Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms.

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.

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.

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. 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.

Really leaning into ethics and justice elements of data science in my fall class, and I’m wondering how much pushback I’m going to get. I’ve taught about racism, sexism, and colonization in games in another class with very few complaints, but this feels different somehow.

Masnick’s critiques of Pearson here are better than anything I could have written.

Some really worrying privacy implications in this kind of edtech—and edtech as a discipline doesn’t care nearly enough about this kind of thing. Makes me worried as a scholar and a parent.

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.

Ugh, Pearson. Why do we keep thinking about ways to make digital textbooks worse than physical ones?

My issue with computer science education isn’t the idea of computer science education—it’s that it’s overwhelmingly driven by workforce and economic concerns instead of concerns related to citizenship and democracy.

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.

I’m not a big fan of journal metrics, so I hate myself a little for including them in the research statement for my tenure dossier.

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:

Disappointing to see academics implicated in the Uber Files. It’s a compelling example of how research funding is contingent on public and private interests. Of course, public interests are generally less worrying than Uber funding research perceived to be positive and profitable, but there are still times I have questions about the NSF’s priorities.

I’ve seen a number of headlines about how a post-Dobbs world changes the game for online privacy, but this is the first one that I sat down to read. School surveillance software is scary enough without this possibility, so let’s not make it worse. I can’t believe that this software gives schools any benefits that outweigh the heavy cost to students’ privacy.

I’ve also been thinking recently about small but important influences on my career, so it was a real treat to read Punya’s thoughts here.

I don’t really understand what the Publons platform is, I’ve always been skeptical of it, and the more journals try to convince me to sign up for it, the less I’m likely to change either of the first two things.

I just barely microblogged something about what I want to say here, but over the past hour, it’s been nagging at me more and more, and I want to write some more about it.

I was introduced to academia through educational technology, and I was introduced to educational technology through a class at BYU taught by David Wiley. This class was not about educational technology, but David’s passion for Web 2.0, Open Educational Resources, and remix culture were so strong that I got hooked. OER and Creative Commons licensing both got firmly planted deep in my thinking, and even though they never became a focus of my own edtech work, they’ve also never left my brain.

This summer, I’m remixing an alternative textbook for my Fall intro to data science class, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how helpful Creative Commons-licensed journal articles are proving. Shows that “open access” is only part of license’s benefits.