Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Work”
📝 writeblog: spent 1:14:04 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
Soooo very close to being done here, but need to take care of something else.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:43:34 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
It’s a work weekend, and these posts need coding. Nearly finished with these, but now it’s time to wind down for the day.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:38:11 on 'publish data ethics in educational technology chapter'
Family is out of town this weekend, so I’m catching up with work, including going over the proofs for this long-in-the-making chapter.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository | Techdirt'
I bristle a bit at Moody’s suggestion that academics are dumb for signing over copyright—it’s dumb that we have to, but there are systemic issues at play here. Yet, especially now with tenure taken care of, I do wonder if we consent too readily to the system.
link to “Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository | Techdirt”
📝 writeblog: spent 0:26:43 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
Squeezed some coding in between meetings!
Novák, Orbán, and Ballard: the far right and Mormon boundary maintenance
Next month, I’m flying to Salt Lake City to attend the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present some of my work about social media, religion, and the far right. I’ll be presenting on three different projects at SSSR—this was biting off more than I could chew, but since two of them connect with Mormonism, Salt Lake suggested the possibility of a larger-than-usual audience for that work, so there you go.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Leveling the technological playing field with Apple | UKNow'
Look, I’m glad my university is aware of and responding to the digital divide, but I’d appreciate a more critical treatment of what we’re doing. This sounds almost like ad copy for Apple, and it’s falling into a lot of tired edtech tropes about how technology must necessarily improve learning.
link to “Leveling the technological playing field with Apple | UKNow”
📝 writeblog: spent 0:16:40 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
Squeezed in a few minutes of coding before meeting with a student.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:56:02 on 'publish UNHCR Instagram study'
I’ve recently been supporting a grad student with this study of messaging strategies on the UNHCR’s Instagram account. We’re meeting later this week, so I needed to get some coding done!
new publication: ClassDojo and student conflation of educational technologies
Last year, Daniela DiGiacomo, Sarah Barriage, and I published an article on student and principal perceptions of ClassDojo. Our findings weren’t entirely what we expected, even if they weren’t a huge surprise. In short, students and practitioners don’t always share the concerns about edtech platforms (like ClassDojo) that are gaining steam in the critical educational technology literature. I don’t say this to shame edtech users for not thinking the way that we ivory tower types do—rather, it speaks to a long-recognized tension between theoretical and conceptual concerns held by academics vs.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:16:16 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
I need to present on this in about a month at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so it’s time to hussle! I spent some time coding Gab posts according to a codebook I put together last week.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Dependence on Tech Caused ‘Staggering’ Education Inequality, U.N. Agency Says - The New York Times'
I’d like to read the whole report before coming to definitive conclusions but wow, are there some important lessons in here for edtech—not least, that efficacy cannot be our only concern! link to ‘Dependence on Tech Caused ‘Staggering’ Education Inequality, U.N. Agency Says - The New York Times’
there but for the grace of Matt go I
This is an interesting academic year for me in a number of ways. It was five years ago that I joined UK as an assistant professor and ten years ago that I started at MSU as a new PhD student. It’s my first year as tenured faculty, and there are leadership changes in my unit and college that are—by the inherent virtue of any change in leadership—inviting opportunities to think about what the future of both look like.
new edition of my remixed data science textbook
I’m happy to share that the Fall 2023 edition of my remixed Introduction to Data Science textbook is now available on my website. This book adapts material from the “ModernDive” Statistical Inference via Data Science course, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s excellent Data Feminism, a number of other Creative Commons-licensed works, and some of my own contributions to put together a no-cost, openly-licensed textbook for my data science students. I put together the first edition of this book for last Fall’s version of this course, but the first run through taught me a lot, and I’m very happy about this edition (though I do have a small laundry list of errors to fix, and I’d like to eventually get into some fiddlier bits like removing social media icons from the header).
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect | WIRED'
Good article on a worrying trend. It’s things like this that make me skeptical of arguments that generative AI could have real benefit when used properly. It’s not that I disagree—it’s that in the aggregate, I’m not sure the proper uses will outweigh the problems. link to ‘Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals—and It’s Proving Difficult to Detect | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban - The Verge'
Even if ChatGPT could be trusted to do this task, “let’s remove books from libraries with less work” is a good example of how efficiency isn’t always a good thing. link to ‘An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban - The Verge’
LIS 618 course mentioned in University of Kentucky news
I love hearing from former students about the great and interesting things that they’re up to—and especially when something they learned in one of my classes helped them along the way. In my experience, former students who are up to great and interesting things would often be doing those things whether or not they had taken one of my classes, but I still appreciate feeling like my teaching contributed in some small way.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:09:29 on 'publish scraping library online presence study'
This project is in its early stages, so I spent some time brushing up on relevant literature.
new publication: Anti-LGBTQ+ discourses in LGBTQ+-affirming spaces on Gab Social
Late last year, I announced the publication of a study I participated in with Dr. Evan Brody and UK PhD student Mehroz Sajjad where we examined LGBTQ+-friendly spaces on the Gab social media platform. Although that was the main focus of our research project, we also found as we were completing it that there were a number of LGBTQ+-friendly spaces that had been overrun by queerphobic activity and discourses. I’m happy to announce that our second paper, focusing on those specific spaces, has just been published in the Journal of Homosexuality.
