Barry Dahl dot com

This was published as a Local View column in the Duluth News Tribune on September 3, 2020.

Facebook has proven itself to be a danger to democracy. The republic is under attack, and Zuckerberg is the attacker.

If Facebook is your main source for news, then you’re not getting news; you’re getting indoctrinated by propaganda. According to PBS News, fake accounts created in Russia during the 2016 election reached more than 126 million Americans, almost equaling the 136 million who voted in the election. A fake account is one that is not backed by a real person — or not by the person purported to be behind the account.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook knew about the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 election but didn’t take action because of organizational dysfunction. Regardless of why Facebook didn’t take action, it knew and did nothing.

As we near another presidential election, we again find that the information fed to the public across social-media platforms is far too often filled with lies and fake videos. In 2020, Facebook still knows and yet does almost nothing to stop it.

Even if Facebook became more effective at cracking down on fake accounts and misinformation detection, I wouldn’t recommend anyone trust the company to take action. The Proud Boys hate group was permanently banned from the platform in October 2018. However, in July 2020, Facebook removed 54 accounts, 50 pages, and four Instagram accounts (also owned by Facebook) where the hate group was back up to its usual violence-inducing tactics. Sure, Proud Boys got caught, but how much damage did it do before getting caught?

Facebook has rules against accounts and posts by violent militias, and yet the Kenosha shooter was egged on by a page that encouraged armed Americans to take to the streets of the far southeastern Wisconsin city. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook made an “operational mistake” by failing to remove the page until after the event occurred. So people died because of an “operational mistake?”

Facebook is Fakebook. The amount of misinformation and fake news is staggering. Your timeline is littered with fake outrage over every little stupid thing. Not to mention the fake enthusiasm about the minutiae of life (“Oh boy, baked potatoes tonight!”).

I left Facebook almost two years ago. I no longer was willing to be the product it was selling to others. Believe it or not, I find I can still stay in touch with friends and family. Facebook made that easy, but the price tag was too high.

If your business uses Facebook as your only “website,” then I won’t be your customer. If you’re a local politician who mainly talks to the people through Facebook, then I won’t hear your message. If you’re trying to sell something on Facebook, then I won’t be your buyer.

Zuckerberg doesn’t care a whit whether his platform is used by foreign agents in an attempt to manipulate the U.S. presidential election. If you are a Facebook user, then you support Zuckerberg and his goals. You are not an innocent bystander.

More than 1,100 companies and organizations joined the advertiser boycott against Facebook in July to pressure the platform to take more action on hate speech and deceptive posts from politicians. I suggest that you join in by deleting your Facebook account and leaving the hate-filled site behind.

If you don’t want to believe some rando who wrote a “Local View” commentary (that’s me), that’s fine. Do your own research. Just don’t do your research at InfoWars and Breitbart — and definitely not at Facebook.

Barry Dahl of Superior is an educator who taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth for six years and worked at Lake Superior College for 16 years, including 10 years as a dean and vice president. He works now for an online learning software company. He was an early user of Facebook when the platform first opened to the general public. To learn more about the evidence against Facebook, he recommends “The Great Hack,” an Emmy-nominated documentary on Netflix.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been preparing to die. Or at least I’ve started preparing for that inevitability. It’s actually been kind of fun.

I don’t actually believe that I’m going to die soon; not that one can ever be too sure about those things. I don’t have a terminal disease, nor a death wish. I’ve just seen a lot of people die in the past few years, and I want to be ready.

As a death prepper, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

• I’ve written my own obit. It’s ready to go, once somebody else is able to add the date and cause of death.
• I’ve chosen the songs I want to be played at my death party (or memorial service, if you will).
• I’ve prepared a shared online spreadsheet to make sure my wife has access to all the financial accounts information.
• I’ve decided on cremation, because I really like the word “cremains.” (I hope you cremember me when I’m gone.)
  • MAJOR EDIT: Based on an awesome podcast episode by Science Vs., I now plan to be composted. No lie. Turn me into dirt rather than ashes. Listen: Should We Compost Human Bodies? 
• My headstone is being prepared. Tasteful little thing, no 24K gold or diamond studs. I don’t feel like I actually need a headstone anywhere in the world, but my wife would like to have our markers side-by-side. That’s a good enough reason for me.

