The more I mess around with hacking my Hugo site, the more qualified I feel to teach my content management systems class.

Last week, I got the chance to chat with Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack about Latter-day Saint missionaries use of social media videos, and I was pleased to see the article published on Sunday. I hadn’t been paying attention to online missionary videos, but the subject fit nicely with the reading I’ve been doing on platform and platform values recently:

Both kinds of accounts “are drawing from the internet/influencer cultures of these platforms,” [Greenhalgh] says. “On one hand, that’s a smart move, and it makes a lot of sense, but online platforms have their own embedded values, and they may not always be compatible. The church has long been nervous about assimilating too much into the cultures it goes into, and I wonder how much concern there is here.”

In addition to cheating being flat-out wrong, students should also consider just how much regulation-reading and paperwork it creates for their professors.

Do other internet researchers find themselves citing journalists to explain things like memes? Or am I just not reading the right scholarly sources?

Today’s writing music is Manu Chao, whom I was surprised to discover in the 2010s was a real musician, not someone my 1990s-era high school French textbooks had made up for sample dialogues.

This is my first summer not teaching since beginning grad school, so even though my to-do list is still long (including, y’know, a tenure dossier to put together), I don’t know what to do with myself.

I think it’s funny (but delightful) that my secondary area of research has gotten more media attention than what I was specifically trained to do.

Developing automations for posting to my website and microblogging platforms is one way I deal with my insecurities as an ed. researcher turned ICT instructor.

The only way to make emotion detection tech worse is, of course, to make it ed tech.

Frustrated by the way that blinding self-citations (that aren’t explicitly self-citations) can actually work against blind review. When I’m reviewing stuff in my niche area, I can sometimes tell who the authors are based on that alone.

Pleased with my decision to no longer tackle email on weekends; less pleased with the Mailbox Mondays that have resulted.

Discussing networks in class today, which is as good an excuse as any to show a clip from Battlestar Galactica. Computers without networks is one of the most interesting worldbuilding details in that show.

We should promote open science practices in social science projects where they make sense but also stop normalizing it in a way that ignores non-positivist paradigms.

The focus on student learning in this year’s AECT reviews is good, but I worry that it blinds us to other important ed tech questions. I’d struggle to describe how surveillance, ethics, privacy impact student learning, but we desperately need that research too-or more!

I prefer not to get into the bad news, but the good news is that I’m learning a lot about how MySQL and WordPress work.

Learned an important lesson about platform dependence today. When I got hired at UK, I went all in on Google Drive to back up all my files; now, our institutional access is going to limit us to about 10% of the storage I was using. Going to be messy.

This is why I’m skeptical of terms like data driven decision making, which are meant to sound objective but cannot live up to their rhetorical power.

Certainly not the worst news I’ve read this morning, but still tremendously worrying.

Boo on Proctorio.

Every selling point on this cold call email for an ed tech product is a reason that I would never consider using it.

Let me get this straight: Invasive surveillance isn’t enough, now companies are creating opportunities to cheat just so they can ding them and take credit for stopping it?

Doctorow tackles the grossest parts of ed tech. It’s a great read.

Just explained something I learned from studying far right spaces in Mormon social media to collaborators on a project studying queer spaces in far right social media, which is not an experience I expected when starting grad school in ed tech.

Ed tech should not be ad tech.

I wonder how many people right now believe both that university instructors indoctrinate students and that they shouldn’t be allowed to do so online because it wouldn’t be effective.