Like in many PhD programs, my comprehensive exams included an element that was intended to help me prepare for my dissertation proposal, dissertation, and dissertation defense. Building off of my research interests and experiences up to that point, my advisor wrote me a lengthy question asking me to define and describe simulation games—the intent, of course, being that at least some of this could be worked into a literature review for a dissertation.

Why can’t we just learn to assess differently? There’s so much about proctoring software that ought to be worrying us.

link to ‘Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times’

I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter. Matt web scraped over four million pages associated with resources from the TpT platform, and we took a quantiative descriptive look at resource metadata, including subject areas, grade levels, resource types, Common Core State Standards, user ratings, and prices across those resources. We then interpreted our findings through José van Dijck’s writing on embedded values on digital platforms—this was my first real dive into van Dijck, and I’m particularly proud of that contribution. Here’s the abstract for more of a peek:

I am, technically speaking, a STEM educator, but the reason I get so cranky about STEM hype is that these disciplines cannot on their own address the problems I’m most worried about right now.

Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning.

I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation. I’m also a bit disappointed that our conversation about 4chan in the early part of the interview got cut; I get why (probably not as interesting to the average viewer than some of my more generally-reaching comments), but I also think it’s important to understand that there are these dark places out there on the internet and that they are leading to tragedies like Buffalo.

Just used the phrase ‘hashtag ontology’ in a draft manuscript, and I think that will keep me happy the rest of the day.

Trying to convince employer that a combination of flights and rail is best way for me to get to upcoming conference, wish me luck!

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.