I do have a couple of things left to do:

• I’m working on a solution that will delete almost all of my online accounts when I die, except for this blog and my Twitter feed. I’ll leave those for my kids to look back on someday.
• I still need to prepare a will. This should be moot, because I expect my wife to live 30 more years after I die, and everything goes to her with or without a will. However, it’s not a sure thing that I go first, so a last will and testament needs to be prepared.
• I’m going to prepare a 5-minute video about my life. My whole life condensed into 5 minutes. That’s going to be a challenge. Lots of good stuff will hit the cutting room floor, but death is cruel – and most people will start to check out after five minutes anyway. Why a 5-minute video? I don’t know; I just want to.
  • I’ve already made a 5-minute video about my career in education for a D2L Fusion conference. This video, 40 Years in 5 Minutes – My Career in a Nutshell, is similar to the 5-minute video that I want to about the rest of my life, except without all the Powerpointless stuff.
• And lastly, to steal phrase, I need to get busy living.

If and when you see my obit, you’ll see that I don’t use the phrase “he passed away.” You don’t pass away – you fail away. You didn’t pass, you failed. You failed to live forever. Death is not a hall pass, it’s a pink slip.

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This is a follow-up to my post from October 2012, Replacement Teachers Coming Soon to Wisconsin. Not surprisingly, I received lots of pushback on that article from those who “Stand with Walker,” including many who don’t live in Wisconsin and have no idea what is happening here, except for what they are told by bloggers and faux news people.

Every time I see another “We Stand with Scott Walker” yard sign, I assume that the home owner hates education and educators. I’m not sure what else to think here in Superior where Scott Walker has started the ball rolling down a hill where the result will be a severe lowering of the quality of public education.

So, what’s happening here in Superior, Wisconsin? Superior is a border town. It takes me 3-4 minutes to be on top of the “high bridge” and into Minnesota. After leaving my house, I could be pulling into the parking lot of a half dozen Minnesota schools within 15 minutes. But I’m not the one doing that. That commute belongs to the excellent teachers and other education employees who have recently taken better jobs on the Minnesota side of the border.

The migration of our best educators from Superior to schools in Minnesota has begun. From one elementary school alone, four excellent educators recently quit their jobs in Superior to take similar, but better, jobs in Minnesota. Why did these educators jump to the other side of the bridge? Because they couldn’t afford not to. They needed to have affordable health insurance for their family, and they no longer had that in the Superior School District.

Note to all school administrators in Duluth, Proctor, Hermantown, Esko, Cloquet, Two Harbors and others; the best Superior teachers are ripe for the plucking since you offer them much better benefits than they now receive in Wisconsin.

The stripping of decent health insurance was a two-step process. Scott Walker didn’t accomplish it completely on his own, but he took care of part one, which was stripping away the collective bargaining rights. I case you missed it, the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 was proposed by Walker, passed by the Wisconsin Legislature, and became law, effective June 29, 2011. At that point, the School District of Superior no longer had to negotiate with their employees over anything except pay raises.

The second step in the process has to be owned by the Superior School Board. They are the ones who took the opportunity provided by Walker to decimate the affordability of the health insurance coverage offered to employees of the school district. One example of the devastating change in employee health insurance is the quadrupling of the annual deductible for family coverage from $1,500 to $6,000.

If ever there was a case study for the importance of public employee unions, Scott Walker’s actions and the resulting fallout would be it. His supporters believe, apparently, that public employees don’t need unions because their employer (the gubment) is always above board and would never screw them over. Those same people like to point to FDR’s statements about how public employees don’t need the protection of unions and collective bargaining. That was in the 30’s and 40’s, and if we still had government leaders like FDR, maybe the public employee unions wouldn’t be necessary. Instead we have politicians like Scott Walker, and there is no doubt that the public employees need protection from the actions of their government employer.