quoted in Salt Lake Tribune article on DezNat movement
This past weekend, Peggy Fletcher Stack at the Salt Lake Tribune published an article about the #DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter, which takes cues from far-right and anti-feminist online communities. In her article, Peggy was kind enough to reference (and quote from) my new publication with Amy Chapman in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association, which presents the (partial) results of a qualitative analysis of over 1,400 DezNat tweets from 2019.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:55:02 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
Trying to get back into writeblogging—and, well, just writing, since it was a very family-focused summer. We recently got reviewer feedback on this manuscript, and so I met with co-authors today to discuss our approach to revisions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter Threatens to Sue Center for Countering Digital Hate Over Research - The New York Times'
This is ridiculous. link to ‘Twitter Threatens to Sue Center for Countering Digital Hate Over Research - The New York Times’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work | Ars Technica'
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’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'JCPS approves $11.7M for AI weapons detection in schools'
Guns in schools are bad, but adding surveillance to schools is not the solution. link to ‘JCPS approves $11.7M for AI weapons detection in schools’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships (26 July 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
Interesting stuff from Doctorow. If I can, I want to work it into my data science textbook for next semester. link to ‘Pluralistic: The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships (26 July 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow’
draft syllabus statement on code, plagiarism, and generative AI
I’m spending a chunk of today starting on revisions to my Intro to Data Science course for my unit’s LIS and ICT graduate prograrms. I’d expected to spend most of the time shuffling around the content and assessment for particular weeks, but I quickly realized that I was going to need to update what I had to say in the syllabus about plagiarism and academic offenses. Last year’s offering of the course involved a case of potential plagiarism, so I wanted to include more explicit instruction that encourages students to borrow code while making it clear that there are right and wrong ways of doing so.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Cowboy releases cheeky app to keep VanMoof e-bike riders on the road - The Verge'
We read Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread” in my class on computer fundamentals, and I try to share actual examples of how tech companies going bankrupt can create actual problems like in the story. Bookmarking this for next time I teach. link to ‘Cowboy releases cheeky app to keep VanMoof e-bike riders on the road - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI | Ars Technica'
I don’t like generative AI, and I get grumpy about advice to accept it and work it into classes (even though I probably agree with that approach at the end of the day). For all that dislike and grumpiness, though, I feel even more strongly that AI detectors are not the way to go. This is a really interesting article. link to ‘Why AI detectors think the US Constitution was written by AI | Ars Technica’
how I'm talking about generative AI in my content management class
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Student Monitoring Tools Should Not Flag LGBTQ+ Keywords | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
Student monitoring software is gross to begin with, but monitoring for LGBTQ+ content makes it even grosser. Love it when EFF tackles ed tech. link to ‘Student Monitoring Tools Should Not Flag LGBTQ+ Keywords | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
appearance on Dialogue Out Loud podcast
One of my most recent articles—a piece on technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition—was published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Publishing in Dialogue has been a wonderful opportunity. It’s a niche journal, so it may never reach the breadth of audience that I usually aim for in publishing. However, that niche focus has also come with a number of benefits. I want to write more about this soon, but the purpose of this post is just to draw attention to one of these benefits: the in-house podcast(s) produced by the Dialogue team.
new publication: far-right and anti-feminist influences on a Mormon Twitter hashtag
I am very happy to announce that a paper I wrote with Amy Chapman is finally published and available open access in the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association (I have also archived a PDF of the article on my website, available at this link). Amy and I began this project in the spring/summer of 2019, so it’s a relief to finally see our first paper in print.
In short, the paper is a descriptive look at tweets using the #DezNat hashtag; DezNat, short for either Deseret Nation or Deseret Nationalism (depending on who you ask) is a movement of arch-conservative Mormons on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter just closed the book on academic research - The Verge'
This is a real shame. link to ‘Twitter just closed the book on academic research - The Verge’
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Eternity in the Ether: A Mormon Media History, by Gavin Feller
I have been looking for this kind of book for a long time, and some of my recent publications would have been stronger if this had come out in time for me to reference it beforehand. It’s not perfect: Some wording is awkward and the conceptual framework (while interesting) could be stronger. However, it’s invaluable for the history it offers and I expect to cite it regularly in the future.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter Demands Academics Who Won’t Pay $42k/Month Delete Any Twitter Data They Currently Have | Techdirt'
This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense. link to ‘Twitter Demands Academics Who Won’t Pay $42k/Month Delete Any Twitter Data They Currently Have | Techdirt’
new(ish) publication: inauthentic accounts on teacher Twitter
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Moderator Mayhem: A Mobile Game To See How Well YOU Can Handle Content Moderation | Techdirt'
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’
technology-mediated authority in early Mormonism
As I wrote earlier, I recently appeared on the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormon Land podcast to discuss a recent publication in which I discuss the history of official Latter-day Saint domain names. Near the end of the interview, David Noyce (managing editor of the Tribune and one of the podcast hosts) asked me the “so what” question—sure, this history is interesting, but what’s the takeaway? Here’s (part of) how I answered:
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'People are arguing in court that real images are deepfakes : NPR'
Very interesting look at some of the less obvious implications of generative AI. link to ‘People are arguing in court that real images are deepfakes : NPR’
media coverage of recent article on Latter-day Saint online presence
I recently wrote about a new article of mine in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought where I trace the history of the official domain names of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This past week, I was lucky enough for the fine folks at the Salt Lake Tribune to take interest in the article. Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote a summary of my findings in this (unfortunately paywalled) article, which appeared on Sunday.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring | WIRED'
Some good commentary here. Musk loves certain buzzwords and flashy stunts, but they’re often in tension with the other decisions he makes. link to ‘Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The poop emoji: a legal history - The Verge'
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. link to ‘The poop emoji: a legal history - The Verge’
new publication: technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition
I’m very excited to share that I’ve just had an article published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a historically and culturally important journal in Mormonism. My article is entitled “The correct [domain] name of the Church: Technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition.” The title is a riff on Russell Nelson’s use of the phrase “The Correct Name of the Church” when leading a renewed emphasis on the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints early in his ministry as President of the same church.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:03:40 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
I have not been good about logging writing progress recently, but I want to try to get back into it. Met with Dan today to work together on Discussion. Lots of wrinkles to iron out, but we’re very close to submitting this!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
I’ve enjoyed reading Alice Marwick’s work in the past, and I really enjoyed her appearance on the EFF’s podcast here. link to ‘Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
I’m sure that I’ve read this before, and I expected to really enjoy a reread, so it was kind of a disappointment to, well, be so disappointed by it. The book is interesting for its interrogation of whether new technologies are less rich than old ones—an argument that has clear relevance today, as perhaps illustrated by Bradbury’s alleged reluctance to allow for an ebook version in the early 21st century. I’m not opposed to this kind of argument, but I think it’s easy for this kind of claim to get tied up in hand-wringing about civilizational decline and old/high culture being better than new/pop culture—and I feel like Bradbury ultimately has more to say about the latter than about the former.
