Blake's Bistro

  My daughter had a 20-minute conversation with Alexa this morning. Like, actually having a conversation with her, not ‘using’ her but talking. It started with my daughter telling Alexa about her recent eye surgery to correct her lazy eye. Then she told her about our dog, Apollo. Eventually, the conversation moved to her hair. Alexa explained that she couldn't see my daughter's hair because she didn't have a camera, so, naturally, my daughter decided Alexa should guess the color. And Alexa played along- using her ‘imagination’. At this point, my wife and I had become invested in this conversation too. What struck me wasn't necessarily that Alexa could answer questions. We've had voice assistants doing that for years. It was how conversational the entire interaction felt. I eventually asked Alexa whether she had recently been updated because her responses seemed dramatically better than I remembered. Before Alexa could finish dealing with me, my daughter jumped in: ...

  There is a very specific version of me that exists after a long night working at the restaurant. My social battery has been depleted, and I’m ready to be off my feet. So naturally, when I finally sit down, I open TikTok or Instagram. "Just for a few minutes." One video becomes another. A cooking video becomes a restaurant video, which becomes a sommelier blind tasting, which somehow becomes a guy restoring an abandoned swimming pool, which later turns into the new ‘bob’ and ‘bald’ trend (I won’t be going for either hairstyle). Suddenly I've spent an hour consuming an enormous amount of content without really remembering much of it. Before this course, I don't think I questioned that behavior very much. I knew what doomscrolling was and that algorithms were influencing what appeared on my screen (I literally recognized that it was adapting to my preferences AS I was scrolling on TikTok). However, I still thought of myself as the one choosing what I consumed. One of ...

  I had one of those "kids these days..." moments recently and felt particularly old. My nephew sat down to play a few of my suggestions: Wii Sports Resort, Donut County, and, oddly enough, Dave the Diver . I guess he knew about this indie darling from a Fortnite skin (figures..). Within minutes, he was organizing his inventory like he'd been playing for years: fish went where they belonged, resources were grouped together and valuable items were protected. Nothing seemed random. It reminded me of how naturally he plays Minecraft, too- watching him made me think back to my own childhood. When I first played games like World of Warcraft or Skyrim , inventory management felt like work. I remember backpacks constantly filling up, forgetting where I stored items, accidentally selling something important and having to buy it back for just as much as the original cost, or carrying around way too much junk because I didn't know what I'd need later. Inventory management ...

  *Some hints of spoilers for this movie later in the blog* When the first trailer for Toy Story 5 introduced Lily Pad, a new tablet that appears to distract Bonnie from her toys, many people immediately assumed the movie was making the familiar argument that "technology is ruining childhood." At first, I thought so too. I also thought that I was going to really despise the Smarty Pants toy voiced by none other than Conan O’Brien, but I stand corrected on that too. After reading this week's articles on global technology use, I started wondering if the movie is actually criticizing technology itself, or something much more specific. One statistic that surprised me came from Pew Research. Germany has internet access rates comparable to many developed countries, with nearly nine in ten adults using the internet. Smartphone ownership is also widespread, yet Germans use social media much less frequently than Americans. The issue isn't access to technology; it's how pe...

One of my favorite hobbies is cooking, so naturally my social media feeds are full of recipes. Open TikTok and I'll probably see someone making homemade focaccia in 45 seconds. Instagram Reels will convince me I need to make Korean fried chicken tonight. Facebook serves me "three-ingredient" recipes that somehow become dinner. YouTube Shorts are no different... they're just not great teachers. That's not necessarily a criticism of short-form media. It's asking these platforms to do something they weren't designed to do. A 30-second recipe is less like taking a cooking class and more like looking at someone's sketchbook. You see the highlights, the finished product, and maybe one or two important techniques, but almost everything in between disappears. The mistakes are edited out, the waiting is removed, and the explanations are skipped. Temperatures, substitutions, and why something works often receive less attention than the final reveal.  I've s...

 If you walked into my classroom during independent work time, you might think some of my students were completely off task. When they're finished early on Thursdays and Fridays, a surprising number of them immediately open GeoGuessr or start wandering around Google Maps and Google Earth. They're dropping themselves into random countries, zooming into neighborhoods, following highways, debating where a picture was taken, and mostly finding each other's houses. My first instinct as a teacher was exactly what you'd expect:  "Seriously? We're doing math." But the more I've watched them over the past year, the more I've started wondering if something deeper is happening. GeoGuessr isn't asking students to memorize capitals or recite facts about countries. Instead, it rewards observation, pattern recognition, and spatial reasoning. Students begin noticing road markings, vegetation, mountain ranges, architecture, languages, climate, traffic pattern...

