Below are posts associated with the “research” tag.
new publication: Jacques Ellul and educational technology
I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.
With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education!
new publication: documenting a teacher group on far-right social media
I’m pleased to be able to finally share the publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology of an article that Dan Krutka and I have been working on for some time, which documents activity in a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform (which we intentionally don’t identify within the paper). Here’s a link to a full-text, read-only version of the article, and here’s the abstract as a preview:
🔗 linkblog: Trump administration’s attack on university research accelerates
I don’t personally need research funding, but I work in an academic ecosystem that’s highly dependent on it. Things aren’t looking good.
Jacques Ellul and the value of research
Last month, I wrote on both my reading up on Jacques Ellul and on concerns about how we understand the purpose and value of research. I’m continuing to read—or, rather, listen to—Ellul’s The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Here’s Ellul, writing in the mid-twentieth century:
We have already examined the requirement of immediate applicability; here we meet it again on the state level.
thoughts on academic labor, digital labor, intellectual property, and generative AI
Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.
the purpose of research isn't to fund universities
My stress and anxiety levels have been high ever since the second Trump administration began and immediately started taking an axe to all sorts of things that one should not take an axe to. For admittedly selfish reasons, though, I’ve been particularly anxious since Friday, when the NIH announced that it was dramatically cutting its support to universities (and other research institutions) in the form of indirect costs. I don’t do NIH-funded work, but we’re a very medically focused campus, and there’s no way that the $40 million that the University estimates we could lose over the next year isn’t going to have ripple effects across campus (not to mention the fact that my colleagues in the College of Communication and Information regularly look to the NIH as a source of funding health communication research).
new publication: Canvas and student privacy awareness
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.
on the performativity of teaching
Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.
🔗 linkblog: Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren'
What a gross offer to receive.
bad faith uses of scientific 'rigor'
I have conflicted feelings about productivity books, but even as I increasingly reject the emphasis on productivity, I do find that there are some gems in these books that are helpful to me as I try to keep my life organized across all of its dimensions. While rereading one of these books over the summer, I came across the following quote (which appears to be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
🔗 linkblog: More academic publishers are doing AI deals'
I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, by Zoë Schiffer
I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up.
Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.
🔗 linkblog: Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some'
Interesting read wirh important implications for how we think about research quality.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
If I understand correctly, this book was recommended in the curriculum for Community of Christ Reunion camps this year; at least, I listened to it because it was recommended for the Reunion that I attended last weekend. I actually finished it on Monday, but it’s been a busy week, and so it’s taken me a while to write this review.
While I am an aspirational environmentalist, I’m not very in tune with nature, so I wasn’t sure how I’d like the book.
follow up on not having control over my own research
Back in December, I wrote a frustrated post about an article I’d submitted to a special issue that was now being repackaged into an edited volume, in which my research would appear as a chapter. At the time, I wrote about how frustrated I was at the lack of control I had over my own research output. I might well have consented to having my work reprinted in this new format, but I was frustrated that my consent was neither sought nor necessary for the process.
🔗 linkblog: How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy'
Gab’s been showing up more in the news lately, so I guess I should dust off some of that Gab data I have and move it closer to publication.
do you want to be good or to be optimized?
This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level:
My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.
publication copyright and reprinting consent
Ben has been one of my best students over the past 5.5 years. He was a non-traditional student who flunked out of UK decades ago, went on to be a successful small business owner elsewhere in the country, and then leapt at the chance to come back to UK through an online degree completion program. As part of that program, he took one of the classes I was teaching at the time, which counted toward general education credit.
frustration with institutional research analytics
Over the summer, I blogged about some concern that I had about a new research portal that my employer had just rolled out. Based on the gentle nudges to update our profiles we’ve been receiving since the platform’s launch, I’m guessing that faculty have not been as keen on the platform as the university is. One of those nudges came this week, and in the spirit of good faith cooperation, I spent some time going through the platform and updating my profile.
🔗 linkblog: Major critic of X sues after being banned from platform | Ars Technica'
The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff.