Random Thoughts on Bodong Chen

Preserving Human Idiosyncrasy: Generative Learning in the Age of Generative AI

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A quiet shift is happening in how we speak and write, and most of us don’t even notice it. Words like “delve,” “underscore,” and “realm” are suddenly everywhere in academic writing and speech. “ You sound like ChatGPT,” before you started to notice.

For example, Kobak et al. (2024) analyzed over 14 million PubMed abstracts from 2010-2024 and found certain words showed abrupt frequency increases following the release of ChatGPT. A more recent analysis of 280,000 YouTube videos showed a similar shift to reflect the AI’s flavor (Yakura et al., 2025).

The Heart of Knowledge: What Chinese Language Evolution Tells Us About the AI Societal Transformation

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Consider the character for love: 愛 becomes 爱. In the traditional form, the heart (心) sits nestled within—love literally contains the heart. In the simplified version, that heart disappears. What remains is efficient, streamlined, easier to write and learn—helpful for boosting literacy rate. But something essential has been extracted from the very concept it represents.

Or take this example from linguist Li Chunyang’s book about the “Vernacular Movement” in the early 1900s: the classical Chinese phrase “何省长昨日去岳麓山扫其母之墓” (Governor He went to Yuelu Mountain yesterday to sweep his mother’s grave) becomes in vernacular “何省长昨日去岳麓山扫他妈的墓”—which can be read as Governor He going to “sweep his damn grave” due to the ambiguity of vernacular pronouns. What was once respectful and precise becomes potentially profane through linguistic simplification.

The Many Faces of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(Photo Credit: ChatGPT 4o)

AI is often the elephant in the room, surfacing in everything from high-stakes policymaking and academic research to casual conversations with my barber. It permeates so many aspects of life that it’s hard to escape its presence. Yet, because AI is so vast and varied in its applications, it remains a “hyper-object”—something so complex and multi-dimensional that it feels impossible to fully grasp. It impacts education, healthcare, law enforcement, entertainment, and more, each in dramatically different ways. AI is not just one thing; it’s many things, depending on where and how it is deployed.

Let's complicate the idea of infrastructure in conversations about GenAI

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First, a blog post

Rethinking AI Infrastructure: Beyond the Surface-Level Conversations

The current excitement around generative AI has sparked a wave of discussions about its potential to transform various aspects of our lives. Amidst the hype, there’s a growing tendency to refer to AI as “infrastructure.” While this comparison might seem fitting, it oversimplifies the complexity of AI systems and, more importantly, obscures the critical questions surrounding control, benefit, and impact. As we hurtle towards an AI-driven future, it’s essential to pause and reexamine our assumptions about AI infrastructure.

Infrastructuring sustainable innovations in education: A quick update

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am excited about the emerging body of work on infrastructuring in the Learning Sciences and beyond. In this post I am sharing a few quick updates on this topic.

New JLS paper on infrastructuring

A paper titled A framework for infrastructuring sustainable innovations in education is published online in the Journal of the Learning Sciences. This paper was inspired by many and has been in the works since 2022. I have received amazingly thoughtful feedback from anonymous JLS reviewers, as well as several colleagues I collaborate with on this topic.

Putting Generative AI in Classrooms

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It was more than one year ago when I mused on the topic of integrating AI in education. Now, it feels like that post was made a decade ago!

Yesterday, I got a chance to be on a panel on this topic, moderated by my great colleague Dr Susan Yoon and participated by Drs. James Lester and Ryan Baker, two known experts in the area of AI in Education. The panel was part of the launch event for the new McGraw Center for Educational Leadership at Penn GSE. We had a good conversation, followed by rich discussions with a room of educational leaders from the Penn community and school districts.

Integrating AI in Knowledge Building

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I had the good fortune of joining a panel organized by my colleageus Seng Chee Tan and⁩ Alwyn Lee at the 2022 Empowering Learners in AI conference. Several colleagues including Leanne Ma (University of Tornoto), Chew Lee Teo (National Institute of Education in Singapore), and Mutlu Cukurova (University College London) were also on the panel.

While my colleagues on the panel presented some really exciting new research, I used my time to ask a series of questions. My “slides” can be found on natto.dev.

