It’s academic promotion season, which means many junior scholars are earning tenure, a form of lifetime security of employment in academic. (Congratulations to my former Ph.D student Mike, I’m so proud of you!)

With this security comes immense privileges and power: a freedom to share ideas without the chilling threat of employment consequences, a new level of respect and responsibility that comes from being senior faculty, and participation in tenuring and promoting other people.

But tenure has never been under greater assault. Many U.S. states regularly seek to dismantle the system in public universities, many are refused it on political…

My first year of doctoral advising in 2008 wasn’t exactly a triumph. I’d just moved across the country. I’d just separated from my wife and was in the middle of a divorce, deep in arguments about child support and joint custody. I was broke after 6 years on a doctoral student stipend and didn’t get paid for a long four month summer. I was incredibly alone, with no friends or support system. I had recently tried to share my gender dysphoria with my therapist and ex, and both responded hostility, so I was putting immense effort into locking away my…

I am, by my nature, a passive person. I’ve always been happy to sit back and let someone else decide, especially when decisions are complicated, socially fraught, or consequential. There’s really nothing about me that seeks to carry that responsibility any further than I have to. It’s heavy, and exhausting, and often thankless.

And yet, somehow in life, I keep finding myself with power. I remember back in my first year of college, for example, joining a meeting of the student chapter of the ACM, the Computer Science club on my campus. There were a few seniors and a few…

There are a lot of computing education conferences—far more than I’m used to in other academic fields. There’s the (big) SIGCSE Technical Symposium, the (rigorous) International Computing Education Research conference, the (European) Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), the (Finnish) Koli Calling, the (originally German) Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, the Australasian Computing Education Conference, the (Asian) CompEd, the (North American) CSTA Conference, and I’m sure many others I’ve forgotten. …

Content warning: this reflection discusses binge drinking and suicidal ideation. If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or Trans Lifeline for support. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

I’m quite an introverted person. I get along fine in social settings and can manage fine with chit chat. I can meet new people and usually build a connection without much social anxiety. I know some tricks for making people feel welcome. But all of these things are effortful and exhausting. My natural preferred state is quiet; my preferred form for…

Eighteen years ago, I remember sitting on a couch in front of a whiteboard arguing about the boundaries of human-computer interaction (HCI) research with two of fellow Ph.D. students. We were all in our first year at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and the question felt urgent: this is what we were getting our PhDs in. How could we not know what was and wasn’t HCI? We argued about the nature of interaction, the essential nature of humanity as tool builders, the duality and friction of human cognition and computation. I knew I was in the right place.

A…

As global vaccination efforts begin to offer glimpses of a return to social spaces, talk of hybrid abounds. I shared some ideas about hybrid conferences recently, Google’s writing about their hybrid work plans, and I’ve been talking endlessly with colleagues about the intrinsically hybrid nature of pre-pandemic academic work, which has long stretched across classrooms, offices, labs, coffee shops, airports, and conferences.

But what about hybrid teaching? In some ways, since the early embrace of the internet by universities in the 1990’s, higher education has always been hybrid in some form. Students submitted assignments online; faculty posted syllabi online; faculty…

Last month, I ranted about how much I hate Zoom for teaching. It’s missing all of the key things necessary for great synchronous teaching—student gaze to convey attention, indicators of student confusion, conversation, social grouping, and freedom to configure a classroom for learning—while adding new problems, like latency and disembodiment. Many of these things are more generally problems of video chat, but some are also specific to Zoom itself and it’s sterile, featureless design.

When I posted my rant, Arvind Satyanarayan reminded me of Ohyay, and pointed me to Kayvon Fatahalian’s blog post about using it for teaching. I’d heard…