a small victory for not policing students
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | WIRED'
RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire… link to ‘Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | WIRED’
high school class rankings and the value-laden non-objectivity of quantitative measures
At the beginning of my senior year of high school, Tyler and I were neck and neck in class rankings—if memory serves, he was slightly ahead. This never got in the way of our friendship. We had spent too much time playing the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Roleplaying Game together, and a few years earlier, we’d even spent one memorable night with our mutual friend Chris hiking repeatedly back and forth between Tyler’s house and mine so that we could find the right hardware for hooking up someone’s GameCube to my family’s venerable TV so that we could play TimeSplitters 2.
rediscovering some comments on computational thinking
I keep a journal using the Day One app for macOS/iOS, and while I have some lingering concerns about platformizing (and even digitizing) my journaling, there are also some pretty neat aspects to using an app like this. First, it’s very easy to copy text from other electronic sources into the app, and that really helps me capture things that made an impression on me from day to day. Second, it’s also easy to search for, read, and even be reminded of old entries.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly'
Lots of helpful stuff in here. link to ‘ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly’
📝 writeblog: spent 0:54:37 on 'publish religion in Gab communication study'
Spent some time reading through Torba’s posts. It’s interesting how the pivot to hardcore Christian nationalism happened right around the 2020 election.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:25:53 on 'publish religion in Gab communication study'
I’ve been interested for the past couple of years in how Andrew Torba uses religious rhetoric in his posts on the official Gab blog. This project is very much in the early stages, but I want to submit a proposal to a conference next week, so I’ve been going through data to try to get a fee for what’s happening—and what to use as my “sample.”
📝 writeblog: spent 2:02:16 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
Put together a conference proposal while my co-author kept working on his part of the findings.
📝 writeblog: spent 2:02:11 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
Spent some time putting together a rough outline and some tables today. It still blows my mind what software students equate with ClassDojo.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:47:30 on 'publish scraping library online presence study'
Spent some time manually reviewing websites today to prepare for later web scraping. I’ll have to figure out how to work with some Wix sites, which are structured oddly behind the scenes.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:45:11 on 'publish beliefs about Canvas study'
Had a good meeting this morning to put together a survey instrument for the study. I think we’re close!
📝 writeblog: spent 0:16:51 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
Spent a few minutes idly working on a web scraper for this.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:36:18 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
Kept on writing! Had some productive conversations about tables and worked on an AECT proposal related to the project.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The End of Grading | WIRED'
Somewhat meandering read, but I think there are interesting implications for both teaching and research. link to ‘The End of Grading | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter's new data access rules will make research harder : NPR'
Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status. link to ‘Twitter’s new data access rules will make research harder : NPR’
📝 writeblog: spent 0:34:08 on 'publish LDS Freedom Forum study'
It’s been over a year since Levi Sands, Amy Chapman, and I started talking about doing a topic model analysis of the LDS Freedom Forum, an online space for far-right Mormonism. I’ve usually been the one slowing us down, but today, I finally checked off a task that’s been on my lost for a month and a half. I’m really excited about the project, I just need to stop dragging my feet.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:55:21 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
Instead of grading (😬), I spent some time grabbing links and then starting to build a web scraper, though that’s enough of a pain that I might ask a friend to borrow his CrowdTangle access.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:27:22 on 'publish Red Pill influences on DezNat study'
Went through page proofs today! Excited that the paper is so close to publication.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:12:41 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
I’m helping organize the Global Mormon Studies 2023 online conference, so I’ve been trying to figure out what (if anything) I would submit for myself. I’ve been wanting to do something about the online (and, thereby, intentionally international) Toronto Community of Christ congregation, but I’ve had trouble figuring out what exactly that would be. Today, an idea clicked. I was going through their YouTube and Facebook videos for some early data collection when I realized just how different the two platform experiences are.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Wants To Help You Figure Out If Text Was Written By OpenAI; But What Happens When It’s Wrong? | Techdirt'
Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.