Network Motifs as Codes

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a framework of applying socio-semantic network analysis to discourse data.

Socio-semantic networks are two-mode, dual-layer networks that are made of actors (e.g., learners), semantic entities (e.g., words), and their relations. Socio-semantic network analysis brings together the study of relations among actors (human networks), relations among semantic elements (semantic networks), and relations among these two orders of networks (Basov et al., 2020). Such a dual-layer network analysis approach is not only useful for examining the duality of socio-semantic relations, it also applies to other settings such as socio-ecological analysis that’s interested in the interactions between social structures and ecological resources (Bodin & Tengö, 2012).

What role should A.I. play in education?

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Listening to podcasts has become a new habit of mine during the pandemic, when cooking or doing dishes, on the way to pick up my toddler, or when my eyes need a break from the screen. Last week, I listened to an interesting episode of the EdSurge Podcast titled What Role Should AI Play in Education? A Venture Capitalist and an EdTech Critic Face Off. This episode features a discussion between Neil Selwyn and venture capitalist Ryan Craig. I thought the conversation was fantastic in many ways and encourage you to take a listen.

Knowledge Infrastructures: Initial Thoughts

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 12:31:47 -0500

Some initial thoughts on knowledge infrastructures and what it means for knowledge building.

Take note: new note-taking facility in Zotero

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 10:25:55 -0600

Over the years, I have been interested in scholarly workflows and, more recently, knowledge infrastructures – for both knowledge workers and young learners.

It has become a hobby for myself to reflect on my own workflows and explore tools that I could add to improve my scholarly practice. I was interested enough in this topic to give a talk on this topic (in Mandarin) last summer.

Annotation software as knowledge infrastructure

Annotation is, and has always been, an important part of knowledge processes.

Where is Knowledge Building Analytics Headed?

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 10:28:39 -0600

This year’s Knowledge Building Summer Institute (KBSI) is going to be special. First, it’s held near the end of November, for the first time in summer for folks from the Southern Hemisphere. Second, the conference is going to be virtual, following a hybrid synchronous–asynchronous model. Much work will be done in Knowledge Forum asynchronously before interactive sessions in Zoom on the conference days. Last but not least, this year’s conference will feature a global KB design experiment, Saving the Planet, Saving Lives, led by colleagues from Ontario and Singpapore. See conference program here for details.

Recognize rigor in learning analytics is multi-faceted

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 15:43:38 -0600

First of all, I’d like to thank our JLA editors-in-chief and SoLAR for organizing this webinar, and more events to come on the topic of rigor. As a community, learning analytics has grown substantially and to a great extent matured since it emerged around 10 years ago. Thanks to tremendous work by colleagues, we have an annual conference, a professional society, an established journal, and probably even more importantly, significant interest in our field from society. For our community to keep growing and evolving, it is time to come up with a set of self-regulating norms around rigor, not only to achieve broader impacts but also to ensure the impacts contribute to the betterment of learning and education.

Using Web Annotation for Web Annotation Research

Mon, 11 May 2020 21:13:01 -0500

In response to a special call for papers from Information and Learning Sciences, a team of us rallied and wrote a review article about Using Social Annotation in Online Classes ( see preprint). It was an interesting challenge given the short timeframe. But we eventually pulled this off as a team thanks to Xinran Zhu’s strong leadership and everyone’s dedication to this work.

In this blog post, I won’t talk about what we wrote. (You can read the preprint if you are interested.) Instead, I will talk about how we used social annotation to conduct this collaborative literature review about social annotation. My hope is to share our collaborative research practice based on social annotation to those who’re interested.

A Map of Collaboration Analytics

Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:05:26 -0500

In a chapter to be included in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Learning Analytis, Dr. Stephanie Teasley and I tried to write about Collaboration Analytics in a way that integrate ideas from CSCL, CSCW, learning sciences, and learning analytics. Below is a draft abstract of the chapter. In this post, I am sharing a key message from this chapter – a map of collaboration analytics – and invite you to provide me feedback and suggestions.

My Statement of Graduate Advising

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Following advice from a fantastic leadership coach from my university, I drafted a statement of advising philosophy in the past summer (yes the summer has already passed in MN).

