Not sure if I agree with everything here, but it’s important reflection.

Since early 2019(!), I’ve been slowly but surely orienting my online presence around my Hugo blog. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on social media platforms, but that those are merely appendages to a website that I have more control over. In fact, I’m really pleased with the POSSE—Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—setup that I’ve developed over the past couple of years. It currently works like this: All of my posts start on this website, and then I use the EchoFeed service to send posts to my Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account (Micro.blog also imports my posts via RSS).

I’ve been waiting for 404 (or someone else) to report on this so that I could rage post it (and assign it in future classes). What a terrible breach of research ethics.

Good—if depressing—article.

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web.

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. Our findings offer an opportunity to revisit theoretical frameworks and other perspectives that are common in the literature on teachers’ use of social media.

So many important points in this piece.

I’ve tried to scale back my media consumption recently. My RSS client feels empty, and it’s weird not to check social media as much. Every time I think about stepping it back up, though, it just stresses me out.

This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense.

Fascinating read—and one that reminds me that academic journal software doesn’t always render emoji either, which is a problem for social media research.

Yes, yes, and yes. I don’t know what the future of the social web will look like, but blogs are what it should look like.

This looks great!

Maybe it’s because of my area of research, but I think the headline here is misleading. Being a teacher on TikTok is one thing, and I’m not opposed to that. Putting your students on TikTok is entirely different, and I struggle to see that being ethically justified. Josh’s research is absolutely the right reference point here.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I often listen to Francophone radio stations while working (most often French and Swiss—Radio-Canada doesn’t support streaming outside its own apps and sites). This is a great way to keep up with my French, and because there seems to be a minigenre of Francophone songs critiquing social media (Stromae’s Carmen comes to mind, but there’s at least one other whose name I can’t remember right now), it sometimes ends up being professionally relevant as well.

I read Feed in high school and found it interesting, but when I read it again in 2019, it was amazing. This review gets at why the book is so good—and important. Maybe it’s time for me to visit it again.

Gun control is good, but surveillance isn’t. I don’t think this is the answer.

This kind of social media surveillance has been bothering me for years. I’m happy it’s getting some attention, even if the impetus for that attention is such a tragedy. This is edtech and our discipline needs to treat it as such.

link to ‘Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.’

Content moderation is a good thing, and ‘free speech’ should not be our primary concern when it comes to social media platforms.

Like in many PhD programs, my comprehensive exams included an element that was intended to help me prepare for my dissertation proposal, dissertation, and dissertation defense. Building off of my research interests and experiences up to that point, my advisor wrote me a lengthy question asking me to define and describe simulation games—the intent, of course, being that at least some of this could be worked into a literature review for a dissertation.

Lots of interesting ideas in this interview. I particularly like libraries running Mastodon instances.

Last week, I got the chance to chat with Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack about Latter-day Saint missionaries use of social media videos, and I was pleased to see the article published on Sunday. I hadn’t been paying attention to online missionary videos, but the subject fit nicely with the reading I’ve been doing on platform and platform values recently:

Both kinds of accounts “are drawing from the internet/influencer cultures of these platforms,” [Greenhalgh] says. “On one hand, that’s a smart move, and it makes a lot of sense, but online platforms have their own embedded values, and they may not always be compatible. The church has long been nervous about assimilating too much into the cultures it goes into, and I wonder how much concern there is here.”

Between Enilda here and Josh Rosenberg’s recent decision to do something similar, I feel that I have a lot to learn from and think about.

Admire what Josh is doing here. I’ve been rethinking my own social media presence recently and want to take some cues here.

Insightful piece on trolling and feeding trolls.