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there is no objective standard of success that we reach when we insist on rigor, which is too often deployed in defense of practices that are ableist and unkind

We are not just teachers, or scholars, or professionals. We are individuals thrown back in varying degrees on our own resources, worried about ourselves and our families and friends as we navigate the effects of COVID-19. Many of us are deeply anxious and afraid. Our pre-existing frailties have been magnified; we feel vulnerable, distracted and at sea. Our loved ones are sick, even dying. This is trauma. Few of us have faced such world-changing circumstances before, and as our minds absorb the impact of that reality, our brains cannot perform as capably as they usually would.

The most professional people I know right now are those who show up, day after day, to teach under extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps they do it with their laundry waiting to be folded, while their children interrupt, thinking constantly of their loved ones, weathering loneliness, wearing sweatpants and potentially in need of a haircut. But I know they do it while acknowledging this is not the world in which we taught two months before, and that every student is facing disruption, uncertainty and distraction. They do it creatively, making room for the unexpected, challenging their students, with the world a participant in the conversation.

Generally these papers are just pumped-up versions of the five-paragraph essay, with filler added. Thesis-driven, argumentative, like the newspaper editorials the genre is based on, this "researched writing" promises to solve big questions with little effort: "Reproductive rights resolved in five pages!"

Actual writing related to research is modest, qualified, and hesitant

our actual model involves elaborately respectful conversation, demonstrating sensitivity to the most nuanced claims of previous researchers

Academic, legal, medical, and business writing has easily understandable conventions. We responsibly survey the existing literature, formally or informally creating an annotated bibliography. We write a review of the literature, identifying a "blank" spot ignored by other scholars, or a "bright" spot where we see conflicting evidence. We describe the nature of our research in terms of a contribution to the blank or bright spot in that conversation. We conclude by pointing to further questions.

Millions of pieces of research writing that aren’t essays usefully circulate in the profession through any number of sharing technologies, including presentations and posters; grant and experiment proposals; curated, arranged, translated, or visualized data; knowledgeable dialogue in online media with working professionals; independent journalism, arts reviews, and Wikipedia entries; documentary pitches, scripts and storyboards; and informative websites.

real researchers don’t write a word unless they have something to contribute. We should teach our students to do the same

at least users can see exactly how the sausage is made. Contrast this to Google or Bing, where the search algorithm that produces results is a closely guarded secret.

The word that Zucca used a number of times in our chat was "authority," and OUP is betting that individual and institutional users will value the authority enough that they'll be willing to pay for access to the service

This paywall is the only feature of OBO that seems truly unfortunate, given that the competition (search and Wikipedia) is free. High school kids and motivated amateurs will be left slumming it with whatever they can get from the public Internet, and OBO's potential reach and impact will be severely limite

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Apple's customers can't take their "iContent" with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can't sell on their own terms.

I don't want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.

Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We'll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we'll hardly notice it, and we'll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

the walled gardens that best return shareholder value

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

Google search results gives more weight to pxhere.com where the image has a mighty 4 views (some of which are me) over the original image, with almost 5000 views.

What kind of algorithm is that? It’s one that does not favor the individual. Image search results will favor sites like Needpix, Pixsels, Pixnio, Peakpx, Nicepic, and they still favor the really slimy maxpixel which is a direct rip off of pixabay.

did you know that the liberating world of “use any photo you want w/o the hassle of attribution” is such a bucket of questionable slime? And that Google, with all of their algorithmic prowess, gives more favorable results to sites that lift photos than to the ones where the originals exist?

So yes, just reuse photos without taking all of the severe effort to give credit to the source, because “you don’t have to.” Be a copycat. Show your flag of Lacktribution. Like everyone else. I will not. I adhere to Thanktribution.

When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?

“It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”

“They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”

“They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.

Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”

As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.

Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.

there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.

Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.

“More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”

some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing

“I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”