Jacques Ellul, a 20th century French academic, is best known for his writing on technique, understood as both individual means to ends and an all-encompassing system that prioritizes efficient solutions to problems. While Ellul’s terminology is not necessarily familiar in contemporary educational technology research, it represents traditional understandings of individual tools as a subset of instructional systems and captures the field’s emphasis on finding more efficient and efficacious means of teaching and learning. However, Ellul’s writing on technique is largely skeptical, creating an opportunity for educational technology researchers to turn a more critical eye towards our emphasis on solutions to problems. This essay argues that while an increased emphasis problems over things is welcome, Ellul’s writing invites more careful consideration of what it means to solve problems. In particular, I draw on Ellul to ask three provocative questions: which problems should we solve, who should solve those problems, and is solving problems always good?

The affinity space framework has proven useful for explaining and understanding teacher activity on social media platforms. In this study, we explore the ‘dark side’ of teacher affinity spaces by documenting a partisan teachers’ group on an alternative social media platform. We used a mix of a priori and emergent coding to analyse screenshots of posts and comments from a public teachers’ group and group administrators’ activity on the broader platform. Findings indicate that although the group administrators began with a focus on teachers, most participants were non-teachers with political (rather than professional) concerns about US education. Furthermore, administrators both freely engaged with political talking points in their activity outside the teachers’ group and allowed the broader platform culture—including conspiratorial thinking, explicit racism and out-group villainization—to seep in. We conclude by describing how these findings correspond with the key characteristics of an affinity space, including an overlapping of affinities, a lack of concern for professional qualifications, and influence from the broader platform. These findings provide an illustrative example of how teacher affinity spaces can drift from their stated intention within the larger platform context.

The proliferation of learning analytics (LA) in higher education has relied on data from learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas and Blackboard. Despite widespread LMS usage, students often lack clarity on what specific data is collected and who has access to it. This study explores undergraduate students’ understanding of data collection practices within the Canvas LMS. We analyzed survey responses of nearly 600 students, examining students’ awareness of the various roles within Canvas and their corresponding data permissions. The results reveal that students exhibit a general awareness of data collection practices but are unsure about the extent of their data’s use and misinterpret the use of data analytics, highlighting a a greater need for critical data education in universities and other educational contexts. These findings suggest a critical need for universities to enhance transparency and educate students on data privacy and LMS functionalities.

Scholarship on the intersection of Mormonism and the internet has often focused on progressive online voices. However, in recent years, the DezNat movement has challenged the assumption that online Mormonism necessarily trends more liberal than the Latter-day Saint mainstream. In this study, we examine the influence of red pill communities—which include far-right and anti-feminist movements on the internet—on DezNat. We collected 1,378 screenshots of tweets containing the #DezNat hashtag (which often included additional data and context) and engaged in open coding of these tweets, guided by our understanding of red pill concepts and tropes. We found considerable evidence of far-right and anti-feminist influences on DezNat-tagged tweets, suggesting that it is disingenuous for DezNat defenders to describe the movement as merely about Latter-day Saint orthodoxy. However, interpreting our findings through an affinity space framework, we argue that it is impractical—and perhaps impossible—to definitively establish the motivations of all those who participate in the movement. Rather, we suggest that the clear red pill references by DezNat participants provide an opportunity to consider overlaps between Mormonism, the far right, and aggressive anti-feminism—as well as the tensions between intentional ambiguity and boundary maintenance in Latter-day Saint institutions.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories. Findings: Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

There is an abundance of scholarship documenting educators’ uses of for-profit social media platforms for professional learning, but little is known about how inauthentic accounts affect those experiences. We studied 83 state-sponsored accounts’ interactions with the teacher-focused #Edchat hashtag by analyzing their profiles, profiles of accounts they retweeted, and tweets they shared. We found no patterns of overt state interference in #Edchat; however, state-sponsored accounts amplified other inauthentic accounts, such as those focused on commercial, spam, and self-promoting #Edchat messages. Most state accounts used formulaic methods to create relatable account profiles that may go unnoticed by educators using the hashtag. These findings raise questions for educators and researchers about disinformation, anonymity, attention-seeking, and information glut in social media environments polluted by inauthentic amplification.