Here it is!

Please feel free to leave suggestions via Hypothesis annotations.

The other project that I haven’t accomplished this summer is to create a Résumé of Failures. Hope I don’t need to wait for the next summer because that will be a big failure :).

A Call for Third-Order Change in Learning Analytics

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 12:28:46 -0500

[Disclaimer: It’s summer time, meaning time for some bold statements.]

“Any educational intervention, for the obvious, common-sense reasons mentioned above, can do harm… ignoring side effects is one of the main reasons for the perpetual wars and pendulum swings in education.” — Yong Zhao (2018)

Education often turns to other disciplines for inspirations. In medicine, precision medicine “takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person” when treating diseases. In business, business intelligence harnesses information and analytics to improve and optimize decisions and performance. All good stuff, right?

Automate for Whom?

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 13:57:08 -0500

I have been working at a large public R1 university long enough – 4 years – to witness steady changes with technology installed in public restrooms.

Below is a newly installed automatic paper towel dispenser in our office building. As someone who tends to use 1 paper towel, I was very frustrated by the design that doesn’t keep me – a user – in the loop and forces me to use that much paper.

#LAK19 Conference Report [Part 2]: Main Conference

Sat, 09 Mar 2019 21:45:15 -0600

(This is the second part of a report of the #LAK19 conference. See Part 1 here.)

It was the only beginning of many fun conversations when the Main Conference kicked off on Wednesday!

Our conference and program chairs delivered an exciting welcome message.

LAK is becoming larger,

Largest LAK ever & 60% attendees are 1st timers! - shared by conference chair @shoha99 #LAK19 pic.twitter.com/k7C02NGWol
— Bodong Chen (@bod0ng) March 6, 2019

but still selective – with a 33% acceptance rate for Full and Short papers.

#LAK19 Conference Report [Part 1]: Pre-Conference Workshops

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 21:45:15 -0600

I just came back from the 2019 Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference hosted by Arizona State University. This conference, surely one of my favorites, is inching to its 10th anniversary next year. I still remember when I was in the 2nd year of my PhD in 2010, Chris Teplovs told me about an exciting, upcoming gathering of 60~ people in Banff, Canada to discuss a thing called “learning analytics.”

After nearly a decade of development, we see clear progress this community has accomplished. The growth of the conference size itself, from 60 to 500+ attendees, while impressive, does not speak to the international sensation around this topic. As someone who first attended LAK as a doctoral student in 2014 and now work on a tenure-track position to grow this area at my institution, I can speak to my lived experiences of observing the rise of local interests in this topic (e.g., the “R1” university I’m part of, the state’s Department of Education), as well as an international passion for learning analytics when I travel to Singapore, Manila, and Beijing.

#OAWeek 2018: My Personal Journey

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 19:48:18 -0500

This week is the Open Access Week 2018. Yesterday we spent some time during a student advising meeting talking about the what and why of Open Access.

The Open Access Week website has provided a great list of ideas for researchers to get involved in Open Access. My own institution does have an Open Access policy. Our univeristy library system also provides support for Open Access including an Open Access Publishing Fund, a Digital Conservancy system, a Research Data Repository, etc. Not to mention my college is spearheading the Open Textbook Library.

An Ongoing Experiment: Public Scholarly Annotation

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Background stories

I value Open Scholarship and have been practicing it for years – both in terms of doing it and learning to do it. Stian Haklev, an OER and Open Access champion, introduced me to this idea. He built a wiki-based workflow system, named researchr, and convinced a few OISE friends, including Cresencia Fong and Alisa Acosta, to share our annotations publicly, in a well-organized manner. For us, the benefits of using researchr are obvious: the system scaffolds the scholarly process of reading and annotating articles, as well as summarizing and organizing our notes. Its openness adds another important piece that’s a bit murkier. What does it mean to share out annotations publicly – to academics who annotate, to authors of an annotated article, and to academia?

Open Textbooks and Open Educational Practices

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was included in an MN Daily story about open textbooks last week. It was actually a bit embarrassing as I thought a few other colleagues would ‘co-star’ with me in this story because there are exciting work on open textbooks and affordable content going on at UMN.

