A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

Thanks to a recommendation from Boing Boing, I’ve spent part of this afternoon watching this amazing video cataloging “Every Music Reference & Sample in They Might Be Giants Songs”:

Flood was one of the first albums I ever owned (I think it was beat by the deluxe soundtrack for Star Wars: A New Hope, but not by much), and while I don’t listen to TMBG as often as I ought to, videos like these remind me how much I love the band. I’ve mostly appreciated them for their weirdness, but it’s been amazing to see how aware they are of other music and how they bring it into their own discography. This is also a beautiful example of everything being a remix—we ought to spend more time supporting that rather than constraining it.

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.

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.

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. It turns out that Data Feminism is also a helpful resource here. Riffing on the common “data is the new oil” metaphor, D’Ignazio and Klein argue that:

J’aime beaucoup la radio numérique, surtout parce que j’ai la possibilité d’écouter des chaînes radio francophones. Parmi mes chaînes préférées se trouve DKL Dreyeckland, une chaîne alsatienne. J’aime bien la musique, mais ce que j’aime surtout, ce sont les pubs. Normalement, je supporte pas la publicité dans mes médias, mais je fais une exception pour les pubs en français, parce que ça me permet d’apprendre un langage que je n’ai jamais appris dans un cours lycéen ou universitaire.

Twelve years ago, I spent a summer in Geneva completing an internship at the NGO Geneva Call ( « Appel de Genève » ). Being the bookworm that I am, I naturally grabbed a few books to bring with me. I know that I read through Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar that summer—I had just started using Ubuntu and was wildly (over)optimistic about the ideals of open source.

I’ve been blogging about ClassDojo enough over the past few weeks that I think it’s time for a quick recap before sharing some of the latest developments. I heard about ClassDojo being used schoolwide back in late July and started wondering what approach I should take as both a student’s parent and an edtech researcher. On Monday of this week, I talked to kiddo’s teacher about it and wrote up some thoughts the next day about teachers’ diminished agency in the realm of edtech. In recognition of that diminished agency, I went ahead yesterday and voiced my concerns directly to the principal about ClassDojo and student monitoring software installed on Chromebooks.

I really will get back to blogging on other subjects sometime soon, but here’s an email I just sent to kiddo’s principal raising some concerns I have going into the school year. I’m not sure what will come of this—and I’m not at all sure this was the right email to write—but in the off-chance it’s helpful for someone, I thought I’d post about it here.

Dear Principal [so-and-so],

We are very excited to be joining the VPE community this year: Our daughter is excited to be starting kindergarten, and we are happy to see how supportive, welcoming, and organized everyone has been. However, as we begin the school year, I have some questions and concerns about technology use at VPE.

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.

Kiddo starts at a new school on Wednesday, and I’ve been putting off signing the Acceptable Use Policy and Chromebook Policy because I want to read them carefully. I don’t know how much I can do about anything that I’m really concerned with, but I’m a tech researcher when I’m not being kiddo’s dad, so I feel an obligation to be informed and raise a fuss when something is fussworthy.

I haven’t attended the Latter-day Saint congregation I officially belong to since March of 2020, and I’m coming up on one year of being an official member of Community of Christ. It’s pretty clear to me—and, likely, to others—where my religious future is headed.

Yet, I’ve always expected that I would remain a de jure—if not de facto—member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even if it’s not the right spiritual home for me or my family any more, and even if I have major disagreements with it, this church has been an important part of my life, and I’ve always wanted to preserve that by retaining my official membership. I’ve never thought of myself as an “ex-Mormon,” I don’t like to talk about my faith transition as “leaving the Church,” and when I was recently described as a “Latter-day Saint professor” in a Salt Lake Tribune article, I was briefly perturbed but ultimately decided that I thought the description worked, even if it was a bit misleading. (To be clear, though, this isn’t a dig at Peggy, who knows that I’m a BYU grad and returned missionary but doesn’t/didn’t know that I’m practicing in Community of Christ.)

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.

This week and last, I’ve been reading up on Mormons’ commitment to both the language of the King James Version (Philip Barlow’s Mormons and the Bible is a fantastic read) and what is seen as the authoritative text of the Book of Mormon. In Paul Gutjahr’s The Book of Mormon: A Biography, he quotes the official Latter-day Saint Scripture Translation Manual as including the following guidelines for translators of the Book of Mormon:

Nearly a year ago, a friend gave me a copy of Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation as a gift for my confirmation into Community of Christ. It (obviously) took me a while to start it, and it’s taking me some time to read through it, but there’s a lot in there that I like. This afternoon, this passage stood out to me:

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God, for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice, your mediocrity and materialism, your sensuality and selfishness that have killed his faith.

This summer has been a good one for getting back into tabletop roleplaying. I played a lot of the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG in middle and high school and have been spending most of my life since then wishing that I were still that involved with RPGs. I’ve compensated some by listening to actual play podcast: Total Party Kill rotates through several great D&D campaigns, the original Fantasy Flight Star Wars run of Campaign is so good that I’m listening to it a second time, and Penny Arcade’s Tales from the Loop campaign blew my mind when I listened to it a few months ago.

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. I had either left this final for last or was trying to get it out of the way first—either way, I specifically remember feeling as I was navigating through different pages in the LMS that I had done enough work—in this class generally and for the final in particular—and that there were other things that needed my time and effort more. It was time to submit and to move on.

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.

When I was growing up, our family had a three-VHS set of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts, and while “Wallace and Gromit fan” was never at the forefront of my identity, I have always loved The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Naturally, things that I loved as a kid are near the top of my list of things to introduce to kiddo. I showed them to her a couple of years ago—probably near the beginning of the pandemic—but she had no memory of them, so this weekend, I had the pleasure of reintroducing her to the series. Between Friday and Sunday, we watched all four of the shorts, starting with The Wrong Trousers, then A Close Shave, A Grand Day Out, and A Matter of Loaf and Death.

J’ai déjà écrit cette semaine sur mon amour pour Dijon, et c’est peut-être pour ça qu’un souvenir précis me vient à l’esprit ce matin.

Quand je vivais à Dijon, je n’avais pas d’ordinateur et ce n’était pas encore l’âge de l’ordiphone. J’allais donc chez un cybercafé toutes les semaines pour écrire des courriels à ma famille et à des amis. Le cybercafé que je fréquentais s’appellait Cyberbisey, justement parce que c’était un cybercafé sur la rue Berbisey (ce n’était qu’après plusieurs semaines que j’ai compris la blague).

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. The resurgence of Mormon fundamentalism into the American shared consciouness has led The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reclaim the word “Mormon,” which stands in contrast to its efforts since the 1990s to downplay that nickname and emphasize its full name. Indeed, it’s not long after this that the I’m a Mormon campaign is launched and that mormon.org gets a major corresponding redesign. However, if this leaning into the word “Mormon” stands in contrast with Latter-day Saint leaders’ previous efforts to distance themselves from the name, Russell Nelson’s August 2018 decision to abruptly reverse course and go further than any previous Latter-day Saint leader in distancing the church from the word “Mormon” felt downright jarring.

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. When the platform launched today, a passage from the press release added to that feeling:

Ça fait quelques années que mon frère regarde la chaîne YouTube Not Just Bikes, qui parle des vélos, des transports publics, et de l’infrastructure qui les soutient (où pas). Il m’en parle assez souvent, mais ce n’est que récemment que j’ai enfin décidé de regarder quelques vidéos. Vu mon amour pour les sujets abordés dans les vidéos (les vélos, les transports publics, l’Europe), ça m’étonne que je n’ai pas découvert cette chaîne avant. J’ai surtout apprécié ces vidéos sur le vélo en Suisse, les pistes cyclables à Paris, et les trains de grande vitesse en Italie (surtout parce que j’avais déjà regardé cette vidéo sur la service Frecciarossa entre Paris et Lyon).

Over the past several months, I’ve been slowly working my way through Mark Scherer’s three-volume The Journey of a People, the most recent quasi-official history of Community of Christ. The first volume was interesting, since it covered an era of Mormon history that I’m familiar with from a perspective that I’m not familiar with. I found the second volume a bit harder to get through—some individual sections were fascinating, but it seemed to lack an overall throughline or narrative. I’m currently working my way through the third volume, though, and I think it might be my favorite. It’s fascinating to watch The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints become Community of Christ, and I’ve thought to myself several times that as happy as I am to be part of the latter, I don’t think I would have ever joined the former, even though they’re simply the same institution at two different points of history.

When I was in college, I ran into a friend on my way to a professor’s office hours. He saw that I had a copy of Superman for All Seasons with me and gave me a hard time about it—he was much more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan (these were the days when this was primarily a reference to comics, not sprawling cinematic universes) and just didn’t get the appeal of Superman—how could you do anything interesting with a character that powerful? Fortunately, the reason that I like Superman for All Seasons is my best answer to that question: What makes the Superman character interesting is not the magnitude of his power but the ways that he chooses to exercise it. I don’t find at all interesting any comics that take the format of “Superman must prove himself stronger than increasingly stronger adversaries,” but I find absolutely fascinating the many Superman comics—and other comics clearly playing with homages to the character—the ones that ask themselves why such a powerful character would use that power for good.