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of groups on the free speech social media platform Gab that were intended to be LGBTQ+-friendly but became spaces of queerphobia. Results indicate that Gab users deployed discourses of difference to situate the platform as heteronormative and to denigrate the LGBTQ+ community. In particular, discourses utilized in the name of free speech were used to establish LGBTQ+ individuals as abominations, undergird hegemonic masculinity, and marginalize queer folk by reducing them to sex acts and sex organs. This study provides a better understanding of the (in)efficacy of “free speech” as a content moderation policy and unpacks how anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech spreads in digital spaces.

In this article, I… examine how changes to (Anglophone-aimed) domain names of the official websites of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints extend, continue, and complicate the existing relationship between naming and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition. In doing so, I will illustrate two key points concerning the relationship between Mormonism and technology. First, as Latter-day Saint institutions use digital technologies to make claims to authority and legitimacy, they are also subject to independent processes of legitimation that exist within complex sociotechnical systems. Second, other parties that successfully navigate these same complex sociotechnical systems have an increased ability to challenge Latter-day Saint legitimacy.

This chapter is an autoethnography of paradigm shift. By paradigm, I mean a collection of “understandings, methods, values, and expectations” (Kimmons & Johnstun, 2019, p. 631). Autoethnography is particularly well suited for exploring paradigm shift, given that its very practice is a deliberate argument for new scholarly paradigms (Ellis et al., 2011). Autoethnography’s philosophical underpinnings also explain my persistent interjection of the personal into what I myself expected to be a story about my professional life. To write an autoethnography is to accept that “canonical forms of doing and writing research” represent a “White, masculine, heterosexual, middle/upper-classed, Christian, able-bodied perspective” (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 3). It is, therefore, natural that I revisit my personal relationship with that perspective as I write this autoethnography about my professional life.

Deeper assumptions frequently shape the ways educational technology stakeholders collect and use data. This influence of assumptions on data decisions makes it critical that educational technology stakeholders engage with deeper assumptions as part of ethical considerations; indeed, they are key to ensuring that stakeholders engage with structural issues in education and educational technology rather than use ethical compliance as a superficial nod to questions of justice, harm, and power. In this chapter, I illustrate the relationship between deep assumptions and data ethics by considering assumptions related to four broad questions about the purpose of education, the purpose of educational technology, the determination of quality in educational (technology) research, and who has what say in these domains. Debates about data ethics are often better understood as debates about these deeper assumptions, which must be surfaced to consider data ethics in our field thoroughly.

In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives. Likewise, although social media platforms are recognized as spaces of identity and community production for LGBTQ+ people generally, less work has considered how they provide a similar forum for “gayservatives.” In response, this article engages in a critical discourse analysis of LGBTQ+-oriented groups on the far right social media platform Gab. Results indicate that far right social media is utilized to connect with other politically similar LGBTQ+ individuals perceived to be absent in one’s offline community. Participants do so via discourses that both regulate and celebrate LGBTQ+ identities, particularly as it relates to hegemonic masculinity. These strategies generally reinforce, but at times reframe, stereotypical narratives about LGBTQ+ individuals. This study provides groundwork for more nuanced understandings of both LGBTQ+ conservatives and the ways power is socialized and embodied through discourses about sexual and gender identities.

Academics’ use of social media platforms is widely recognized and often understood as an extension of traditional academic practice. However, this understanding does not account for academics’ use of pseudonymous Twitter accounts. We used a combination of computational and human-driven methods to examine the activity of 59 anonymized, self-identified academics on Twitter. Our computational analysis identified five broad topics: discussing academic life, discussing British news and affairs, discussing everyday life, surviving lockdown, and engaging with academic Twitter. Within these broad topics, we identified 24 more specific codes, most of which were concentrated in individual topics, with some cross-cutting codes. These codes demonstrate how the pseudonymous accounts considered in this study can be considered ‘authentically academic’ even if they do not conform with widespread expectations of academic social media use.