📝 writeblog: spent 3:01:14 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
Spent some time polishing the front end and some other finished bits of the paper.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:33:17 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
Met with Sarah and Daniela today to review the data and discuss where to go from here. I have some new tasks, and we have some new ideas—looking forward to seeing where things go!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge'
I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating. link to ‘Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Florida Teachers Are Emptying Classroom Libraries to Avoid Going to Jail'
What a dumb world we live in. link to ‘Florida Teachers Are Emptying Classroom Libraries to Avoid Going to Jail’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members'
Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research. link to ‘Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members’
Cory Doctorow on behaviorism
After bouncing off of it a year or so ago, I recently decided to restart Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway (which led NPR reporter Jason Sheehan to describe Doctorow as “Super-weird in the best possible way”). The audiobook is excellent, and since I started a couple of days ago, it’s displaced my podcast listening and given me another chance to wrestle with Doctorow’s ideas here.
There is way too much going on (and I’m not far enough into the book) for me to engage with the underlying message of the novel (or even to be sure of what it is yet), but one passage stood out to me so much this morning that I have to write it down now.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:55:26 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
Wrapped up categorizing apps/software into distinct categories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, students identified more LMSs (or SISs) and content/assessment software than behavior management or communication apps (the two main things ClassDojo does).
📝 writeblog: spent 1:44:56 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
Met with Dan today for writing work. I finished a section on how the admins’ openness to far-right ideas allowed racist and conspiratorial thinking to enter what was purportedly a teachers’ social media group.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:46:49 on 'publish beliefs about Canvas study'
I recently started a new project with colleague Meghan Dowell where we’re hoping to learn about students’ and instructors’ understanding of how Canvas works (taking some inspiration from a 2017 article by Nick Proferes). I spent time going through Canvas documentation and meeting with Meghan about our survey instrument.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Instagram Has a White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Problem'
I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are. link to ‘Instagram Has a White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Problem’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees'
Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing. link to ‘ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees’
📝 writeblog: spent 1:04:29 on 'publish DezNat and authority study'
Spent some time this afternoon finishing up a conceptual framework section which makes a case for using Weberian language for describing how this movement thinks about authority.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:40:52 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
I met with Dan and spent time writing up our findings on how the admins of this teachers’ group were swimming in far-right discourses in their overall activity on the platform. No real surprise that they allowed those influences into a teachers’ group.
quoted again about Gas app in EducationWeek
This week, Discord announced that it has acquired the Gas social media app popular among secondary students. Presumably in response, Alyson Klein ran an explainer today at EducationWeek on the subject of the app. In doing this, she re-ran a quote that I provided to her for a December article that she also wrote:
“It feels a little exploitative to me,” said Spencer Greenhalgh, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s school of information sciences.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Discord acquires Gas, the popular app for teens to compliment each other - The Verge'
A couple of months ago, I spoke to Education Week about the Gas app. I thought it had an exploitative business model then, and its being acquired does nothing to calm that fear. link to ‘Discord acquires Gas, the popular app for teens to compliment each other - The Verge’
📝 writeblog: spent 1:01:43 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
My co-authors recently got back to me with comments on my “coding” of respondents’ open-ended answers. Based on that, I made some tweaks and then started grouping “codes” into categories. It turns out there are fuzzy boundaries between many types of edtech, which probably exacerbates the underlying phenomenon we’re getting at.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:16:08 on 'publish Red Pill influences on DezNat study'
This morning, we got copyedits back on our first DezNat piece, so I’ve been going through them. I appreciate having a copyeditor who’s better at mechanics and style than I am, but since I consider myself a pretty good writer, it’s also pretty humbling.
R. Sikoryak's 'Terms and Conditions' and ed tech
My sister-in-law recently gifted me a copy of R. Sikoryak’s weird but wonderful comic Terms and Conditions, which “adapts” the 2015 iTunes terms and conditions into a comic format. I was as delighted by the gift, which I’m sure only contributed to her bewilderment (she knew I wanted the book, but I can’t blame anyone for not understanding why I wanted it).
One of the gags of the comic is, obviously, the idea that a comic adaptation would get you to actually read through the whole document instead of just pretending that you have.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:12:37 on 'publish DezNat and authority study'
Amy Chapman and I currently have an in-press paper on the far-right inspired DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter, and we’ve also been at work on a second paper covering all our analysis we couldn’t fit in the first paper. In particular, we’re interested in how the DezNat movement conceptualizes (and claims) religious authority. I spent time this morning getting back into the flow of this paper and reading up on Weber, whose tripartite model of authority ought to be helpful here.
quoted in EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools' social media lawsuit
Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article.
I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:
📝 writeblog: spent 1:27:17 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
Got my data sorting done today! And this despite a considerable setback: I realized that there was a less clunky, more efficient way to categorize the open-response entries, so I started from scratch once I realized that. Fascinating to see how many different technologies students mention when prompted to pick tech similar to ClassDojo.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:56:15 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
About two years ago, in the wake of the Capitol riot, I started collecting data from far-right social media platforms, focusing on groups that fit with my existing research background. I’ve been working with Dan Krutka on analyzing a teachers’ group—we’re so dang close to having a full manuscript. Today we spent some time getting back in the flow of the paper so that we can get this out for review sometime this semester.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text'
See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to.
link to ‘A CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text’
📝 writeblog: spent 0:35:36 on 'publish Dojo and platforms study'
Spent some more time this morning going through survey data and matching software mentioned in survey data with actual software categories.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:51:56 on 'publish Dojo and platforms study'
A few years ago, Sarah Barriage, Daniela DiGiacomo, and I surveyed some undergraduate students on their previous experience with ClassDojo. One thing that startled us about the data is how often students treated other edtech apps and platforms (e.g., Canvas, Kahoot, Zoom) as equivalent to Dojo, when we saw Dojo as a different kind of edtech. I’ve been meaning to write that up for years, and I’m finally getting off my butt and doing it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge'
Personally, I’m not very optimistic about ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI should have better considered disruptions to fields like education before releasing the tool. That said, I don’t think a ban is the solution here.
