list of things Paul repeatedly tells us to avoid. Go figure.
      • So, people feel the platforms are basically like smoking, and yet, they can't stop.
    2. About 7 in 10 Americans think their phone or other devices are listening in on them in ways they did not agree to.

      I'm enough of a tinfoil hat wearer to this this might be true. Especially since my google home talks to me entirely too much when I'm not talking to it.

    3. Only 10 percent say Facebook has a positive impact on society, while 56 percent say it has a negative impact and 33 percent say its impact is neither positive nor negative. Even among those who use Facebook daily, more than three times as many say the social network has a negative rather than a positive impact.

      Here's the rub. Only 1 out of 10 Americans surveyed think Facebook is a good idea.

      Over half of Americans surveyed actually think Facebook is bad for them and society as a whole. And yet, the general sense is now that life is impossible without it.

      How does the church respond to this? Do we tell people to get off or "use in moderation?"

  11. Sep 2021
  12. Mar 2020
    1. You have all changed my life. I’m considering extreme minimalism. Even just at home with my husband. If I could downsize to a duffle bag one day and travel, I will. Or at least travel during summers to volunteer.

      People downsizing...

    1. Today we walked for the first time from our home to the nearby veggie shop. A great experience of simplicity, minimalism, and nature. Feeling awesomely blessed.

  13. Sep 2019
  14. Dec 2018
    1. Maybe during this Christmas break I will find the guts to do a purge but I know that it will be a "fake purge".

      I've been seeing a lot about (Japanes) minimalism this past year in relation to physical goods, but hadn't considered what a minimal social media presence would look like.

  15. Nov 2018
    1. I don’t want to live a life where “staying up to date” is a priority. I don’t need that. I don’t need to always know what’s going on everywhere and with everyone.

      I like this a lot. De-pressurise your life!

    1. To me it comes down to two things: simplification and awareness.

      I'm personally a fan (following Matt D'Avella) of the term 'intentionality' to capture this idea.

  16. Aug 2018
    1. Fifty years ago, the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick coined a phrase for these “useless objects” that accumulate in a house: “kipple.” In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for the movie Blade Runner, he theorized that “the entire universe is moving toward a state of total, absolute kippleization.” Kipple reproduced, Dick wrote, when nobody was around. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the ease of online shopping have made Dick’s prediction come true, with one small tweak: Our kipple does not just multiply on its own, every time we turn away. We grow it ourselves, buying more and more of it, because we can.
  17. Nov 2017
    1. There are about 300,000 items in the average American home. Side note, in my home, that includes just those little hair bands for my daughter, there’s got to be 300,000 of those. 3.1% of the world’s kids live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally

      Number of items in a household

    2. We’ve seen this huge trend of people like Marie, I was going to call her Kimono, I’m totally forgetting her last name. Joshua:                   Kondo.

      Marie Kondo

    3. Joshua:                   Yeah, and so I figured out if you were to throw any complications into this equation this minimalist lifestyle and work, but then of course, I stumbled across some other folks as well. People like Leo Babauta who I’m sure you know, he runs a website called Zen Habits, and he’s a father of six. When I first stumbled across him he had kids everywhere from entering college to elementary school and everything in between and he and his wife Eva lived in the city in San Francisco, yet, they were minimalists. Then, I found people like Joshua and Kim Becker who were in the documentary and they have two kids in the suburbs of Phoenix or Courtney Carver and her teenage daughter and her husband in Salt Lake City.

      Minimalist bloggers.

    4. Dave:                        It turns out there’s actually a number for how much it costs to buy happiness and I gave a talk at the third Bulletproof conference on this and the number $75,000. There’s a study that shows people’s happiness level does go up a little bit with each dollar they earn up to $75,000 because that’s the point where you’ve covered health care costs, food, housing and communications and transportation. When you have your basic needs covered, additional dollars don’t make you any happier, but if you’re making $30,000, making $75,000 actually will measurably make you happier because you’re less stressed and less worried about, “How do I put food on the table?” If you have a minimalist lifestyle, maybe the number is lower than $75,000 because you’ve cut your spend substantially. Maybe the number’s only $42,000 or whatever it is, but there is a number. I’m struggling to make ends meet and if you’re struggling, struggling is the opposite of happiness. You can be happy while struggling, it just takes a pretty enlightened person to do that and most of us aren’t there.

      How much money do you need to be happy.

  18. May 2017
    1. Min­i­mal­ism doesn’t fore­close ei­ther ex­pres­sive breadth or con­cep­tual depth. On the con­trary, the min­i­mal­ist pro­gram—as it ini­tially emerged in fine art of the 20th cen­tury—has been about di­vert­ing the viewer’s at­ten­tion from overt signs of au­thor­ship to the deeper pu­rity of the ingredients.

      This also sounds like a great way to cook!

  19. Mar 2017
    1. Go to your closet. Hold each piece of clothing, each accessory, and each shoe in your hands. Now ask yourself,“Does this spark joy?”Does it make you feel pretty or handsome when you wear it? If it does then keep it. If not, get rid of it (harsh, I know).

      You could say the same to each object in your household basically. And, swoosh, you're a Minimalist.