In my second-to-last year of grad school, I was asked to give a research talk as part of my program’s prospective student day. My talk was representing the “educational technology” part of the program, and the incomparable Kristy Robinson gave a talk reresenting the “educational psychology” part (to this day, when I’m struggling with a bout of imposter syndrome, I still remind myself that my grad program let me present alongside someone of Kristy’s caliber, so I must have something going for me).

Last night, my spouse and I took kiddo to her new school to find her classroom, officially meet her teacher, and all that fun stuff. While we were there, we got confirmation of what we’d heard earlier: ClassDojo is going to be used in all classrooms this year as part of a school-wide initiative. It was helpful to talk to kiddo’s teacher about this. She understood my concerns, she had her own trepidations about being required to use ClassDojo, and she honestly wasn’t sure how she was going to bring it into the classroom. One interesting detail that came out of the conversation is that she had only heard on Friday (a mere five days before the beginning of the school year) that she was going to be required to use this platform.

Two of my major projects for the summer have been updating my website and submitting my tenure dossier for consideration. One specific thing I’ve been meaning to do at the intersection of these two projects has been to include a modified research statement on my website as well as a list of my publications along with links to PDFs for all of my research, ensuring that it remains accessible to everyone. I haven’t yet decided how much civil disobedience I want to engage in here—part of the reason that I keep putting all of this is off is that I want to revisit all the contracts I’ve signed over the years to figure out what rights I have in terms of posting preprints, sharing papers in personal/institutional repositories after a certain amount of time, etc. I do want to push the envelope in terms of open access to research, but I think there’s an important balancing act involved in all of this, and I haven’t figured out what side to err on.

I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter. Matt web scraped over four million pages associated with resources from the TpT platform, and we took a quantiative descriptive look at resource metadata, including subject areas, grade levels, resource types, Common Core State Standards, user ratings, and prices across those resources. We then interpreted our findings through José van Dijck’s writing on embedded values on digital platforms—this was my first real dive into van Dijck, and I’m particularly proud of that contribution. Here’s the abstract for more of a peek: