Day: February 10, 2020

Virtue Signalling

by dougpete, posted in inspiration, learning, Media Literacy, social media

First off …

ETFO

Today marks a day of rotating strike action by ETFO members in the following districts:

  • Avon Maitland
  • Durham
  • Durham Catholic (designated early childhood educators only)
  • Halton
  • Hastings-Prince Edward
  • Lambton Kent
  • Rainbow
  • Thames Valley
  • Upper Canada
  • Upper Grand
  • Campbell Children’s School Authority

Details here.

Unfortunately, the voicEd This Week in Ontario Edublogs show had glitched when it was to be broadcast from the OLA Superconference. There were great blog posts to talk about and this one from Melanie White “Listening to Reflections” generated a comment from our guest host that day, Diana Maliszewski, about “Virtue Signalling”. Melanie’s original post had talked about the challenges that she had experienced using social media in the classroom.

Now, I’ll be honest and admit I hadn’t heard that expression below and Diana had just a few minutes to expand on it. I made myself a note to do some more work.

There’s a whole article devoted to it on the Wikipedia

Virtue signalling is a pejorative neologism for the conspicuous expression of moral values.[1][2] The origin of the term is often credited to journalist James Bartholomew from an article in The Spectator in 2015.[3]

It’s an interesting read as well as this article 12 Examples of Virtue Signaling.

Our original discussion had spurred me on to some additional reflection. Thanks, Diana.

What my reflection did was give my feelings something to hang my hat on. There are times when I’m consuming media only to see a celebrity or someone who thinks they’re a celebrity pictured doing the “right thing” or they’re talking about some cause that they are only on the sidelines about or they’re promoting their newest book.

While I don’t see this concept going away any time soon, I found it kind of healing to note that there is a label for this concept and there are others that are similarly challenged by it.

I’m not all in with all of the examples; maybe Tribalism is a good example; I’ll always be a Detroit Tigers, Minnesota Vikings, Montreal Canadiens fan.

However, I will think about the impact the next time I take a selfie.

It’s an interesting concept to think about – where is that fine line between actually doing good as opposed to posting something that makes you look like you’re doing good?

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OTR Links 02/10/2020

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.