link to ‘New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge’
three grumpy observations from a Twitter researcher on requests for 'quote toots'
Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap - Neal A. Maxwell Institute'
Such an interesting book. I’m going to have to get a copy to read one day.
link to ‘Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap - Neal A. Maxwell Institute’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Schools and EdTech Need to Study Up On Student Privacy: 2022 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
Edtech professionals aren’t paying nearly enough attention to this sort of thing.
link to ‘Schools and EdTech Need to Study Up On Student Privacy: 2022 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
end-of-semester thoughts on hating grading
When I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I took a job as a student instructor for FREN 102, the second half of a two-course sequence in first-year French. I had a lot of weird experiences as an undergraduate student teaching and grading other undergraduate students, but the one that I remember this morning is the time that I held a student’s scholarship in my hand. I don’t remember the student’s name or much about her, except a vague recollection of her face and a couple of conversations with her.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Brief – Hidden Harms: Student Activity Monitoring After Roe v. Wade - Center for Democracy and Technology'
I see a worrying future for edtech ahead, and I’m not sure the academic discipline is adequately prepared for it.
[link to ‘Brief – Hidden Harms: Student Activity Monitoring After Roe v. Wade - Center for Democracy and Technology’](https://cdt.org/insights/brief-hidden-harms-student-activity-monitoring-after-roe-v-wade/?utm_source=rss
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facial Recognition Researcher Left a Trans Database Exposed for Years After Using Images Without Permission'
I hated this project when I read about it in The Verge 5 years ago. I hate it even more now.
link to ‘Facial Recognition Researcher Left a Trans Database Exposed for Years After Using Images Without Permission’
unexpected research ethics implications of Twitter's 'general amnesty' for suspended accounts
For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.
quoted in EducationWeek about 'Gas' social media app
A few weeks ago, thanks to a recommendation from my colleague and friend Josh Rosenberg, I was contacted by Alyson Klein at EducationWeek to talk about the “Gas” social media app that’s become popular among high schoolers lately. Klein’s article was published last night, and I was happy to see that I’d been quoted in the article.
To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the app before Klein reached out, but it only took a few minutes of research for me to figure out that I didn’t like it very much.
new publication: LGBTQ+ communities and far right social media
I’m pleased to share that a study I contributed to—Gayservatives on Gab: LGBTQ+ Communities and Far Right Social Media—is now available (open-access!) through the Social Media + Society journal. Dr. Evan Brody is the lead author on the study, and we were lucky enough to have support from PhD student Mehroz Sajjad. Here’s the abstract for the study:
In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facebook Pulls Its New ‘AI For Science’ Because It’s Broken and Terrible'
Very interesting read.
link to ‘Facebook Pulls Its New ‘AI For Science’ Because It’s Broken and Terrible’
new publication: an autoethnography on French, data science, and paradigm change
I’m pleased to share the publication of a new chapter of an edited volume. The chapter in question is “I"m a French teacher, not a data scientist”: Culture and languages across my professions, and it’s part of a volume called Cultures and languages across the curriculum in higher education. According to the CLAC Consortium, Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is a:
a curricular framework that provides opportunities to develop and apply language and intercultural competence within all academic disciplines through the use of multilingual resources and the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives.
new presentation: reactionary Mormons and religious authority online
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2022 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present research with Amy Chapman on how the reactionary DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter conceptualizes and claims—but ultimately problematizes—religious authority in the online sphere. We presented in one of the sessions sponsored by the Mormon Social Science Association and were lucky enough to have some good conversations and receive some helpful feedback.
when niche research pays off
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).
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'School Facebook Pages and Privacy Concerns: What Educators Need to Know'
Josh is doing important work here—the kind of work that edtech researchers often don’t consider as being in their purview. Glad to see this getting coverage.
link to ‘School Facebook Pages and Privacy Concerns: What Educators Need to Know’
why I put email back on my phone
Since the beginning of COVID-19, I’ve been dismantling a lot of my productivity and organization systems, trying to put less pressure on myself to get things done and be more mindful in how I spend my time. Several months ago—I cannot remember exactly when—this culminated in taking email off my phone and pivoting away from the excellent Things 3 task management app to a more paper notebook-driven approach to keeping track of what I need to get done.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CI’s DiGiacomo views information, media literacy as tool to preserve democracy | UKNow'
Glad that my colleagues’ interesting work is getting recognition from our university.
link to ‘CI’s DiGiacomo views information, media literacy as tool to preserve democracy | UKNow’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Citizens' social media can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation'
I fall victim to this despite being a Mastodon fan. Appreciate the reminder to be more careful with language.
link to ‘Citizens’ social media can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation’
thank you, Seymour Papert
This morning, kiddo was pretending to be a robot, so when I needed her to switch her attention from, say, getting dressed to brushing her teeth, I’d have to pretend to “reprogram” her before she’d cooperate. This got me wondering if she was maybe old enough to try some basic programming activities—something like LEGO Mindstorms. I think that she’s probably still a bit young for that sort of thing, but it made me excited about doing this sort of thing in the future.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Essential Tech Question for Schools: What Are the Teacher's Objectives?'
