Marketing yourself as “the tech in edtech” is not at all a flex like Infinite Campus seems to think it is. Like, all edtech is tech—that’s the point. I don’t know that I’d agree with “the ed in edtech” either, but I’d at least get what they’re going for. This just boggles me.

My decision a few months ago to import my Twitter archive into my journaling app has been a mixed bag. I’ve been deleting a lot of orphaned references and truncated posts, but also, now I have a record of the time I picked a fight with an LMS CEO about privacy, and that’s fun.

Ben’s perspective here is useful.

It’s amazing how much I struggle to write a single sentence during time I’ve set aside for writing, but when I’m in the middle of grading, I can “pause for a second” to jot down an idea and wind up with three draft paragraphs.

I love a genuinely good experience as a peer reviewer. The current manuscript I’m reviewing is one that I’m very well suited to review (which does not happen enough), and the authors have clearly improved the paper since the last round. It’s nice when things work like they’re supposed to.

Some important observations by Ian Linkletter in this interview.

Definitely worth bookmarking this for semesters to come. I like Canvas as far as LMSs go, but the sheer scale of dependence here has me thinking about taking other approaches. This first paragraph is a doozy:

Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States.

Oh wait, this is worse.

Amazing time of year for this to happen.

This is a good example of how thorny the AI problem is, and why I strongly prefer a digital labor critique to a copyright critique. Yes, I’m mad that Meta trained their models on my work, but I don’t think the answer is to strengthen Elsevier or Cengage’s copyright claims.

Well, this is certainly… something.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

I’ve been thinking for a while that the connection between John Perry Barlow and Marc Prensky re: the mythical “digital native” is underexplored, and this morning, I finally started a folder for a new writing project.

You know, I wasn’t sure about the choice of Van Tatenhove as the next law school dean, but I figured that I didn’t know that much about the guy, and if the law faculty was on board, I ought to trust that rather than my gut reaction.

Finding out that faculty were not on board and that the university seems to have made the decision from above despite faculty concerns is more worrying than any concern I previously had.

Audrey Watters once compellingly argued that metal detectors are edtech. I think we now have a responsibility to treat AI nudifier apps as edtech, too.

Really appreciate this essay. It puts things nicely and has the kind of personal investment that makes it relatable.

I am in my late 30s. “Digital native” was first used for my age cohort in the early 2000s—and was riffing off of John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” It is a USELESS term because its frame of reference keeps shifting to “kids these days” (and other reasons, too).

Two grumps (and, to be clear, I’m grumpy at my employer, not the student reporter):

1. the framing here is, as usual, “how to use” whether than “should we use”

2. “misinformation” is centered as the (implicitly sole) problem with generative AI, not digital labor or any of the deeper issues

Mixed feelings about this. I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of ed tech at this level, but I also think that there is some unwarranted handwringing going on here. I have trouble untangling the two.

Les Cowboys fringants is a Québécois folk rock band that has gotten a lot of my attention over the past five years (though I’ve enjoyed their music for even longer than that. I have a bunch of their albums, but over the past few months, I’ve taken to listening to some of their concerts that have been recorded. I do this while I’m working, so I’m usually listening to the sound rather than watch the visuals, but I do enjoy taking the occasional peek at what’s happening on stage, too.

Last Thursday, I listened to a recent episode of The Vergecast during my morning bike commute. The episode featured Paul Ford talking about his recent experience with Claude Code, and I was genuinely surprised to find some of his comments resonating with me. It helped that Ford wasn’t uncritical about AI (though certainly not as critical as I would have been), but some of it was just that I recognized some of the thrill that he was describing of using tools and resources to learn how to solve a problem. In fact, I found that thrill so contagious that a passing comment he made got me to spend some time once I got to the office converting my Twitter archive into a CSV that I could finally import it into the Day One journaling app that I use.

Once again, my spring break has consisted of: trying to catch up on work, telling myself that it’s spring break and therefore okay to not catch up on as much work as I expected, and feeling guilty about not catching up on as much as I expected

Oh, it’s not just in RSS!! Page is still up!

Love it when this kind of thing shows up in my RSS reader so I can use it as an example in my content management systems class.

Just checked up on the results of a web scrape that worked so, so much better than expected only to find that I hadn’t updated the base URL correctly, so all the results were wrong.