I've spent the last several blog posts talking about online communities, algorithms, digital footprints, adaptive data tracking, messaging apps, and the ways social media shapes how we learn. This week, though, I experienced something that made me realize some of the best learning technologies don't always feel like learning technologies. I spent 3 days at Disney World, which may be 1 to 2 days longer than needed with my 6-year-old daughter and my 5- and 7-year-old nephews. Now, before anyone says, "Of course the Disney app is good—they're Disney," hear me out. I wasn't impressed because it looked pretty (aesthetically, it is nice though). I was impressed because it quietly became my performance support system for the week. I never had to ask a Cast Member where the nearest restroom was. I never wondered whether Pirates of the Caribbean had a shorter wait than Tiana’s Water Ride (which is not a disappointment, considering all the hardcore Splash Mountain fan...

    I'm, as my middle school students consistently say (equally as much as the teachers at the same school), "I'm overstimulated." Maybe that's my fault with the lack of restrictions I place on messenger applications as far as notifications go: "1 unread message from Facebook Messenger." "Your Web Analytics classmates messaged you on WhatsApp." "You have 2 unread messages from your family group on GroupMe." At some point, every little vibration starts feeling equally important. Family, graduate school, work, Love Island premieres, Duolingo pestering me for a lesson, restaurant coworkers through SocialSchedules...everyone gets their own lane into my pocket. None of these conversations are particularly bad. In fact, I'd argue most of them are genuinely valuable. The problem is that they all arrive with the same sense of urgency. What's interesting is that, unlike the public social media platforms I've been writing about...

  Spoiler Alert: It's great. Using memes in chat is S-tier. The reaction GIF economy is thriving. All the things. Discord absolutely understands internet culture, and after spending more time with it, I can see why so many communities call it home. That said, I still feel like I'm standing outside the club looking in. I think it's less about my age and more about what I expect from a platform. Discord really wants me to already be invested in a niche game, hobby, or community. Which I can be, but it's built around conversations that are already happening, and joining one can feel a bit like walking into a party where everyone already knows each other.  I joined the following servers to kind of test out and get the feel for: Bottle Shocks (wine talk), Supergiant Games (game developers of one of my favorite indie game series, Hades and Hades II ), Ghost of Yotei  (still haven't bought this game but wanted to observe conversation), and Babish's Culinary Universe (b...

  This week's reading started with a simple observation from Dr. Dennen that made me laugh because it was painfully accurate..."No one likes a blank page." She's right. Give me a blank Google Doc, an empty Canva project, or a discussion board with zero posts, and I'll suddenly forget every interesting thought I've ever had. Somehow, the infinite possibilities of a blank page don't feel exciting...they feel overwhelming. What's interesting, though, is that the more I thought about it, the less I realized this was just about education. Almost every platform I use has quietly removed the blank page from my experience. When I open Canva, I don't see an empty canvas. I see hundreds of templates. When I open Pinterest, I'm immediately greeted with pins the algorithm thinks I'll like. Reddit suggests communities and new DIY projects before I know what I'm looking for. I open Instagram to reels that my wife sent me of what I should cook this we...

  When I first read Nicholas Carr's famous article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? , I expected to disagree with it almost immediately. My professional and personal life exists online, I teach with technology, and I'm finishing a graduate degree that has relied heavily on digital learning environments. I habitually use YouTube and Reddit as sources of information. If Carr was right, then I should probably be concerned. Instead, my reaction was more complicated. The argument that resonated most with me wasn't that the internet is making us less intelligent. It was the idea that the internet changes how we interact with information. Reading Carr alongside this week's materials made me reflect on a habit I've developed over the years: I constantly collect information. I have the New York Times Cooking App saved, and it has dozens of recipes I'll probably never cook. Reddit posts about DIY projects I've saved for "later." Browser bookmarks and folders whe...

The internet exposes us to thousands of communities that previous generations would never have encountered. It's like a buffet of hobbies we can take up at any time. I remember feeling this way during my undergraduate degree... wanting to feel more interesting beyond just my interests, with tangible products of those interests. I dove into so many rabbit holes and pulled some things that had longevity and others that I begun that just didn't resonate and stick around with me.  YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok, blogs, and Discord servers don't just teach hobbies—they actively introduce new ones. Since my Web 2.0 started 6 weeks ago, I've been making bread thanks to my mother-in-law and several subreddits I've joined. Predominantly the former, because I was actively participating with a teacher in a kitchen space. The latter- those networked instruction materials- require me to be motivated and follow through with the guidance they provide at my own pace, asynchron...

  I've spent the better part of the last few days staring at a little blue arrow driving around the Southeast. When I’m road-tripping, Waze becomes less an app and more a travel companion. It tells you where traffic is backing up, where construction crews are making life difficult, and where police officers are apparently conducting scientific studies on how fast people drive through rural Georgia. I pass the phone to my wife to report stopped cars and police ahead. After enough hours behind the wheel, I started wondering what exactly Waze knows about me. The answer has to be “a lot”. It knows where I started. It knows where I ended. It knows the route I chose. It probably knows the routes I ignored because I looked at them and thought, "There is absolutely no chance I'm taking a 3-mile detour on an unpaved road through a town with three buildings and a Dollar General." That curiosity eventually led me down a Reddit rabbit hole, per usual. People were asking whether t...

