Because we have a library science program, my dept. often gets sample books from publishers that faculty can take for free. Today, kiddo is with me at work, and one of the new sample books just happens to be a long graphic novel from an author she likes. Serendipity is great.

I don’t know if I’m using OneDrive wrong or if it is just that much worse than Google Drive for syncing local files.

Another set of proofs, another set of complaints about a copyeditor making changes to my writing in ways that distort my meaning. If I get grumpy about a human doing my writing for me, why would I ever want generative AI to do it?

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.

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. Of the three projects, one that I’m particularly interested in is some analysis I’m doing of Mormon groups on the far-right social media platform Gab. This has turned into an interesting exploration of what boundaries are firm and what boundaries are porous in Mormon (social and religious) spaces. For example, many of the posts in these Mormon groups are unobjectionable on their own, simply sharing Mormon humor or memes; yet, what’s most interesting about these posts is the implicit compatibility betwteen Mormon groups and the undeniably far-right nature of the overall Gab platform. Even if they don’t say it out loud, these folks clearly see no objection or tension between being a faithful Latter-day Saint and participating in a social media platform that has no interest in policing its users when it “establish[es] LGBTQ+ individuals as abonimations” and otherwise leans hard into the contemporary far right. In contrast, there’s also activity in these groups implicitly criticizing Latter-day Saint leaders (who are traditionally revered as “prophets, seers, and revelators”) for encouraging Latter-day Saints to wear masks and get vaccinated against COVID-19. So, prosocial pandemic behavior crosses a firm line, but spending time on Gab does not.

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.

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. the practical concerns held by those outside the academy.

I don’t know if I’m pleased or disturbed by how often the classic British political sitcom “Yes, Minister” is relevant to my work in academia.

One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.

It’s already indefensible that ClassDojo promises greater access to teachers for parents willing to pay, but these features also translate into letting richer parents put more pressure on teachers. This business model is awful.

Another paper, another fight with copyeditors about not capitalizing danah boyd’s name.

Journal copyeditors are great when they fix things, but when they break my sentences and don’t ask questions about “[information removed for blinding]”, I wonder what the point is.

Journal copyeditor changed a bunch of first-person language in our abstract to third-person “the authors,” and I am peeved.

Every copyright transfer I sign destroys another part of my soul.

College conversation about investment in GPT-type tech to support research is continuing. I think it’s… fitting that the survey being circulated is clearly using Qualtrics’s auto-suggested Likert responses—and that the responses aren’t quite right for the questions being asked.

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!

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. All of these things are mixing together as I think about the privileges and obligations of tenure and what I want to do with myself and for my institution as my career moves forward.

I firmly believe that research is a process of argument—and that statistics are, therefore, a rhetorical device.

I’ve been struggling with putting together a particular document for over a week. It’s like I’ve entirely forgotten how to do academic writing—something I usually feel pretty confident about.

My college is floating the idea of investing in GPT-type technology to help researchers code text data. This reminds me of my longtime belief that the distinction between “qual” and “quant” is often less important than the distinction between different research paradigms.

It’s four hours into my workday, so I guess it’s time to start doing that writing I blocked the whole day off for. 🙃

“Welcome to tenure, here are all your new service obligations.”

Prensky coined the term “digital native” to talk about people my age, but I have a colleague younger than me who is using the term to refer to our undergraduate students. This sums up so much of why I think this term is useless.

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).

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.