TA Tuesday (December 19, 2017)

Here's your weekly dose of TA. Enjoy.

Tools and Resources

  • The HP Sprocket, a mini photo printer, would make a good addition to an organizing or advocacy organization's meeting box. Imagine all the ways you could use this printer:
    • Taking pics at events and putting them in cool, event-specific frames for participants to take home
    • As part of an advocacy campaign; take a picture of someone standing next to an important message.
    • Use the Sprocket in place of a photo booth
  • Font Awesome's free vector graphics (examples on the right) are designed to be used on websites but they can also be used in documents. I'm most interested in ones not found elsewhere such as braille, blindness, and the broader accessibility icon.
  • Buh-bye #Storify. This cool and easy-to-use social storytelling tool is disappearing in May 2018. If you've used Storify, read Storify End-of-Life to learn how to download and preserve your stories. Techies have weighed in on the news; read thoughts on Hacker News. Twitter is solving part of the problem by creating threading. It doesn't fully replace Storify, but it does allow folks to make sense of numerous tweets on a subject. And again people weigh in on Hacker News.
  • Swite is a website platform where the content is social media. That's right. You import your content from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This seems like it would be a good way to promote a social media-driven campaign. Free and paid plans.
  • There's still time to create a holiday video with Biteable.

At work

  • Aspen's Five Best Ideas of the Day is super handy. It identifies five stories from various sources Monday through Friday and, if you choose, will deliver them to you at Noon. The sources are not your run-of-the-mill sources, places you always go for news and interesting ideas. This makes Aspen's list special.

Learn something


For yourself


Good reads

  • How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege? investigates how marriage is not a phenomenon on its own but rather connected to mental health, the economy, overall well-being, family and community stability, and more.
  • Black athletes can teach us about more than just sports weaves together a story about bullying using athletes, the current presidents, and children as the characters. And while author Andre Perry spends a good amount of time talking about the president, the real story is this:
    YouthTruth surveyed more than 180,000 students in 37 states in grades five through 12 to learn "how much, in what ways, and why students are being bullied," according to the report.

    Among students who were bullied, 44 percent said their appearance was the primary reason. Seventeen percent cited their race or skin color; 15 percent said it was because others thought they were gay. Socioeconomic class, religion, nationality, gender and disability were also cited as significant factors.

    The bullies' primary weapon of choice was their mouth. The study found verbal bullying to be most prevalent, at 73 percent. Social bullying, which includes deliberately harming someone's reputation or relationships, according to a government website, followed at 54 percent. Cyber bullying and physical harassment were less frequent at 28 and 23 percent respectively.

    Bullying may be ubiquitous, but it doesn't have to be normalized—especially by the president.     (emphasis added)
  • Should we spend less time looking at screens and more time actually talking with others? One corporate leader thinks so: Why Ideo's Fred Dust Thinks We Must Relearn The Art Of Dialogue.