read | Chris Aldrich

Listened to From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We 'Policing' Young Women's Voices? from Fresh Air | NPR

Journalist Jessica Grose, linguistics professor Penny Eckert and speech pathologist Susan Sankin discuss upspeak, vocal fry and why women's voices are changing — and whether or not that's a problem.

Journalist Jessica Grose is no stranger to criticism of her voice. When she was co-hosting the Slate podcast, the DoubleX Gabfest, she would receive emails complaining about her "upspeak" — a tendency to raise her voice at the end of sentences.

Once an older man she was interviewing for an article in Businessweek told her that she sounded like his granddaughter. "That was the first moment I felt [my voice] was hurting my career beyond just irritating a couple listeners," Grose tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

–Originally bookmarked on December 18, 2019 at 09:53AM

Listened to Body of Law: Beyond Roe from On the Media | WNYC Studios

Justice Ginsburg says she wishes it had been another case, not Roe v. Wade, that SCOTUS heard as the first reproductive rights case. On the Media and The Guardian take a closer look.

A majority of Americans polled by CSPAN last year couldn't name a Supreme Court case. Of those who could, Roe v. Wade was by far the most familiar, with 40 percent able to name it. (Only five percent could name Brown v. Board of Education.) And since it was decided in 1973, a majority — roughly 70 percent — have consistently said they want Roe upheld, albeit with some restrictions on legal abortion.

But what do we really know about Roe? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has often said she wishes it had been another case that the Supreme Court heard as the first reproductive freedom case instead. It was Susan Struck v. Secretary of Defense, and it came to the high court during the same term as Roe.

The year was 1970, and the Air Force (like the other branches of the military) had a regulation banning female service members from having a family. If a servicewoman got pregnant, she would get discharged. Captain Susan Struck was a nurse serving in Vietnam, and she challenged the decision in court with Ginsburg as her lawyer. However, the court never heard the case because the Air Force changed their policy first. For this week's show, we partnered with The Guardian (read their story here) to learn more about Susan Struck’s fight and its bigger lessons for reproductive freedom and for women in the workplace.

Our producer Alana Casanova-Burgess and The Guardian's health reporter Jessica Glenza spoke to Struck about the difficult decision she made to give her baby up for adoption in order to fight the regulation. Plus, we hear why legal scholars think this case "deserves to be honored by collective memory," and how Ginsburg's arguments to the Supreme Court differed from what the justices decided in Roe.

Then:

- Slate's Dahlia Lithwick explains the threats to reproductive rights in the court right now;

- Neil Siegel of Duke Law School puts the Struck case in context and discusses what better questions we could be asking about women's equality;

- activist and scholar Loretta Ross explains the tenets of reproductive justice and how they expand the frame beyond Roe and abortion;

- and Reva Siegel of Yale Law School tells the story of how abortion was discussed before 1973, including during the Women's Strike of 1970. And she describes the framework of ProChoiceLife, which expands the idea of what pro-life policy is. She is also the co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories.

Read The Guardian’s print version here, and share your story with Jessica Glenza if you were a woman serving in the military before 1976.

Music by Nicola Cruz, Kronos Quartet, and Mark Henry Phillips

Read Introducing OpenFuego, your very own heat-seeking Twitter bot (Nieman Lab)

We're open-sourcing the code behind Fuego, which mines Twitter to find the links a community is talking about most. Build your own!

Listened to Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice by Audie Cornish from All Things Considered | NPR

A few weeks ago, All Tech Considered asked the audience to send voice samples to analyze. Those samples were put through an algorithm to figure out what kind of voice would make an appealing radio host. NPR's Audie Cornish explains how this experiment turned out.

hat tip: What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding | NiemanLab

Read What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding by Jason Loviglio (Nieman Lab)

From nasal New York accents to vocal fry, NPR's anchors and reporters have long inflamed debates about whose voices should represent the nation — or just be heard by it.

WNYC Studios’ On The Media recently had a piece on the history, science, and engineering behind How Radio Makes Female Voices Sound “Shrill”.

This piece on NPR is a great example of how we’re still dealing with these engineering and social problems nearly a century on.

Listened to Making and Breaking Domain of One’s Own by Martha Burtis from Hybrid Pedagogy

What if the early Web adopters in higher education had imagined Domain of One’s Own instead of Course in a Box? Why didn’t they?

On Friday, 12 August 2016, Martha Burtis gave one of two closing keynotes at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held at the University of Mary Washington. Below is the text of her talk; the audio above is edited from the video recording of that morning’s keynotes.

Some interesting history of the DoOO’s early movement here. Martha waxes perhaps a bit too nostalgic about the early web in her hindsight, but honestly we all had rose colored glasses then. I’m glad we’ve got some of that early magic back. It makes me feel like the web may eventually move in the right direction again.

She does make some great points about how uncreative things can be with the sterile big box LMS solutions. School administrations shouldn’t be trying to coop everyone up in neat tidy little boxes. As much as they may want to “disrupt” the space and make things better, easier, cheaper, and more streamlined, limiting creativity and innovation is the surest way to not get there.

Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 01:35AM

Listened to #16: Helping Students Build a Presence Online by Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon from Modern Learners

To what extent should we give students the opportunity to create their own presence and, dare we say it, brand online?

On the college level, that’s being done with the project “Domain of One’s Own” which was started at Mary Washington University a few years ago and now has expanded to many other universities. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the school provides every student with a personal space on the web, hosted by the school, and administered by the student. It’s a way of teaching both digital literacy and digital citizenship in an age when being online is more and more a requirement for learning, for business, or just about anything else.

But what if we moved the idea of a Domain of One’s Own down to the high school level? Can we wait until college to provide students with a space online? That’s the question that Bruce and Will discuss in this podcast. Specifically, they talk about a must read post by Martha Burtis, one of the originators of DOOO. You’d be well served to check it out before listening to this episode. (You might also check out Audrey Watters’ great riff on the project as well.)

What are the tensions between having students publish their work online and making sure they act responsibly and safely? To what extent do teachers and leaders have presences online that they can use as models? What are some first steps that schools and individual teachers can take to begin to help students build their “findability” online?

A reasonable introductory discussion about the Domain of One’s Own concept by two people who generally agree with it, but don’t have the experience of some of those above them. This fact makes this a particularly interesting thing to listen to. I wonder what their personal sites modelling this sort of behavior look like?

Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 02:05AM