To my friends on the police force and those in the fire halls, he’ll be coming for your collective bargaining rights next. Obviously he hasn’t wanted to do this until after the election, because he’s counting on your votes to get re-elected. As soon as the Wisconsin Governor election is over, Walker will be positioning himself for a run at the White House; and that means finishing the job he started by wiping out all public employee unions in Wisconsin. Do you like your employee benefits? If so, then you’d better protect them, because Scott Walker won’t.

I Stand Against Scott Walker!

I Stand WITH Education and Educators!

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I am the yearbook committee each year for the elementary school where my youngest attends (and he’s got two more years to go, oy!). Every year it is a mad dash to get all the class photos laid out – and then to stuff as many candids into the various pages as possible. Almost everyone likes to see their face show up multiple times in the yearbook, although there are some exceptions to that very general rule.

Doing something fresh and interesting for the front and back cover is always a challenge, especially since I am neither the most creative person nor the best designer you’ll ever meet. These two cover pages are the only color pages in the book; everything else is black-n-white. This year I decided to use a photo of the Aurora since the school is named Northern Lights Elementary.

Luckily, I was able to find some very nice CC-Attribution photos on Flickr. I didn’t have to look any further than my friend and fellow educator, Alan Levine (cogdogblog on Flickr). Since it was licensed for remix – I cropped it to fit the vertical page layout and then added the text as seen below.

Then I made the fatal error (well not really fatal, at least I hope not (although that would get me out of the yearbook business)) and forgot to add my intended blurb on the inside of the cover giving Alan a photo credit for his fine shot.

Please consider this to be a make-up attribution for Alan as well as my apology for being a bit scatterbrained. Now there will be about 600 grade schoolers who won’t see his name in their yearbook. His career may never recover, but I certainly hope so.

Alan, please accept my apologies for my oversight. Hope this makes us square.

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Or so it must be according to those who want more proof that bin Laden is dead. The word of a Navy SEAL is not good enough. Apparently.

Every American who believes that the U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 didn’t kill bin Laden apparently thinks that the entire group of specially trained, best-of-the-best American soldiers are all involved in a lie and the cover-up of that lie. Sure, people have their political reasons for not wanting to believe Obama, and Hillary, and anyone else seen biting their lips in that “staged” photo in the “Situation Room” at the White House. After all, how could anyone ever believe a U.S. politician? The cable “news” channels see to it that we can never believe anything that comes from a politician.

And isn’t it convenient that there is no group officially called SEAL Team 6? Also convenient that they need to stay completely out of the public eye – such a shroud of secrecy. So yes, if you believe that the bin Laden killing is a scam and a hoax – then you also believe that U.S. Navy SEALs are a major part of the effort in pulling the wool over our eyes. It’s not as if Obama went over the wall of that compound himself and shot bin Laden in the head.

No, it was a U.S. Navy SEAL. Do you seriously not believe that?

(Okay. That should take care of my political ranting in this space for at least several months. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)  (Flickr-CC photo by The U.S. Army)

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I’m trying to figure out where I fit in the employed — self-employed — unemployed landscape. Technically I’m still employed in that I will continue to have a paycheck for approximately three more months and I am still working on some “special projects” for my employer. However, it really feels as though I am unemployed, since I received the news (see previous post) that my position is being eliminated at the college.

As I write this I am working on plans to see if I can make a living being self-employed. I’ve been self-employed previously and I really believe that it feels more like being unemployed than employed. Not because you don’t work when you’re self-employed (usually, quite to the contrary), but because you do not have the security of the trappings that come along with those remaining good jobs that are out there – particularly those significant employer contributions to insurance and retirement costs as well as managing all that income tax crapola that requires special attention.

Although some of the advice is questionable, I am re-reading “Before You Quit Your Job” by R. Kiyosaki (you know, the Rich Dad guy) to get my mind around reviving my entrepreneurial spirit. More relevant to me have been several posts by Harold Jarche, including Freelancers Unite, Freelance Lessons, To be, or not to be a consultant, and So You Want to Be an E-learning Consultant.

I’m also faced with a bit of a dilemma. Although I would love to go down the entrepreneurial path, I do have concerns about my ability to put 3 kids through college in addition to all that other stuff like keeping a roof over their heads and food on their table. So I’m also sprucing up my job application materials with the thought of applying for several of the jobs that are recently posted or about to be posted around the region. Right now it feels like figuring out my next ten years is a bit of a full-time job itself.

