30 November 2023 - kudos:

My second-to-last class meeting for my content management course featured an impromptu lecture on how URL structure is undervalued by both web users and site designers. It wasn’t irrelevant to course concepts, but I hadn’t been planning on it either.

pre-conference updates to my online presence

19 October 2023 - kudos:

This week, I’m attending two different research conferences (well, I only barely attended the first one, to be honest). The leadup to these conferences has involved some changes to my web presence, just in case people actually check my website when I put it on my slides. Overall, I’m happy with the changes that I’ve made, so I thought I’d take advantage of my free Delta in-flight wi-fi to blog about some of the changes I’ve made and why.

12 October 2023 - kudos:

Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work | Ars Technica'

31 July 2023 - kudos:

Haven’t read this yet, but I’m bookmarking for my classes. link to ‘A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work | Ars Technica’

how I'm talking about generative AI in my content management class

13 July 2023 - kudos:

Fall 2023 will mark my fifth time teaching my department’s class on Content Management Systems. I have really loved taking on this class and making it my own over the past several years. It’s also been fun to see how teaching the class has seeped into the rest of my life: It’s a “cannot unsee” situation (in a good way!) where the concepts I teach work themselves into everyday encounters with the news, my own websites, and other things around the internet.

8 July 2023 - kudos:

Slowly realizing that I have no choice but to make generative AI one of the themes of my content management class in the fall.

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists | Techdirt'

29 June 2023 - kudos:

Helpful summary by Masnick; bookmarking for later. link to ‘Internal Twitter Video Reveals Twitter Bent Over Backwards To Protect Trump And Pro-Trump Insurrectionists | Techdirt’

🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation | Techdirt'

11 May 2023 - kudos:

This is a neat game that shows how difficult content moderation is. Excited to have my content management students play it in the Fall. link to ‘Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation | Techdirt’

a small victory for not policing students

21 March 2023 - kudos:

I’ve never been a fan of policing student behavior in my classes. I don’t take attendance, I’m pretty generous when it comes to late work and making up assignments, and I try to make participation in class something that’s organic rather than something structured and forced. In recent years, this hasn’t necessarily gone well. For example, the undergrad class I’m currently teaching has lousy attendance, and I struggle to get anyone except the 3-4 same voices to contribute to class discussions.

7 November 2022 - kudos:

Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?

5 November 2022 - kudos:

I feel like I am constantly fine-tuning how I do assessments in my classes. I want to trust students and avoid policing them, but I’m frustrated when they respond to this approach by acting like it exempts them from attending class and participating.

data privacy and kiddo's school

25 August 2022 - kudos:

In addition to all the irritating ClassDojo stuff going on at kiddo’s school, I’ve also spent some time banging my head against the wall made up of two forms: One to opt out of FERPA directory information sharing, and the other to opt out of kiddo’s information being shared with media outlets. I’m too tired tonight to get into all the details of what’s been going on, but the short version is that there’s no (clear, easy) way for spouse and I to request that kiddo’s name and image not be shared on school social media without also insisting that kiddo’s name and image not appear in innocuous things like… a school yearbook.

22 June 2022 - kudos:

Prepping a Fall class and feeling torn between wanting to make a lot of improvements and not wanting to burn myself out by reinventing wheels from previous semesters.

21 June 2022 - kudos:

Setting up a Canvas course gets meta when you’re doing it for a class on web content management.

some Hypothesis (and other) updates for the blog

21 June 2022 - kudos:

Shortly after last week’s mostly-successful experiment with Hypothesis, I noticed Chris Aldrich posting to Micro.blog about the software and started up a conversation. I’d followed Chris a few weeks before in trying to get more into Micro.blog (perhaps my favorite indie social media platform out there, though I’m also enjoying getting into Mastodon) by following academia and academia-adjacent folks, and was pleased to see an area of common interest. It wasn’t until a separate conversation on Mastodon this morning that I remembered that my Hypothesis setup was dependent on my manually checking annotations on my website.

27 September 2021 - kudos:

I brought up the federal German elections in class today to make a point about WordPress; I’d say it made sense in context, but I can’t promise that was true for the students!

25 August 2021 - kudos:

I just had to annotate a class reading to explain first that “AIM” stands for AOL Instant Messenger and second what instant messaging was, all because I wasn’t sure my students would understand either. This makes me uncomfortable.

25 August 2021 - kudos:

Beginning of semester stress dreams, Fall 2021 edition: Dani Rojas is enrolled in my content management systems class but is refusing to comply with the mask mandate.

24 November 2020 - kudos:

TIL that if you find out your content management students aren’t accessing the LMS course in the way that you told them to (some only check “to do” page, not main course page), you can at least turn it into a review of course material!

23 September 2020 - kudos:

Having my students post a weekly report on what they did that relates to each course objective. When it works, it’s the best kind of assessment—it assumes that there’s learning always happening and that we just need to notice it.

11 September 2019 - kudos:

I set up a private Slack group for one of my classes today, and within 15 minutes, they had turned my face into a custom emoji. 😂