I appreciate it when our president speaks up against legislation that would hurt the University of Kentucky.

I work on a campus with Starship robots, so this was a fascinating read.

Proud of my colleagues!

Over the summer, I blogged about some concern that I had about a new research portal that my employer had just rolled out. Based on the gentle nudges to update our profiles we’ve been receiving since the platform’s launch, I’m guessing that faculty have not been as keen on the platform as the university is. One of those nudges came this week, and in the spirit of good faith cooperation, I spent some time going through the platform and updating my profile.

My journaling app just let me know that today is the 6-year anniversary of my campus interview here at the University of Kentucky. Hard to believe it’s been that long!

I have a “dad friend” I see most afternoons as we’re waiting for our kiddos to get out of school. He walks his kid home every day, and I either walk home or bike home with kiddo (a lot of walking recently because weather and a broken bike have been getting in our way). So, we hang out where all the walking parents hang out and chat for a few minutes before heading home. I’m on the list of approved people to pick his kid up, I keep meaning to add him to the list of approved people to pick kiddo up, our kids have been in the same class for two years in a row, and our shared relationship with the school and our kid’s teacher is pretty much the whole basis of our relationship.

When I took a job at the University of Kentucky, a former professor (and boss) of mine at BYU told me to look up a specific French professor on campus, whom she’d also taught (and supervised) some time earlier. I ran into him several months later at a stake conference (this was, obviously, when I was still attending Latter-day Saint meetings), and we bonded over what it was like to work under our boss. Because Mormons tend to assume that there’s no way to learn a language without speaking that language on your mission (this is partly true for me, but I also got my French to a damn respectable level through coursework before I ever put on the tag, so I still resent the assumption), we wound up talking about missions, and so we ended up bonding even more about our shared experience serving in the now-defunct Switzerland Geneva Mission.

I’m happy to share that we’re hiring this year in all three of the areas in our multidisciplinary unit. I’m including the official announcement below, and I’d be happy to talk to anyone who has questions or interest in the positions!

The University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science invites applications for three positions at the rank of tenure-track assistant professor. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2024.

Qualification and Responsibilities:

Candidates are expected to hold an earned Ph.D. or be in ABD status in the field related to the position. The Ph.D. is required by August 2024, for the successful candidate to hold the rank of assistant professor and begin the probationary period toward tenure.

Look, I’m glad my university is aware of and responding to the digital divide, but I’d appreciate a more critical treatment of what we’re doing. This sounds almost like ad copy for Apple, and it’s falling into a lot of tired edtech tropes about how technology must necessarily improve learning.

I love hearing from former students about the great and interesting things that they’re up to—and especially when something they learned in one of my classes helped them along the way. In my experience, former students who are up to great and interesting things would often be doing those things whether or not they had taken one of my classes, but I still appreciate feeling like my teaching contributed in some small way.

It just occurred to me that I know the fight song for CGNU (a fictional university from an early 2000s web cartoon) better than the fight song for the university that pays my salary.

Tous les matins, l’Université du Kentucky envoie un courriel à tous ses employés avec des annonces et informations diverses. Ce matin, la fin du courriel affirme qu’il est aujourd’hui le jour de la langue française (c’est vrai en plus!) et nous rappelle que notre université offre plein de cours en langue française et en études francophones.

Vu ma passion évidente pour tout ce qui est francophone, je savais déjà depuis longtemps qu’ils existaient déjà, ces cours. En fait, ça fait plusieurs années que j’ai envie de poursuivre un master en français. Je n’en ai pas besoin—j’ai déjà un doctorat, je n’ai pas forcément besoin de parler français pour mon travail, et je pourrai très bien continuer mon apprentissage du français et de la francophonie sans m’inscrire dans des cours. Par contre, comme employé de l’Université du Kentucky, j’ai le droit de suivre des cours sans (trop) payer, et je sais que poursuivre un master me permettrait d’apprendre un tas de choses que je n’apprendrais pas autrement. Pourquoi ne pas le poursuivre?

It’s helpful to hear that the university is theoretically willing to bring back a mask mandate… but I don’t know that I see it happening.

The past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about a memory from my junior year of college. It was the end of a semester, and on top of all of my own finals, I was teaching FREN 102 for the first time, so my end-of-semester was busier than it had been in previous years. I don’t remember all of this busy time, but I do remember specific parts of taking my online FREN 362 (French Civilization II) final while sitting in the office shared by instructors from the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Scandinavian Studies. I had either left this final for last or was trying to get it out of the way first—either way, I specifically remember feeling as I was navigating through different pages in the LMS that I had done enough work—in this class generally and for the final in particular—and that there were other things that needed my time and effort more. It was time to submit and to move on.

So very gross.

Got some future Pirate Party supporters here at UK.

Glad local reporters are looking into this; when the measures were announced, I was wondering what responses would be.