5,000 cameras?! What the heck?

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.

Outlook reactions continue to be THE WORST.

Can we agree that swearing at one’s email inbox counts as work so that I can say I’ve been especially productive today?

A few months ago, I announced a new publication from Dan Krutka and me based on our study of a teacher’s group on far-right social media. I’m happy to share that Renee Hobbs’s Media Education Lab has taken interest in the research, and that Dan and I will be giving a webinar for them next month.

The webinar is called “When Teachers Talk Politics Online: The Dark Side of Online Spaces for Teacher Professional Learning” and will take place on October 6th at 4pm EST. It is free, but you need to register here to get the Zoom link.

I’m a big fan of the 404 Media tech news outlet, and I also really enjoy their podcast. I especially appreciated an episode that I listened to yesterday, which I’m embedding below as a YouTube video (as an aside, I simply do not understand how YouTube has become a major podcast-listening medium, so it pains me a bit to do this, but I’m once again trying to write something quickly before getting to real work, and YouTube embeds are relatively easy to do in Hugo, so that’s what I’m going with.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

The effect on university budgets is among the least objectionable parts of the Big Beautiful Bill, and it’s still devastating.

Perhaps the best demonstration yet of why we need to talk about epistemology when we talk about generative AI. Gift link. It turns out that it takes an awful lot of intervention to get Grok to be “maximally truth-seeking” and “neutral.”

Je connaissais pas l’existence d’UniDistance Suisse, et maintenant j’ai envie d’en apprendre plus.

Today was really, truly going to be a much-needed writing day, and then I didn’t even clear my inbox until 2:30. Yayyyyyy.

Spaced on an evening meeting that I’d actually been looking forward to and 😫😫😫

I don’t have the whole picture here, and I don’t like passing judgment without having the whole picture, but I don’t know if I like this.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

Merci à Matoo, qui a vu combien j’écrivais sur Jacques Ellul sur ce site et qui m’a donc recommandé la petite série de cinq épisodes « Avoir raison… avec Jacques Ellul », qui est sorti il y a quelques semaines sur France Culture. J’ai écouté la première épisode ce matin en faisant de petites préparations pour mon premier jour d’enseignement pour cette année scolaire, et je le trouve déjà très utile.

J’ai déjà lu trois livres par Ellul et je suis en train de lire deux autres (bon, en théorie — j’avoue que ça va lentement). Ce week-end, je vais recevoir quelques nouveaux livres d’Ellul que mon beau-frère a acheté à la librairie new-yorkaise magnifique Albertine, qui est soutenue par l’ambassade française aux États-Unis. Mon beau-frère va à New York tous les étés et me cherchent toujours quelques bouquins francophones, et ça fait qu’en ce moment, j’aurai bientôt beaucoup plus à lire d’Ellul. C’est la première fois dans ma vie que je m’engage à ce niveau avec l’œuvre d’un seul écrivain académique, et je trouve qu’avoir des résumés comme celui de France Culture m’aide beaucoup à situer ce que je lis en un moment particulier dans l’ensemble de sa pensée.

After years of putting this off, I have finally figured out how to network my computer to the department printer, and I no longer have to worry that my position as a tenured professor of information communication technology will be revoked for being intimidated by basic office setups.

Appreciate Josh’s eye for detail here.

Today, I attended my first kids’ soccer game since rereading James Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” and since reading about Jacques Ellul’s ethic of non-power, and it turns out that makes a difference?

I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:

Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.

What a wild, depressing story. I feel like I ought to use this to teach the concept of platforms to my students—it neatly sums up the intervention in normal human activity by someone who thinks they have a buck to make.

Closing digital divides is good, and increasing diversity in tech fields as good, but I’ve been complaining for years about computer science ed that we stop at the nobility of those goals and don’t ask ourselves about the deeper motivations behind those initiatives. So it is with AI: A more diverse field more available to all is better than what we have, but we also have to ask whether AI education is actually a social good.

Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument. In particular, I want to take issue with this part of Musgrave’s essay:

There’s always been a dark side to internet culture, but I don’t think it was naïve in my earlier work to argue for recognizing its value. Yet, it’s important as a scholar to call out the ugliness that’s happening here.