See, I get the impression that it’s increasingly district, school, and legislative priorities that are driving tech choices. I agree that teachers ought to have the agency, but I don’t know that’s the case.
link to ‘The Essential Tech Question for Schools: What Are the Teacher’s Objectives?’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are'
Really important story here, and glad to see George Veletsianos quoted. I’ve long been an advocate for developing assessments that are impossible to cheat at, but I don’t know if that’s the entire (or even a practical) response to GPT-3. We are continuing to develop technologies whose societal effects we are not prepares for.
link to ‘Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are’
help us find a new Director for our School of Information Science!
Jeff Huber, the longtime Director of the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky, is stepping down into a regular faculty role at the end of this academic year. I’m serving on the search committee to find a new Director, and I’m happy to share that the official posting for the job is now live. If this sounds up your alley, feel free to apply, and if this isn’t your kind of job, please help share the posting with folks who might be interested.
all I want for tenure is to be added to the Star Wars bulletin board
This “Don’t Fly Solo” board has been up in the hallway of our building since before I was hired. I took a picture of it back in December 2017, when I was here on a job interview. It was one of the most prominent signs (no pun intended) that this would be a friendly and fun unit to work in, which was one of the biggest considerations on my mind when I decided to accept the job (though the adventure of changing disciplines and the convenience of living closer to family shouldn’t be discounted).
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How to Protect Yourself If Your School Uses Surveillance Tech | WIRED'
I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together.
link to ‘How to Protect Yourself If Your School Uses Surveillance Tech | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: 07 Oct 2022 “Don’t install spy on a privacy lab,” and other lessons for university provosts – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
There is so much of both horrible and hopeful in this story. The way we’re normalizing surveillance is really worrying, and I’m glad some people are fighting back.
link to ‘Pluralistic: 07 Oct 2022 “Don’t install spy on a privacy lab,” and other lessons for university provosts – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure'
This looks great!
link to ‘Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'When School Superintendents Market Surveillance Cameras'
Lot of worrying stuff in here. Edtech needs to take surveillance tech more seriously, because the two are increasingly simultaneous.
link to ‘When School Superintendents Market Surveillance Cameras’
ClassDojo and educational 'accomplishment'
As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in.
Lance Eaton on the invasive surveillance of LMSs
This week, I’m hurriedly putting together some revisions for a book chapter on data ethics that I’ve been working on for an open access volume on ethics in educational technology. I’m excited about the volume, and I’ve really loved writing the chapter, so it’s kind of fun to be doing these revisions, even if I waited for the last minute to do them.
One reviewer suggestion that I’m particularly grateful for is to elaborate on a sentence I wrote arguing that “learning management systems allow us to monitor students in invasive ways that would be unimaginable in a face-to-face context.
new report on Google Classroom and ClassDojo
I have been writing a lot about ClassDojo recently, spurred by a combination of my professional concerns about the app and by my frustration that my kid’s school is now using it. Last week, I was pleased to see a new report from the United Kingdom-based Digital Futures Commission about not only ClassDojo but also Google Classroom. I’m sure my kid will have to use this latter software as well, so it’s good to be aware.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED'
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.
link to ‘The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED’
to be loved is to be 'liked'
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED'
Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility.
link to ‘Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED’
ClassDojo and the creation of artificial demand
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'List of 5 unique classes offered at University of Kentucky | Lexington Herald Leader'
This ‘Black Mirror’ class comes out of my department—happy to see a colleague get credit for such an interesting class!
link to ‘List of 5 unique classes offered at University of Kentucky | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘Girls Who Code’ Team Up With Tomahawk Missile Maker Raytheon'
This is my issue with CS education efforts, especially ’teaching people to code.’ It’s narrowly focused on technical skills and not broader social and ethical reflection. I’d never argue that programmers shouldn’t work for defense contractors, but I’m uncomfortable with associating them so closely with CS education.
link to ‘‘Girls Who Code’ Team Up With Tomahawk Missile Maker Raytheon’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Rentrée : Le désespoir de « MonsieurLeProf », l’enseignant le plus célèbre des réseaux sociaux'
C’est dommage de perdre un tel prof. Je ne suis pas de près la situation des profs en France, mais vu combien de problèmes il y a aux États-Unis, ceci ne m’étonne pas trop. Il est peut-être temps de relire « Le hussard noir ».
link to ‘Rentrée : Le désespoir de « MonsieurLeProf », l’enseignant le plus célèbre des réseaux sociaux’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun Detecting AI Scanners in Schools Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show'
What a mess of a story. School safety tech is edtech, and like edtech, a lot of it appears to be more posturing and theater than effective practice.
link to ‘‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun Detecting AI Scanners in Schools Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'US government to make all research it funds open access on publication | Ars Technica'
Exciting news! This still leaves a lot of research behind paywalls, though.
link to ‘US government to make all research it funds open access on publication | Ars Technica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Scanning student rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional, judge rules : NPR'
Well, here’s some happy news! I hope this ruling sticks.
link to ‘Scanning student rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional, judge rules : NPR’
some thoughts on platforms and 'community'
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Tool That Monitors How Long Kids Are in the Bathroom Is Now in 1,000 American Schools'
I’ve been grumpy about ClassDojo all week, and this is the only thing that’s made me feel better about it—BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE.
link to ‘A Tool That Monitors How Long Kids Are in the Bathroom Is Now in 1,000 American Schools’
ClassDojo and 'data as oil'
The new semester at the University of Kentucky starts on Monday, and I am flailing to try to get my data science course ready to go—including putting together an open, alternative textbook for my students. I’ve been borrowing heavily from Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism for my textbook: It’s a fantastic resource, and I’m hoping my students take a lot from it.
