One of my favorite perks of academia is finding a personally interesting book through the university library.

Plagiarism is clearly bad, but its weaponization as part of a culture war could well he worse. I don’t love the idea of its escalation. Gift link.

It’s that time of year where I have a text editor open alongside Canvas so that I can strip out all the extra HTML tags that LMSs like to add to my content.

Welp, here’s something to pay attention to this legislative session.

My department has a copyright class on the books that’s never been taught—even when I offered to take it on after being hired. I understand why that offer wasn’t taken up, but I can’t help but think about all I could do in that class with Mickey Mouse this semester.

Proud of my colleagues!

Ben has been one of my best students over the past 5.5 years. He was a non-traditional student who flunked out of UK decades ago, went on to be a successful small business owner elsewhere in the country, and then leapt at the chance to come back to UK through an online degree completion program. As part of that program, he took one of the classes I was teaching at the time, which counted toward general education credit.

As often happens at the end of a semester, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about grades: What they mean, what purpose they serve, and how to best assign them. In thinking about this, I’m also thinking about a comment that a number of my colleagues put on each class syllabus: something to the effect of “I don’t give grades, you earn them.” These colleagues are gifted teachers whose examples I strive to follow, and I appreciate the sentiment behind their statement, but it’s also always struck me as oversimplifying what it means to grade.

My rule is that if it’s a personal project, but I learn some regex and bookdown along the way, it still counts as professional development.

Over the summer, I blogged about some concern that I had about a new research portal that my employer had just rolled out. Based on the gentle nudges to update our profiles we’ve been receiving since the platform’s launch, I’m guessing that faculty have not been as keen on the platform as the university is. One of those nudges came this week, and in the spirit of good faith cooperation, I spent some time going through the platform and updating my profile.

Kiddo’s awesome “advent calendar of magic” is prominently advertised as a STEM toy, and that’s been bugging me. Not because it isn’t true, but because things don’t need to be STEM to be valuable.

My journaling app just let me know that today is the 6-year anniversary of my campus interview here at the University of Kentucky. Hard to believe it’s been that long!

Lots to appreciate in this post.

My second-to-last class meeting for my content management course featured an impromptu lecture on how URL structure is undervalued by both web users and site designers. It wasn’t irrelevant to course concepts, but I hadn’t been planning on it either.

This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff.

The bassist for one of my favorite bands is an academic by day, which must be the reason why they have the only song I’ve ever heard with “post doc” in the lyrics.

I have been feeling bad all semester for the students who signed up for my data science class because they enjoyed my games and learning one. I’m the same professor in both, but games and learning is very fun-focused and sociocultural, whereas data science is a firehose of stats and coding.

Helping a student distinguish between backticks and single quotes and remembering the 8th grade keyboarding students from a decade ago who complained that I made them do code in a class they thought should be about learning to type properly. Gotta do the latter to do the former.

When I learned that Stephanie Moore and Tonia Dousay were editing a volume on ethics in educational technology, I jumped at the chance to write something on data ethics. Stephanie and Tonia’s book is now published on Royce Kimmons’s open access EdTechBooks platform as Applied Ethics for Instructional Design and Technology, and my chapter is available alongside six others on other subjects related to ethics and educational technology. Here’s a link to the online version, and I have a PDF archived on my website.

It weirds me out that linking to a file in an email is starting to become the new attaching a file to an email. It isn’t that I’ve never done this, but it seems like it’s the default for my students—even for file types that I don’t think of as cloud-specific.

The sheer hassle of ordering an instructor copy of this McGraw-Hill textbook is only strengthening my commitment to eventually replacing it with an open textbook.

The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff.

I have thought for years about the way that Twitter research (in the aggregate) serves as a largely unintentional history of Twitter, but I’ve never thought to wonder what that specifically looks like right now.

Five years ago, a few of us who had (had) the same PhD advisor started a group chat on Keybase and added that advisor. It’s been a source of music recommendations, professional advice, sympathy during rough personal moments, and much more. It’s wholesome, helpful, and all around great.

I’m happy to share that we’re hiring this year in all three of the areas in our multidisciplinary unit. I’m including the official announcement below, and I’d be happy to talk to anyone who has questions or interest in the positions! The University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science invites applications for three positions at the rank of tenure-track assistant professor. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2024. Qualification and Responsibilities: Candidates are expected to hold an earned Ph.

A few hours after presenting at AECT on Thursday morning, I hopped on a plane to Salt Lake City, so that I could attend the 2023 conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion—especially the sessions associated with the Mormon Social Science Association. I’m giving three presentations today and wanted to include my slides here for anyone else who’s interested: I’d be happy to talk more about any of these!

On Thursday morning, I presented some work I’ve been doing with Dan Krutka at a session of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology. Here’s the title and abstract of our presentation: Teachers on Far-Right Social Media: The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Informal Learning We present the results of our studying a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform. The identity of the platform and the persistence of far-right agenda setting overwhelmed any educational intentions of the group, which therefore had little to offer teachers looking to improve their craft.

I was dreaming that some STEM-type was criticizing Bachelor of Arts degrees as “BS” and dream-me flew into a rage ready to defend the humanities until I woke up and realized that his joke didn’t even work.

One paper that I read and reread as I was starting to get into Twitter research was Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev’s “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” published in a 2011 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. I thought of this paper again yesterday; more specifically, I thought about the anecdote that the article begins with: Barry and Beverly Wellman moved to Toronto more than 40 years ago. Not being able to get a public school job at first, Beverly went to teach English-language subjects at a Jewish day school.

Is it too much to ask to put virtual conference attendees on a different listserv? One that doesn’t include the pleas to join the in-person social events taking place while I’m trying to clean my kitchen and put kiddo to bed?

Thanks to a combination of personal hubris and inconvenient coincidences, this week involves 4 presentations at 2 conferences, catching up on 3 weeks of grading, and writing P&T letters for 4 colleagues. Hooray for free wifi on my flights.

My Mormon Studies research will probably never get the citations that my edtech work has, but it’s neat how much more layperson and media interest it generates. That said, I hope late-night weekend presentations stay rare because I’m very tired this morning.

I’m becoming more and more skeptical of “improve teaching and learning” as a motivation for education (and especially edtech) research—it’s a noble goal, but it distracts us from so many other important questions.

This morning, I read an excellent piece by Lam Thuy Vo at The Markup expressing concern about how services like Amazon’s Ring cameras can distort police priorities and perpetuate bias. Here’s a good summary passage: As a reporter, I’ve always been interested in systems that disadvantage some people—when it comes to policing, they are often Black or Latino—while prioritizing the wishes of a smaller, much more powerful subset—often affluent White folks.

Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.

You know, I think the combination of research training in ed tech and currently teaching ICT classes makes me particularly critical of the “digital native” idea.