Five years ago, a few of us who had (had) the same PhD advisor started a group chat on Keybase and added that advisor. It’s been a source of music recommendations, professional advice, sympathy during rough personal moments, and much more. It’s wholesome, helpful, and all around great.

Un jour pendant mon séjour en France, un ami (aussi américain) m’envoie acheter des flocons d’avoine. Mais lui, il ne se souvient pas de la phrase complète, et moi, j’entends mal ce qu’il dit. C’est donc comme ça que j’arrive chez Casino demander tout bêtement « des flacons de quelque chose »

I would never visit a casino or place a bet, but I’m putting off the last mow of the season until tomorrow morning, when it might rain and get all the leaves wet, so clearly I’m still a gambler.

La webradio joue un rôle important dans mes efforts de garder un lien avec le monde francophone depuis le Kentucky. Je suis donc content d’avoir appris ce matin comment trouver un flux caché d’une webradio—comme ça, je peux l’ajouter à une appli au lieu de visiter le site web.

Kiddo picked up a new library card over the weekend (lots of Kentucky counties do reciprocity agreements, so we collect them), and she’s incensed that there’s a 25-book limit at this system (we regularly check out 50 books each from two different counties).

I generally like my local paper, but I’m annoyed by all of the feel-good “someone won big at the lottery!” stories they publish. Lotteries are regressive taxes, and celebrating winners helps conceal that fact.

Maybe not clicking with Utah is because so many of my interactions with Utah and Utahns involved being defensive about or emphasizing my being from somewhere else. Even in my Mormonism, I was a Kentucky Mormon, and I filtered a lot through that perspective.

Visiting Utah for work this weekend has me thinking about how I’ve never really felt like I understand this state—and that despite attending college here and all four of my grandparents being born here. I feel like it should be more familiar to me than it is.

I was dreaming that some STEM-type was criticizing Bachelor of Arts degrees as “BS” and dream-me flew into a rage ready to defend the humanities until I woke up and realized that his joke didn’t even work.

Used some Conet Project numbers stations recordings as white noise to help me fall asleep last night, so can’t wait to see what kind of paranoia my subconscious injects into the day.

I am enjoying Dimension 20 now that I’m finally trying it out, but it’s also reminding me how much Dungeons and Dragons straight up expects you to solve problems with violence, and that’s been bothering me a lot more than it used to.

Is it too much to ask to put virtual conference attendees on a different listserv? One that doesn’t include the pleas to join the in-person social events taking place while I’m trying to clean my kitchen and put kiddo to bed?

Thanks to a combination of personal hubris and inconvenient coincidences, this week involves 4 presentations at 2 conferences, catching up on 3 weeks of grading, and writing P&T letters for 4 colleagues. Hooray for free wifi on my flights.

Je crois comprendre assez bien le français, mais pendant une demi-seconde ce matin, j’ai oublié que “carrefour” peut signifier autre chose qu’un supermarché.

My Mormon Studies research will probably never get the citations that my edtech work has, but it’s neat how much more layperson and media interest it generates. That said, I hope late-night weekend presentations stay rare because I’m very tired this morning.

It’s one of those Saturdays where I step out of the shower, and kiddo has left me a secret message in hieroglyphics to decipher.

I’m becoming more and more skeptical of “improve teaching and learning” as a motivation for education (and especially edtech) research—it’s a noble goal, but it distracts us from so many other important questions.

Ma nièce est à Londres, et elle est toute contente de nous envoyer des photos de la fameuse Voie 9 3/4 de Harry Potter. Pour moi, il serait déjà magique d’avoir une vraie présence ferroviaire chez moi—la gare de King’s Cross m’est plus intéressante que Poudlard.

When my sister was in town last week, kiddo insisted on drawing her a surprisingly accurate diagram of how data gets transferred over the internet, so I brought it into the office for the next time I have to teach it.

Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.

You know, I think the combination of research training in ed tech and currently teaching ICT classes makes me particularly critical of the “digital native” idea.

Just had a student explain that such-and-such a file wasn’t in a specific folder, it was just on their computer, in case anyone was wondering how digital native rhetoric is holding up. Need to bookmark that 2021 article from The Verge.

I think academia undervalues teaching and that teaching-focused faculty deserve more status, recognition, and compensation. Yet, I’m still suspicious of the new BYU-Idaho president’s comments on the need for “a faculty free of the obligations of research.”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing reminds me as much of teaching French as does teaching programming. It takes a lot of the same metacognition to learn both, and it’s really hard to teach that metacognition.

Une fois en enseignant le FLE, une étudiante a écrit la phrase « Je me suis blessée, mais j’étais d’accord ». Elle savait que « d’accord » voulait dire « okay », et en anglais « okay » peut signifier aussi « pas mal » ou « assez bien », et elle a donc fait un lien de trop.