In our big content management systems class project this semester, students are knocking it out of the park in a way that makes me proud of them but also reassures me that maybe I understand this stuff despite no formal training after all.

Sometimes I feel like I’m nagging my data science students when I tell them to use function x in R instead of almost-identical function y. Other times, I remember that function y has awful output that makes grading their work a pain, and I stop worrying.

Some switch has recently flipped in my brain so that I can hand out Bs, Cs, and worse without being anxious about it. I still have real concerns about grading as a concept, but I’ve stopped worrying about taking off points as though I’m the one being penalized.

I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.

I’m currently at the 2024 conference for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, where the Mormon Social Science Association always organizes a number of panels. (I presented on a reactionary Mormon Twitter hashtag earlier today!). MSSA traditionally has a Saturday evening no-host dinner, and as long as I’ve attended (okay, only since 2021), we’ve relied on a foodie board member to find a place for us to eat. Rick isn’t here this year, and somehow that got turned into my becoming responsible for finding us a restaurant to meet, eat, and chat at.

Wild to read this so soon after finishing Character Limit, because I’m getting very similar vibes.

That feeling when data you’re coding is just so bizarre that you don’t know what to make of it. Online communities are a heck of a thing to study.

What a gross offer to receive.

You know you’re working in the right place when you casually bring up Squirrel Girl in the copy room, and someone replies “oh, yeah, she defeated Thanos.”

Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book!

What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.

I usually do too much qualitative work for them to be useful, but .Rmd-based slides are a delight to work in.

I am slowly writing something related to open source governance this semester, so naturally this story keeps getting wilder to give me things to think about.

I have conflicted feelings about productivity books, but even as I increasingly reject the emphasis on productivity, I do find that there are some gems in these books that are helpful to me as I try to keep my life organized across all of its dimensions. While rereading one of these books over the summer, I came across the following quote (which appears to be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.):

This was a hell of a semester to decide to not dedicate a whole lecture to WordPress in my CMS class.

This week, I’ve encountered Ursula K. LeGuin’s anarchist vision of what a university could be as well as a number of reminders of how much things aren’t like that vision.

Today, I demonstrated I know just enough ed psych to be a troublemaker in relevant meetings.

I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear.

Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.

I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow.

I had to visit Gab today to hunt down some data for a paper, and boy was this the wrong Monday to visit that hellhole of a site.

I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up.

Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening. Somehow, though, remembering all of these facts and events as I read them all in one place felt overwhelming. Had Musk really created that much chaos in such a relatively short period of time?

It feels weird to be giving advice to first-year faculty, because I still feel like I don’t know anything, but my spouse recently pointed out that I’m now more senior than most of the people I turned to for advice during my first year…

I really ought to read the original piece instead of just the Slashdot excerpt, but I tried that, and it just made me even more angry, and I don’t think it would change my response.

I’m not opposed to doing away with grades, but I’m not convinced by hand-wringing about grade inflation. Grades do need to be meaningful to be useful, but the idea that As need to be reserved for an elite few speaks less to meritocracy (referenced in the full piece) than to a need for an elite.

Like much software, I only know as much Git as I need to get my stuff done, but I’m pleased to report that some code conflicts in class finally got me to learn .gitignore.

Interesting read wirh important implications for how we think about research quality.