Reflecting on and rethinking research in the age of #newmedia; Participatory, Decolonizing, Critical, and Indigenous Methodologies; #DigitalHumanities; and #opendata.
In their seminal book on classifications and infrastructures, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star conclude: We have argued in this book that it is politically and ethically crucial to recognize the vital role of infrastructure in the “built moral environment.” Seemingly purely technical issues like how to name […]
Data systems in non-profits are nearly always built to track, manage, and analyze individual clients/service users. In fact, this is a base assumption of such systems, and the vast majority of the literature on the topic supports this assumption. The problem with tracking service users.. well, there’s a lot. Here’s a few: We need not […]
Whether self-help or helping profession, the act of improving the human and their well-being will become increasingly relegated to the efforts of algorithms. ChatGPT and its siblings are merely the latest and most visible actors in this game. The use of robots to provide physical help and company to the elderly, apps that surveil and […]
A presentation I gave at the Minnesota Social Services Association (MSSA) in March, 2014. This was the first iteration of an ongoing series of presentations and writing on the political economy and infrastructures of “data”, as well as the concept of #DataJustice. The goals of this session were to: (1) spark conversation, debate, and collaboration around the use […]
Musician and digital pedagogue Kris Shaffer has written multiple articles on using GitHub for scholars and academics. Check out his post Push, Pull, Fork: GitHub for Academics, or his presentation and video, or his article on using GitHub pages for open publishing. If you are interested in using GitHub as a tool, I suggest the […]
Okay, yes, the name is ridiculous. But I think there’s something in this idea. I want to mashup Participatory Action Research (PAR) and a Connectivist MOOC (cMOOC). I have a few topics in mind, but the organizing idea is actually most important to me at this point. The fact that it could be called a […]
When I created this blog, the original purpose was to engage the unfinished, draft fragments of my work. I had two primary purposes. The first was simply to challenge academic processes of production which recognize work as either in process (and therefore relatively secret) or as finished/published (and therefore complete, unchanging, and static). The second […]
I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about how I use my iPad for academic stuff, which leads to the broader question of how I integrate my academic and technological lives. I’ll try to answer that briefly here (though I’m still happy to talk with you about it). Cloud Storage — The Backbone of My […]
Rather than engagement, which evokes a sense that we are focusing on something static, completed, or defined, my experience in community work has centered around engaging – an ongoing and fluid process of engagement. In my experience, engaging involves a process of defying social expectations in ways that provide real space for connection. This can […]
I believe that community is constituted through stories. Four stories about my understanding community: Community – an attitude and orientation: Framed by cubicle walls and the front desk, the office I work in looks similar to any other at a university. What makes it a community is its residents’ attitudes. Every staff member is woven […]