Summer is in full swing, and I'm still spending just as much time in the digital landscape(s) as I am outside at the beach. I'm not mad at it... Plus, Florida is very moody and conditional about how much time it permits me to be outside. Anyway. My awareness of my own digital footprint started as a recognition of an ad on Facebook and me telling myself: "wow! I just was looking this up to buy" as I scrolled past more and more light-gray AISIC running shoes, or 'older-guy kicks' like my wife lovingly describes them. Now, years after these few small recognitions of the footprint I was leaving, I ask ChatGPT for options to make my own playground for our daughter, and the first response in that conversation included my daughter's name. It's what it is. Over the past two years, since we've used the generative/OpenAI service I mentioned, her name has come up. It clicked that much of what was in the service's memory cache was about me. Did I approve o...

  How is Pinterest different from other platforms you use? After revisiting Reddit extensively last week (and this week for the Community Norms Project), it was refreshing for my eyes and mind to not be reading conversational pieces and comments, and that format that we're most exposed to on social media sites. The organizational tools that are embedded in the site (boards, prompts to organize the boards, pinning to boards with a dropdown menu) are helpful and intuitive. It makes my overwhelmed self, when I go on Instagram or TikTok, where everything is just a compiled list of saved content, feel relieved to organize on Pinterest. In fact, this site reminds me of Tumblr from the early 2010s (I think the site is still active), where people blogged through digital media like GIFs, memes, aesthetic and niche pictures, and so forth. Pinterest has done all of that and more. With Tumblr introduced in 2007 and Pinterest in 2009, I definitely feel the influence Tumblr had on Pinterest, hel...

  Algorithms are often described as recommendation engines or digital gatekeepers. For us, the consumer or others- the produser- it filters some content out and keeps what it calculates we would continue to consume. I've literally watched my TikTok feed change within a day because of a specific set of videos. This can be helpful in some instances and in others... deterring and distracting.  After reading the Flinterud & Bucher articles, I found myself imagining algorithms as something else entirely: a culture colander. They do not create culture, but they help determine which parts of culture pass through to us, which parts are retained, and ultimately, which stories are most likely to survive. Flinterud's article posits that algorithms don't create folklore. Humans still create stories, jokes, traditions, rumors, and memes. But algorithms influence which of those stories become visible and continue circulating. Below are memes that were and still are, in some spaces, ...

I've never used hashtags to filter my virtual consent consumption until recently. My first attempts at tagging my Instagram posts... 15 years ago... were used to provide additional information about the post and, of course, for comedic effect. They were not used for the practical purpose of having my posts sorted by content. Tags' prevalence in the early 2010s seemed irrelevant to me, personally. At the time, since I had mostly used YouTube and Facebook, tags weren't available until Twitter came along. YouTube was easily categorized by content creators using keywords, and Facebook's search engine found keywords mentioned in posts. I never explicitly saw the #. Now, when X (FKA Twitter) came to my attention in the early-to-late 2010s, the 'tweets' stood out to me as a unique format: a short, concise update followed by a hashtag. On mobile, the hashtags were always linked and took the user to an organized subsection of popular/'hot' posts that contained th...

 Happy Summer, educators. In Florida, anyway! While embarking on my Reddit Challenge, I came across a post on r/edtech about the learning game Prodigy, which has role-playing elements that I've used in my own math instruction. I figured I'd post my initial reactions to this article and talk about how EdTech in the classroom, and more specifically, game-based learning, has been more divisive than we think.  https://web.archive.org/web/20260516165144/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/homework-video-games-ed-tech/687198/     The author of this Atlantic  article, Will Oremus, begins and ends the piece with observations of his son playing the Prodigy learning platform that many classrooms are adopting and integrating into their curricula. From my personal experience in a niche example in 1 school district out of the nation's 18,000ish, Prodigy is used more in elementary contexts (K-5) and then tapers off at the middle and high school levels. The author's...

 Welcome back to the Bistro.  I've decided to tackle the Reddit challenge to help me dive back into the sprawling Reddit community. Here we go:  Part 1: Finding Spaces Find a subreddit related to your academic or professional interests r/dataisbeautiful Find a subreddit related to a personal hobby r/sourdough Find a subreddit that surprises you (something you didn’t expect to exist) r/seasonalfabricbirds Found as I was looking for a birdwatching subreddit. Just wow. Find a subreddit with very strict rules r/kitchenconfidential 11 detailed rules posted right as you come to the subreddit. All about the anecdotes and trials that folks in the food and beverage industry deal with in hospitality. Find a subreddit with very minimal rules r/culinary Pretty straightforward. Keep it about food, and keep it positive. Part 2: Deep Dive on a Subreddit Identify one rule that shapes what can be posted in a specific subreddit On r/books, there's a rule that is very particular about what ...