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As many of my friends already know, I recently received notice that my job was being eliminated at Lake Superior College. I was fully expecting that I would hear the news that my job was being re-designed into a lower level title with less pay, but I had no inkling that my position and my employment would be cut completely. This picture of me in my office was taken just a couple of months before I received this news. Ahh, good times.

Along with three of my vice presidential colleagues, I received the kind of news that no one wants to hear – something to the effect of – “you’re no longer needed here.” Although that is not a direct quote, that pretty much sums up the situation. As part of a major reorganization at the college, the remaining administrators will take on new responsibilities and there are also quite a few things that probably just won’t get done any more. I’ve spent 15 years at Lake Superior College and about 27 years altogether working in higher education. A brief rundown of my time at LSC includes:

• November, 1995: I accepted a temporary faculty position at LSC teaching accounting, starting the winter quarter of ’95-96 school year.
• August, 1996: I started a probationary period on a tenure-track accounting position with the LSC faculty.
• During the 2000-01 academic year I received some release time to serve as the Online Faculty Coordinator.
• June, 2001: I resigned my faculty tenure (oops!) to become the Dean of Technology and Distance Learning at LSC.
• June, 2004: Received a promotion to Vice President of Technology and e-Campus at LSC, and joined the President’s Cabinet.
• November, 2010: I received notice of my impending lay-off due to reorganization and reduction in force.

I am now working from home on special projects during the three-month period when the college is obligated to pay me but doesn’t want me around (note: I don’t want to be there either as it is extremely difficult to deal with the near constant pity party related to my departure). I’m not exactly sure what is next. More info will be posted here in the near future.

My biggest regret/disappointment/concern has to do with my abrupt exit from the college community. After 15 years of service, and after creating (I believe, and so I’m told) a pretty decent record related to online learning and the uses of technology at the campus; it doesn’t feel good at all to basically just disappear from the campus and from my friends and colleagues. It feels as if I’ve done something wrong, which I haven’t. In fact, the whole thing is downright painful.

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Why do I think I’m qualified to be a college president? Fair question. Here’s a first attempt at an answer.

I have enjoyed over 25 years working in higher education with a majority of that time being spent at Lake Superior College (LSC), a comprehensive community and technical college in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. During that time I have developed a strong sense of the overall importance of education to the future of our country in addition to an unwavering commitment to supporting the mission and values of community colleges. I’m currently serving as the Vice president of Technology and e-Campus at LSC.

My leadership aspirations are the culmination of my entire educational background and work experience. My career in higher education started in the classroom where I taught accounting for eleven years at research universities followed by another six years in the classroom at Lake Superior College in Duluth, Minnesota. My first administrative job came in 2001 when I was selected to serve in a newly created position as the academic Dean of Technology and Distance Learning at LSC. This position gave me significant experience in working with faculty on curriculum review and revisions while also directly managing the growth of online offerings at LSC. Serving as Chief Information Officer (CIO) helped me develop many connections with leaders at all of the institutions of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. One of the most important roles that I have played at my college is to work as an advocate for the bridge between academics and information technology. I have also been involved in building that same bridge system-wide in some of the committees and task forces that I have been appointed to by the MnSCU Office of the Chancellor. I firmly believe that academics is the engine that propels all that we do in higher education, and that the other units of the college are service providers who are needed to help support the primary academic mission.

My varied experiences in higher education create a rare confluence of skills, abilities, and interests. My years of experience as an academic dean and a faculty member qualify me to serve in the role of Chief Academic Officer (CAO). I also have the experience and expertise of a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) by virtue of my service as an interim campus CFO, two accounting degrees, and 17 years of experience in the accounting classroom; all of which have helped to prepare me to fully understand the financial issues facing higher education today. I have spent the past 9 years serving as the CIO at Lake Superior College, advocating for the proper role of technology in academia. I believe that my knowledge and skill set related to the CAO, CFO, and CIO positions give me a unique opportunity to lead an innovative institution of higher learning into the future.

There’s more to the story than that, but that should give you a good idea of my qualifications for a job as campus leader.

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