University of Minnesota professors use their free time to write free textbooks: https://t.co/iCgMCxC3qf @mndailynews @bod0ng @dernst @UMNews #UMNproud #CEHD Learn more: https://t.co/eydHtKE8Em @open_textbooks #oer @LTMediaLab @UMN_CI pic.twitter.com/zweg5n1FB5
— U of Minnesota CEHD (@UMN_CEHD) April 19, 2018

In this blog post, I’d like to share some personal thoughts that were not included in the news story.

Episodes from my trip in China

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I am not an ethnographer.

But there were a few episodes from my trip to/in China last month that caught my attention, or ‘gaze’. To put these episodes into perspective, my most recent trip to China took place in October 2016.

On the Escalator

As more subways are built underground, I encountered more of those super long escalators in mega cities. On one escalator in Shanghai, I heard its accompanying ‘voice reminder system’ saying:

Web Annotation of Research Articles in Learning Sciences

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As a member of the Outreach Advisory Board of the Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS), I was really glad to see the journal putting together a web annotation event during December 11-22, 2017. This activity is yet another move made by the editorial team to engage its readership on various social media venues.

Coming Soon: Web annotation of JLS articles in Hypothes.is.
The first article is a study by Akkerman and Bruining published in 2016 in Volume 25 (2).Read the full article at https://t.co/tGoOiQKLUR and visit https://t.co/2dYOBe15L8 for instructions for using @hypothes_is pic.twitter.com/z5oSHleIKB

The Forest

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

The universe is expanding, but at what price.
The Milky Way is a beauty, but at what price.
The Sun is shining, but at what price.
The Earth looks blue, but at what price.

All continents are moving, but at what price.
Civilizations boom, but at what price.
A wall defends ‘us’, but at what price.
Pyramids are built tall, but at what price.

AERA-NSF Workshop: Data Sharing and Research Transparency (Part II)

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Story continued, after Part I.

In the 2.5 days of the workshop, the group continued to deepen the discussion on Data Sharing to more concrete and practical items. In Part II of my personal reflection, I summarize key Data Sharing resources/initiatives to be aware of, possible action items, and some personal random thoughts on future directions.

The 3-day workshop on "Data Sharing and Research Transparency at the Article Publishing Stage" comes to a close today in D.C. pic.twitter.com/XpXIKp459g

AERA-NSF Workshop: Data Sharing and Research Transparency (Part I)

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It was an honor to be invited to attend the AERA-NSF Workshop on Data Sharing and Research Transparency at the Article Publishing Stage in Washington, D.C. during July 25‐27, 2017. I am attending as an early career scholar from the International Society of the Learning Sciences — my academic home.

It’s only a half-day into the workshop but I’m already amazed by so many great thoughts from a full room of journal editors, program officers from funding agencies, and early career peers. Below I’m sharing some general (not necessarily representative) themes of ideas discussed so far at the workshop.

Changing Value and Valuation in Education

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In his arguments against the Common Core, Prof. Yong Zhao, a known educational thinker, referred to his home village:

When I was growing up, the most valued talent was the ability to handle water buffalos used to plow the rice field, other than physical strengths to carry things such as newly harvested rice or sweet potatoes. I don’t know for sure how good a water buffalo handler she [Lady Gaga] could be, but I am quite sure she will not be able to run on bumpy muddy paths with 200 pounds of sweet potatoes dangling on each end of a bamboo pole.

Graphing the Reddit Place Sensation with Neo4j

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’ver never liked the April Fool’s Day, until this year when Reddit decided to launch a social experiment called Reddit Place.

The idea is simple. The whole world – or all Reddit users – were given a 999 x 999 blank canvas to draw on. Some simple rules apply:

Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one. ( source)

A biased introduction to Learning Analytics: Kicking-off #UMNLACoP

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today, we kicked off our Learning Analytics Community of Practice at UMN (#UMNLACoP)! Launching this CoP has been a joint effort among the Center for Educational Innovation, the College of Liberal Arts, the Libraries, and the College of Education and Human Development.

During today’s kick-off event, I spent 15 minutes presenting a quick introduction to the field of Learning Analytics. Below is an audio recording of my presentation.