Ce matin, j’ai préparé du muësli fait-maison au lieu de faire des corrections, et je n’ai aucun sentiment de culpabilité.

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. Walkaway is too delightfully weird to be able to give an easy explanation of the context here, but the following passage comes from an argument between (one of the many) protagonist(s) Limpopo and antagonist Jackstraw. Jackstraw believes that their “walkaway” community needs to be gamified and leaderboarded to be made more efficient. Limpopo is firmly against that:

The desire to “enhance” or “improve” learning is a noble one, but I’m increasingly convinced it gets too much attention—and distracts us from as (or more) important questions about education and technology.

In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”

Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”

I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are.

Reading through the data available through Canvas analytics, I’m reminded of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s argument (in their excellent book “Data Feminism”) that structured, “clean” data is most necessary for “strangers in the dataset.”

My tenure dossier has passed all the college-level steps, and I just finished reading the kind letter my dean wrote. Now off to the Provost’s office for months of waiting!

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.

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. “They know teenagers are insecure and they want to know what their friends think about them.”

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.

It’s been a long day at the end of a long week, but it ended with an “are you working on anything interesting so I can write about it?” message from a reporter and a kind compliment from a grad school friend, so all in all, not too bad.

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. The other gag—and one that breaks up the monotony of reading through the document—is that each page is an homage to a famous work of comic art, but with Steve Jobs inserted in the place of one of the characters. My favorite is one that I’ve shared in a previous post about the book, a shout-out to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns:

Remembering the time some trollish critics of research I’m doing with a colleague grabbed the audio from a YouTube video of our conference presentation and remixed it into a song they posted to SoundCloud. It’s supposed to be mocking, but I find it funny.

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:

I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.

Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.

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.

Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.

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.

Nothing says unwarranted optimism quite like the big pile of books I brought home from campus in case I had time to work on “that manuscript” over the break. Lugging them back to campus tomorrow morning.

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. That uptick has meant that it’s been difficult to avoid them crossing my feed, and so even without trying, I’ve had a few thoughts about “quote toots” that I think might be worth sharing.

Such an interesting book. I’m going to have to get a copy to read one day.

Dreamt this morning that I was applying for PhD programs. It wasn’t until dream-me began reviewing my research record that I remembered that I already have a PhD and am actually applying for tenure right now.

Edtech professionals aren’t paying nearly enough attention to this sort of thing.