I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow.

I had to visit Gab today to hunt down some data for a paper, and boy was this the wrong Monday to visit that hellhole of a site.

I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up.

Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening. Somehow, though, remembering all of these facts and events as I read them all in one place felt overwhelming. Had Musk really created that much chaos in such a relatively short period of time?

It feels weird to be giving advice to first-year faculty, because I still feel like I don’t know anything, but my spouse recently pointed out that I’m now more senior than most of the people I turned to for advice during my first year…

I really ought to read the original piece instead of just the Slashdot excerpt, but I tried that, and it just made me even more angry, and I don’t think it would change my response.

I’m not opposed to doing away with grades, but I’m not convinced by hand-wringing about grade inflation. Grades do need to be meaningful to be useful, but the idea that As need to be reserved for an elite few speaks less to meritocracy (referenced in the full piece) than to a need for an elite.

Like much software, I only know as much Git as I need to get my stuff done, but I’m pleased to report that some code conflicts in class finally got me to learn .gitignore.

Interesting read wirh important implications for how we think about research quality.

I am way more pessimistic about AI than Masnick is, but we agree on this sort of thing. Algorithmic surveillance is no more appropriate in response to AI concerns than it is to cheating concerns.

I keep getting lured to meetings by free lunches, only to remember once I get there that my leftovers from home would be better than anything the college will pay for.

I don’t know if it’s summer amnesia, taking on some new responsibilities, or a coping mechanism, but boy did I forget how much of my workday emails can take up.

I am, unbelievably, preparing my fourth offering of my department’s ICT/LIS 661 Intro to Data Science class, and this time around, I’ve decided to add a new section to my “about the class” page in Canvas to head off some concerns that I’ve seen over the past few years. I have a lot of students with no background in either statistics or programming who take my class, and it can be really intimidating for them. I’m not convinced that the advice I give below is everything that I ought to say (or exactly how I ought to say it), but this semester, I want to get out ahead of a lot of the one-on-one pep talks I give throughout the semester.

One day, before I retire, I will remember how to cross-list sections in Canvas without having to look it up.

Interesting—and hopeful—read.

This semester, I am encouraged to include in my syllabus links to student resources related to mental health, food insecurity, etc., but required to include instructions for how to respond to an “active aggressor.” How depressing.

More than once, I have gotten myself in trouble while teaching my WordPress class by getting out of my web hosting comfort zone. Today, though, I pulled off some DNS and cPanel stuff right on the edge of my limits, so let’s hope sailing stays smooth for the whole semester. 🤞🏻

I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.

I recently got a chance to be recorded as part of a video that my unit’s Information and Communication Technology master’s program put together for recruitment purposes. I feel weird about participating in marketing in an increasingly corporate university environment, but I like our program, I believe in what I had to say about the program, and I was pleased to hear what students (including one I advised!) had to say about what they got out of the program, so I’m pretty happy with the final product:

A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).

I follow higher ed coverage from both The Guardian and my local paper, so when “UK” shows up in my RSS reader, I nearly always have to pause before I can parse whether it refers to the University of Kentucky or the United Kingdom.

This is a darker version of some of the thoughts I had when I first heard about the “PhD comparison.”

Before you click through to the article, I also want to use this short post as a complaint that I don’t think “intelligence” is a thing—and that PhDs certainly wouldn’t be a measure of it if it were.

Woke up from a dream that I’d been charged with sharing results for federal grant applications from my college. Looked up myself, and was relieved to not get the grant that I’d applied for—but surprised to be awarded funds for a “bike book” project I didn’t remember proposing.

I appreciate Punya’s essay here. I’m very grumpy about generative AI, but that doesn’t change the fact that some grumpiness has more to do with moral panic than a reasoned response—but THAT doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for some of this kind of careful nostalgia that Punya is sharing.

We should all be worried about what’s happening here.