Of course, my kid’s semester has already started, and I’ve already blogged a bunch about my frustrations with her new school’s use of ClassDojo this year.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'University of Kentucky COVID guidelines for fall 2022 semester | Lexington Herald Leader'
It’s helpful to hear that the university is theoretically willing to bring back a mask mandate… but I don’t know that I see it happening.
link to ‘University of Kentucky COVID guidelines for fall 2022 semester | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica'
Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms.
link to ‘What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bad Data “For Good”: How Data Brokers Try to Hide in Academic Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
I hadn’t realized so many academics were working with data brokers. It’s kind of scary! The EFF has some good points here about so-called “data for good”—and rightly brings up that ethics review boards should be thinking about this sort of thing.
link to ‘Bad Data “For Good”: How Data Brokers Try to Hide in Academic Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Some Thoughts on the Open Scholarship in Education (OSE) Working Meeting | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.'
Appreciate Joshs’s reflections here—espeically as it relates to disciplinary and language differences within education.
link to ‘Some Thoughts on the Open Scholarship in Education (OSE) Working Meeting | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.’
teacher agency and edtech
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs | Techdirt'
Masnick’s critiques of Pearson here are better than anything I could have written.
link to ‘Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs | Techdirt’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them'
Some really worrying privacy implications in this kind of edtech—and edtech as a discipline doesn’t care nearly enough about this kind of thing. Makes me worried as a scholar and a parent.
link to ‘Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them’
disappeared papers and the importance of personally hosting my research
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pearson says NFT textbooks will let it profit off secondhand sales - The Verge'
Ugh, Pearson. Why do we keep thinking about ways to make digital textbooks worse than physical ones?
link to ‘Pearson says NFT textbooks will let it profit off secondhand sales - The Verge’
knowing when enough is enough
The past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about a memory from my junior year of college. It was the end of a semester, and on top of all of my own finals, I was teaching FREN 102 for the first time, so my end-of-semester was busier than it had been in previous years. I don’t remember all of this busy time, but I do remember specific parts of taking my online FREN 362 (French Civilization II) final while sitting in the office shared by instructors from the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Scandinavian Studies.
being a student's parent as an edtech researcher
Kiddo starts at a new school this year, so we got the chance to all go as a family today and get introduced to everything. Kiddo got to meet teachers and other kids while we filed into a meeting to fill out a ton of paperwork and learn about how this school does things. For years, I’ve been wondering when my research in educational technology (and, increasingly, critical research on social technologies more broadly) were going to become relevant as a parent with a kid in school, and it looks like it’s going to be this year.
thoughts on an in-press article—and on names and legitimacy in Mormonism
One of the highlights of the summer has been getting an article accepted in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This article takes as a starting point Cragun and Nielsen’s argument (also published in Dialogue) that:
what is really at play in the debate over the use of “Mormon” is legitimacy.
Cragun and Nielsen are writing in 2009, at a time when Big Love is on the air and the April 2008 FLDS Temple raid is (or was recently) on the news.
research analytics for... industry collaboration?
Over the past several months, the University of Kentucky has been pushing us to set up profiles on a new research analytics platform. The platform looks… fine, but I’ve been irritated with some of how the platform works and curious why UK is so keen on having us fill out our profiles. It’s felt from the beginning like this is something more for UK’s benefit than for our individual benefits as faculty.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media'
Disappointing to see academics implicated in the Uber Files. It’s a compelling example of how research funding is contingent on public and private interests. Of course, public interests are generally less worrying than Uber funding research perceived to be positive and profitable, but there are still times I have questions about the NSF’s priorities.
link to ‘Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'After Dobbs, Advocates Fear School Surveillance Tools Could Put Teens at Risk – The Markup'
I’ve seen a number of headlines about how a post-Dobbs world changes the game for online privacy, but this is the first one that I sat down to read. School surveillance software is scary enough without this possibility, so let’s not make it worse. I can’t believe that this software gives schools any benefits that outweigh the heavy cost to students’ privacy.
link to ‘After Dobbs, Advocates Fear School Surveillance Tools Could Put Teens at Risk – The Markup’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past – Punya Mishra's Web'
I’ve also been thinking recently about small but important influences on my career, so it was a real treat to read Punya’s thoughts here.
[link to ‘A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past – Punya Mishra’s Web’](https://punyamishra.com/2022/07/07/a-wheatstone-bridge-to-the-past/?utm_source=rss
why 'open access' isn't enough
I just barely microblogged something about what I want to say here, but over the past hour, it’s been nagging at me more and more, and I want to write some more about it.
I was introduced to academia through educational technology, and I was introduced to educational technology through a class at BYU taught by David Wiley. This class was not about educational technology, but David’s passion for Web 2.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Coverage in EdWeek of a recent article on uncertainty in science | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.'
