On Thursday morning, I presented some work I’ve been doing with Dan Krutka at a session of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology. Here’s the title and abstract of our presentation: Teachers on Far-Right Social Media: The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Informal Learning We present the results of our studying a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform. The identity of the platform and the persistence of far-right agenda setting overwhelmed any educational intentions of the group, which therefore had little to offer teachers looking to improve their craft.

This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts.

Yesterday, I complained about Apple putting artificial limitations on what its hardware and software can do in terms of music syncing in order to make more money out of its consumers (and, probably, keep music companies happy). As I was writing that, I was thinking about similarities with the business model of a lot of mobile apps—let people download the app for free, but keep bonus features (or even the best features) behind a paywall.

I’ve thought a lot about “community” in online spaces over the course of my (still-short) academic career. Early drafts of my dissertation had a lengthy discussion about the benefits and disadvantages of Étienne Wenger’s community of practice framework (which emerged from Wenger’s work with Jean Lave) as compared to James Paul Gee’s affinity space framework. From a research perspective, I tend to prefer Gee’s space-focused perspective and agree with many of his arguments for why it makes more sense to use that language in an online setting.