BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science
I am an interdisciplinary digital methods researcher studying meaning-making practices on online platforms. Most of my work has dealt with informal learning through social media, but I'm increasingly dabbling in online Mormonism, the online far right, and various combinations of the three.
My CV is available here.
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🔗 linkblog: Teachers Are Not OK
Bookmarked this a while ago and am finally reading it. So infuriating.
🔗 linkblog: The Internet of Consent - Anil Dash
Lots of good observations in here, and I need to think through the implications for digital methods research.
🔗 linkblog: Funding Cuts Are a ‘Gut Punch’ for STEM Education Researchers
What’s happening at the NSF is a tragedy, and I’m upset about all of these cuts. That said, I’ve long been skeptical about how the NSF has been used to promote STEM education at the expense of other worthy (but less economically productive) causes in schools. If Trump’s petty—and often cruel—cuts are a warning sign about how government can distort research priorities, there’s a deeper issue lurking in the background that we also need to wrestle with.
🔗 linkblog: Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online
I confess that I would have found this interesting in an earlier part of my career. Now, though, I’m reminded that I built that career on a methodological approach that’s uncomfortable close to surveillance, and I don’t love that.
🔗 linkblog: Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will exist ‘because you still need childcare’
I hate everything in this article.
🔗 linkblog: How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future
There are some critical perspectives in this piece, but certainly not enough in my book. [gift link]
🔗 linkblog: American Schools Were Deeply Unprepared for ChatGPT, Public Records Show
Fascinating piece that underscores how often cheerleading voices are the only ones valued in edtech—and also how much education has been forced to respond to big tech companies simply releasing their products into the world wirhout input from those it will effect.
new publication: Jacques Ellul and educational technology
I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.
With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education!
🔗 linkblog: Oklahoma education standards say students must identify 2020 election 'discrepancies'
Ryan Walters continues to be shameful.
🔗 linkblog: UK launching social media campaign spotlighting NIH-funded research
NIH funding is an important part of my employer’s budget, so I think this kind of advocacy is important. However, it rubs me the wrong way that we’re speaking up publicly about potential funding cuts and being largely silent and “well, gotta follow the law” when our marginalized students are being targeted.
new publication: documenting a teacher group on far-right social media
I’m pleased to be able to finally share the publication in the British Journal of Educational Technology of an article that Dan Krutka and I have been working on for some time, which documents activity in a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform (which we intentionally don’t identify within the paper). Here’s a link to a full-text, read-only version of the article, and here’s the abstract as a preview:
🔗 linkblog: Reddit Issuing 'Formal Legal Demands' Against Researchers Who Conducted Secret AI Experiment on Users
WAIT. They prompt engineered the AI tool to disregard informed consent and ethical concerns?
🔗 linkblog: Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users
I’ve been waiting for 404 (or someone else) to report on this so that I could rage post it (and assign it in future classes). What a terrible breach of research ethics.
🔗 linkblog: Who Ordered That? On AI, Education, and the Illusion of Necessity | Punya Mishra's Web
I would be more critical of generative AI than Punya, but this is a solid, important argument.
🔗 linkblog: ICT class gives thumbs up to new emoji submission to Unicode
This project is one of my favorite things to come out of the program I teach in, and I’m glad Meghan’s work is getting recognition!
🔗 linkblog: They’re putting A1 in the classrooms.
This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.
🔗 linkblog: Trump administration’s attack on university research accelerates
I don’t personally need research funding, but I work in an academic ecosystem that’s highly dependent on it. Things aren’t looking good.
🔗 linkblog: OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting over college students with free AI
I was already planning to voice skepticism about Apple partnerships with universities in a manuscript I’m writing, but now I’ve got this to cite as well.
🔗 linkblog: Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds
Masnick’s writing has never struck me as inflammatory or rushed. If he’s using this language, we should all be worried.
🔗 linkblog: Beshear vetoes bill Kentucky professors say erodes academic tenure at public universities • Kentucky Lantern
This is unlikely to make a difference, but I’m grateful anyway.
🔗 linkblog: How the Ph.D. Project, and 45 colleges, became a target of the Trump administration
This is what my employer cut ties with.
📚 bookblog: The Technological Society (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
This is an ambitious book—probably overambitious, and I don’t agree with all of the claims, especially with 60-70 years for Ellul’s ideas to marinate in continued technological development. Yet, his ideas are valuable and prescient—I don’t buy his claims as an ontological argument, but I think they make for a compelling theoretical framework for making sense of lots of what’s happening today.
Jacques Ellul and the value of research
Last month, I wrote on both my reading up on Jacques Ellul and on concerns about how we understand the purpose and value of research. I’m continuing to read—or, rather, listen to—Ellul’s The Technological Society, and I was interested to find a passage that brought together these two ideas. Here’s Ellul, writing in the mid-twentieth century:
We have already examined the requirement of immediate applicability; here we meet it again on the state level.
thoughts on academic labor, digital labor, intellectual property, and generative AI
Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.