Ben’s perspective here is useful.

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.

Universities are too platform dependent, and even those platforms are too dependent on the next layer of the stack. What a mess.

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.

Dammit, am I going to have to stop using Canvas?

For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.

One day, before I retire, I will remember how to cross-list sections in Canvas without having to look it up.

It’s that time of year where I have a text editor open alongside Canvas so that I can strip out all the extra HTML tags that LMSs like to add to my content.

This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff.

In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”

Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”

Reading through the data available through Canvas analytics, I’m reminded of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s argument (in their excellent book “Data Feminism”) that structured, “clean” data is most necessary for “strangers in the dataset.”

Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.

I’ve been getting “Welcome to Canvas during this difficult time, here’s some documentation” pop-ups for nearly 2.5 years now. Only way to dismiss it is to accept a cookie, and I use relatively locked-down Firefox, so I may just see it for eternity at this point.

I know I’m going to make plenty of mistakes teaching Intro to Data Science for the first time, but one thing I’m already proud of is teaching my students to use <code> tags to format code and output in their Canvas posts.

Special thanks to Google Drive for breaking the iframes I’ve been using to set up annotation-enabled readings in Canvas this semester… during the week that students are reviewing readings for their final papers. Really appreciate it.