Teachers participate in professional learning activities to enhance their pedagogical knowledge and share best practices—and the increasing role of technologies in education, including social media, is shifting how this professional learning occurs. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to consider the role of social media for professional learning. Using intensive longitudinal methods, we repeatedly surveyed 14 teachers’ use of social media both before and during the pandemic (N = 386 total responses). We found patterns in social media platforms uptake and their purposes, but teachers’ use of social media was largely idiosyncratic. Also, teachers demonstrated notable shifts in social media use after the pandemic started; multilevel models indicated that teachers were more likely to use social media to connect and share, especially, as well as learn and follow, compared with before the pandemic. Higher levels of COVID-19-related family stress were also associated with more use of social media to find materials.

Scholars working in the area of children and youth services (CYS) have called for researchers and educators to look to disciplines outside of Library and Information Science (LIS) for inspiration in moving this area of the field forward. In this paper, we explore the opportunities provided by incorporating theoretical approaches and concepts from the fields of childhood studies, learning sciences, and educational technology in three separate special topics courses offered at the University of Kentucky. In these courses, we draw on our knowledge and expertise within fields external to LIS in order to encourage our students to think deeply and critically about how they think about, interact with, and provide services for children and youth. While two of the three courses are not solely focused on children and youth, all include content relevant to CYS professionals. In each section, we highlight the ways in which our different disciplinary expertise influences both the material we teach and the ways in which we teach. We then discuss the commonalities amongst our experiences and the potential that incorporating concepts and theories from these and other disciplines has for broadening CYS curricula more generally.

TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT) has emerged as an alternative to traditional curricular publishing houses; however, the critical investigation into this for-profit platform is limited. The aggregate content offered and downloaded from the platform through 2019 was Web-scraped, enabling us to construct a content model of TpT and provide descriptive results regarding the interactions between content, technology, and users/usage on TpT. We find TpT’s content model implicitly redefines what constitutes an education, elevating holiday activities and classroom decor to the same level as established curriculum. In terms of content, learning standards were largely absent and user ratings were uniformly high, casting doubt upon the validity of these technological features. 87.9% of resources were under $5, however, many small sales add up across users, indicating the platform extracts significant value from educators and schools. We discuss how the online educational marketplace phenomenon stands to impact the future of curriculum production and the teaching profession.

ClassDojo is a classroom communication and behavior management app intended to “bring every family into [the] classroom” (www.classdojo.com). The features of the platform include a points system to facilitate classroom management, instant teacher-parent communication (on the individual or class level), and student portfolios (among others). While ClassDojo claims to be used in over 95% of schools in the United States, there is little known about how students or principals interact with and understand the platform’s features and data. Drawing upon a mixed-methods study in a small state in the Southeastern United States, this article offers empirically driven insight into how students and principals perceive new digital education apps like ClassDojo. In particular, this analysis speaks to stakeholder attitudes toward the use of the app with regard to if and how it is mediating student-teacher and student-parent relationships. In so doing, this article offers early insights from a state-specific case into how the use of and experience of ClassDojo is situated within the broader educational experiences of students.

‘Alternative’ social media platforms like Parler and Gab—on which hate speech and conspiracy theories often exist unchecked—present an opportunity for instructional designers and other education professionals to revisit assumptions about informal learning on social media. Employing a conceptual framework that distinguishes education from miseducation, we use these controversial platforms to argue that educators should more fully consider: 1) the miseducation happening in learning spaces, 2) how the design of educational technologies may amplify miseducation, and 3) the importance that formal education resist miseducation.