Really enjoyed this coverage of Josh’s work! I haven’t ever done Bayesian work, so it surprised me how closely the ideas in the article resembled thoughts I’ve been having about positivism and other research paradigms.
link to ‘Coverage in EdWeek of a recent article on uncertainty in science | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.’
some thoughts on Gab pushback against research on Gab
I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter.
job post: instructional communication lecturer position at University of Kentucky
My unit (the School of Information Science) at the University of Kentucky teaches all of the composition and communication courses for the College of Communication and Information, and I just received word this morning that we’re hiring a full-time lecturer for these courses. I feel conflicted about the existence of the lecturer position at UK, but I can say with some fconfidence that lecturers are valued, respected members of the SIS faculty.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Schools Are Spending Billions on High-Tech Defense for Mass Shootings - The New York Times'
Gun violence can’t be solved with educational technology—and make no mistake, all of this is edtech.
link to ‘Schools Are Spending Billions on High-Tech Defense for Mass Shootings - The New York Times’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Diverse and inclusive stock photos for your next presentation, learning design, etc – George Veletsianos, PhD'
Really appreciated George’s post here. Looking forward to trying these out in future slide decks.
link to ‘Diverse and inclusive stock photos for your next presentation, learning design, etc – George Veletsianos, PhD’
new publication: examining pseudonymous academic Twitter accounts
I’m happy to report that a paper of mine (in collaboration with David E. Williams at the University of Saskatchewan) has just been published in The Internet and Higher Education. We topic modeled 77,514 tweets from 59 academically-themed but anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter accounts. This resulted in five broad topics, and we followed up with a qualitative analysis of the 100 most-representative tweets from each of those topics to generate some narrower codes.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology'
Solid thinking by researchers I respect and admire. I especially appreciate the point that no solution exists outside politics.
link to ‘The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.'
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.’
why I will (probably?) always agree to write a letter of recommendation for a student
Today, I heard from a student that I had a couple of semesters ago asking for a letter of recommendation for a master’s program. I only had the student in one class, his attendance was spotty, and I didn’t have a lot of sustained interactions with him, so I am questioning whether I would be the best letter writer for him. However, while I said as much to the student in my reply, I also told him that despite all of that, I would still be willing to write him a letter.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'After Uvalde, social media monitoring apps struggle to justify surveillance - The Verge'
This article may make its way into a chapter I’m writing on how assumptions about education shape our understanding of what appropriate data collection looks like. As Audrey Watters has written, this kind of thing is very much edtech, and we need to be critical about how we deploy it. Even if it did work, I’m not sure the surveillance would be worth it. If it doesn’t work, all the more reason to be skeptical.
a culmination of previous work, or a steppingstone for the future?
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times'
Why can’t we just learn to assess differently? There’s so much about proctoring software that ought to be worrying us.
link to ‘Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times’
new(ish) publication: investigating offerings and downloads on TeachersPayTeachers
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.
interview with WEKU on Buffalo shooting and social media content moderation
Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning.
I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation.
quoted in Salt Lake Tribune on LDS missionaries' use of social media
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech | Techdirt'
The only way to make emotion detection tech worse is, of course, to make it ed tech.
link to ‘Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech | Techdirt’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Columbia Professor Expresses Doubts over University Ranking - The New York Times'
This is why I’m skeptical of terms like data driven decision making, which are meant to sound objective but cannot live up to their rhetorical power.
link to ‘Columbia Professor Expresses Doubts over University Ranking - The New York Times’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'George Washington University apologizes for tracking locations of students, faculty | TheHill'
Certainly not the worst news I’ve read this morning, but still tremendously worrying.
link to ‘George Washington University apologizes for tracking locations of students, faculty | TheHill’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Proctorio subpoenas digital rights group in legal spat with student - The Verge'
Boo on Proctorio.
link to ‘Proctorio subpoenas digital rights group in legal spat with student - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students – The Markup'
Let me get this straight: Invasive surveillance isn’t enough, now companies are creating opportunities to cheat just so they can ding them and take credit for stopping it?
link to ‘A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students – The Markup’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: 16 Feb 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
Doctorow tackles the grossest parts of ed tech. It’s a great read.
[link to ‘Pluralistic: 16 Feb 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow’](https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'College Prep Software Naviance Is Selling Advertising Access to Millions of Students – The Markup'
Ed tech should not be ad tech.
link to ‘College Prep Software Naviance Is Selling Advertising Access to Millions of Students – The Markup’
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Amazon Paid for a High School Course. Here’s What They Teach.'
So much ugh. Big Amazon presence here in KY, so wonder when we’ll start to see this.
link to ‘Amazon Paid for a High School Course. Here’s What They Teach.’
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Students Are Learning To Resist Surveillance: Year in Review 2021 | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
Such an important read.
link to ‘Students Are Learning To Resist Surveillance: Year in Review 2021 | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Personalized Learning Debates Put Too Much Emphasis on Technology, School Leaders Say'
Lots in here that reminds me of Watters’s comments on personalization.
link to ‘Personalized Learning Debates Put Too Much Emphasis on Technology, School Leaders Say’
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Report - Sharing Student Data Across Public Sectors: Importance of Community Engagement to Support Responsible and Equitable Use - Center for Democracy and Technology'
Looking forward to reading—and citing—this full report.
link to ‘Report - Sharing Student Data Across Public Sectors: Importance of Community Engagement to Support Responsible and Equitable Use - Center for Democracy and Technology’
🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Automated Proctoring Swept In During Pandemic. It’s Likely to Stick Around, Despite Concerns | EdSurge News'
Glad UK is stepping back from proctoring, but worried about the foothold it’s gained.
link to ‘Automated Proctoring Swept In During Pandemic. It’s Likely to Stick Around, Despite Concerns | EdSurge News’
🔗 linkblog: just read 'Ed Tech Usage is Up. So Are Parent Privacy Concerns'
Interesting read on an important subject.
link to ‘Ed Tech Usage is Up. So Are Parent Privacy Concerns’
🔗 linkblog: just read 'Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
OER forever. This article makes me sad.
link to ‘Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
🔗 linkblog: just read 'Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge'
Very interesting to think about how mental models re: file storage may be changing.
link to ‘Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge’