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’

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.

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.

I’ve been skeptical of writing manuscripts in Markdown or LaTeX for ages, but today I found myself asking where the “code editor” was in Word, so maybe it’s time to give it a try.

Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.

Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.

I’m currently on a search committee for the new director of our School of Information Science, and it’s kind of neat that academics get to hire their own bosses. My students’ minds were blown yesterday when I explaned this.

There was a brief period of publisher generosity early in COVID times where I snagged so many PDFs of books my uni library usually doesn’t have access to. Still making my way through them.

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.

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’

I just got paid by a journal after they accepted one of my papers, and as happy as I am about this, it is so far out of my normal academic experience that I feel disoriented.

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’m very glad that figuring out my office phone is not a prerequisite for tenure, or else my application would be in real trouble right now.

Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility. link to ‘Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED’

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.

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’

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’

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’

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’

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’

It’s a work from home day, but I put on real work clothes to meet with a student, only for them not to show. I think it was genuine miscommunication rather than irresponsibility, but still grumpy that I’m in a button-down shirt right now.

Well, here’s some happy news! I hope this ruling sticks. link to ‘Scanning student rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional, judge rules : NPR’

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.

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’

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.

I’ve been getting “Welcome to Canvas during this difficult time, here’s some documentation” pop-ups for nearly 2.5 years now. Only way to dismiss it is to accept a cookie, and I use relatively locked-down Firefox, so I may just see it for eternity at this point.

We had a short unit retreat this morning, and then I spent more time catching up with colleagues after the retreat than the retreat itself lasted. Both remind me that I work with great people.

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’

Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms. link to ‘What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica’

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’

Got happy news this morning that a paper that may be one of the most important research projects I’ve worked on has been accepted into an open access journal! Making it hard to focus on my semester prep.

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.’

I hate myself for creating a ClassDojo account, but kiddo’s school is going all-in, so not sure I have the choice. First observation is how confident the app is that it can make me pay extra for free software I don’t want to use in the first place.

I spent most of the summer working from home, so I’m working in my campus office for the first time in over two months today. Nice to be back, but I also didn’t realize how many software updates were waiting for me!

Spent part of this morning reviewing proofs for a chapter-length autoethnography that is not going to add much to my CV but may be the most personally important thing I’ve ever written. Really excited to see this so close to print.

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.