A general suspicion of Mormonism in American politics and media dates back to the 19th century and continues today. Weber (2019) has described Mormonism as a ‘meme’ that is malleable enough to symbolize different things for different audiences in different contexts. In this study, I examine the presence of ‘Mormonism as meme’ in 511 posts composed by government-sponsored Twitter accounts as part of information operations before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I retrieved these posts from a dataset of government-sponsored tweets made available by Twitter and used a mix of computational and human methods to determine: 1) which countries used Mormonism as meme, 2) whether government-sponsored accounts originated or amplified these messages, 3) what identities government-sponsored accounts adopted, and 4) how government-sponsored accounts used Mormonism as a meme. This study’s results indicate that six governments invoked Mormonism as part of their information operations during this time frame. Venezuela pursued a strategy that depended on using pro-Trump accounts to repeatedly share messages describing Mormons as communitarian and insular. Other countries (including Russia and Iran) pursued more subtle strategies, more often retweeting others’ posts than writing their own. However, they still invoked aspects of Mormonism that called into question its compatibility with liberal, conservative, or broadly American values. As a whole, these posts correspond with both Weber’s (2019) description of Mormonism as malleable meme and information operations’ twin purposes of influencing the 2016 election and dividing Americans.

Despite the continued use of social media in educational contexts, there remains skepticism about whether platforms like Twitter can actually contribute to learning. In this paper, we argue that such skepticism is based on an overly narrow conception of learning that focuses on academic performance and disregards other manifestations. To advance this argument, we document use of the #bac2018 Twitter hashtag in the month leading up to the 2018 baccalauréat exams (the “bac”), which are significant not only for their role in the French educational system but also for their connections with broader French society and culture. We found that participants engaged in sharing notes; slacking, doubting, and fearing; requesting retweets; preferring topics; complaining; connecting with bac heritage and experience; joking; and showing awareness of time. In keeping with the significance of the bac, we found that these practices within the #bac2018 hashtag were associated with not only academic learning but also social and cultural practices that are significant despite their absence from any formal curriculum. These findings underline the complexity and richness that characterizes learning—especially in digital contexts.

Research on teachers’ use of social media has typically assumed that it is a) driven by a need for professional learning and b) best understood in terms of individual motivations. In this study, we use a dataset of nearly 600,000 tweets posted to one or more of 48 Regional Educational Twitter Hashtags associated with 44 U.S. states. To explore the influence of local contextual factors on hashtag- and account-level activity in these hashtags, we use an analytic approach heretofore uncommon in social media-focussed education research: generalised linear and multilevel modelling. At the hashtag level, higher numbers of teachers within a state, proportions of students receiving subsidised meals, student-to-teacher ratios, and amounts of state spending per child are associated with more activity within a regional hashtag; by contrast, more left-leaning state governments and citizenries are associated with less activity. At the account level, more experienced accounts and accounts in more right-leaning states contribute more tweets to these hashtags. These findings reinforce established understandings of Twitter as a site for teacher learning; however, they also underline the importance of acknowledging other important purposes of teachers’ Twitter use, including receiving emotional support and engaging in activism.

Social media platforms have firmly established themselves as phenomena of interest for Learning Design and Technology (LDT) researchers, and the data accessible from these platforms provide new methodological possibilities. Given the number, diversity, and constant evolution of both social media platforms and research tools, it would be inappropriate to suggest that there is a single correct way to carry out LDT research with social media data. In contrast, this chapter introduces six broad, interconnected steps to social media research: Conducting Ethical Research; Framing the Research; Organizing the Research Process; Collecting Data; Analyzing Data; and Writing, Sharing, and Publicizing Research. Each step is associated with several considerations, careful attention to which will guide researchers toward a particular correct way to accomplish their specific research objectives.

Online curricular marketplaces such as TeachersPayTeachers.com (TPT) are challenging conventional notions of curriculum, the professionalization of educators, and the exchange of capital in P-12 education. In this research note, we explore these issues by presenting an accounting of: (a) the size and scope of TPT, (b) the number of TPT resources being downloaded, and (c) the financial transactions associated with TPT educator-storefronts. Findings indicated that TPT hosted 4,018,173 classroom resources from 208,748 educator-sellers with 1.5 billion all-time downloads and $3.9 billion in total sales. 69% of all TPT downloads were of free materials. However, an overwhelming 81% of total TPT sales were attributed to the top 1% of educator-sellers (n = 1,524). TPT’s massive scope suggests it has introduced an important disruption in P-12 curriculum, with implications for the professionalization of educators. Furthermore, TPT’s unequal distribution of wealth across educator-sellers suggests disparities in the extent to which individual sellers are part of this disruption.