BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science. My CV is available here, you can browse my research here, and my Google Scholar profile here
Supported by digital methods, my research focuses on online social spaces, community practices within these spaces, and the influence of the platforms where they are found. My research is interdisciplinary, exploring spaces associated with teaching and learning, Mormonism, the far right, or even combinations of these themes.
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I sometimes write in French! To only see the French content (which is also available below, alongside English content), please click on [fr] in the site header.
🔗 linkblog: Libraries Can’t Get Their Loaned Books Back Because of Trump’s Tariffs
This never occurred to me, but distupting interlibrary loan is a mortal sin.
🔗 linkblog: New tech bolsters UK's law enforcement presence, but one priority requires buy-in from campus residents
5,000 cameras?! What the heck?
🔗 linkblog: Research, curriculum and grading: new data sheds light on how professors are using AI
Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?
where I'm cited on Wikipedia
Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.
While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually.
October 6th webinar on 'dark side of affinity spaces' research
A few months ago, I announced a new publication from Dan Krutka and me based on our study of a teacher’s group on far-right social media. I’m happy to share that Renee Hobbs’s Media Education Lab has taken interest in the research, and that Dan and I will be giving a webinar for them next month.
The webinar is called “When Teachers Talk Politics Online: The Dark Side of Online Spaces for Teacher Professional Learning” and will take place on October 6th at 4pm EST.
404 Media podcast on generative AI and epistemology
I’m a big fan of the 404 Media tech news outlet, and I also really enjoy their podcast. I especially appreciated an episode that I listened to yesterday, which I’m embedding below as a YouTube video (as an aside, I simply do not understand how YouTube has become a major podcast-listening medium, so it pains me a bit to do this, but I’m once again trying to write something quickly before getting to real work, and YouTube embeds are relatively easy to do in Hugo, so that’s what I’m going with.
new publication: online space in a Community of Christ congregation
A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication.
🔗 linkblog: GOP megabill could cost UK HealthCare $100M annually in Medicaid reimbursement payments, but a leading university official has doubts
The effect on university budgets is among the least objectionable parts of the Big Beautiful Bill, and it’s still devastating.
🔗 linkblog: How Elon Musk Is Remaking Grok in His Image
Perhaps the best demonstration yet of why we need to talk about epistemology when we talk about generative AI. Gift link. It turns out that it takes an awful lot of intervention to get Grok to be “maximally truth-seeking” and “neutral.”
🔗 linkblog: Le Valais veut se doter d'une université prioritairement à distance
Je connaissais pas l’existence d’UniDistance Suisse, et maintenant j’ai envie d’en apprendre plus.
🔗 linkblog: Former faculty leader leaves University of Kentucky after bucking president’s governance plan • Kentucky Lantern
I don’t have the whole picture here, and I don’t like passing judgment without having the whole picture, but I don’t know if I like this.
religious institutions, religious community, and religion-as-platform
I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:
What does it mean to be part of a religious community?
une série de France Culture sur Jacques Ellul
Merci à Matoo, qui a vu combien j’écrivais sur Jacques Ellul sur ce site et qui m’a donc recommandé la petite série de cinq épisodes « Avoir raison… avec Jacques Ellul », qui est sorti il y a quelques semaines sur France Culture. J’ai écouté la première épisode ce matin en faisant de petites préparations pour mon premier jour d’enseignement pour cette année scolaire, et je le trouve déjà très utile.
🔗 linkblog: The NSF just cut K-12 STEM Education research going forward
Appreciate Josh’s eye for detail here.
defining platforms—and religion as platforms
I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:
Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.
🔗 linkblog: How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
What a wild, depressing story. I feel like I ought to use this to teach the concept of platforms to my students—it neatly sums up the intervention in normal human activity by someone who thinks they have a buck to make.
🔗 linkblog: An AI divide is growing in schools. This camp wants to level the playing field
Closing digital divides is good, and increasing diversity in tech fields as good, but I’ve been complaining for years about computer science ed that we stop at the nobility of those goals and don’t ask ourselves about the deeper motivations behind those initiatives. So it is with AI: A more diverse field more available to all is better than what we have, but we also have to ask whether AI education is actually a social good.
insisting that pencils are technology is not (necessarily) a wiseass move
Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument.
🔗 linkblog: What's behind the Trump administration's immigration memes?
There’s always been a dark side to internet culture, but I don’t think it was naïve in my earlier work to argue for recognizing its value. Yet, it’s important as a scholar to call out the ugliness that’s happening here.
why I think labor, not copyright, is the foundational problem with AI scrapers
This morning on Bluesky, I saw some posts about a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for their use of pirated, copyrighted materials in training their generative AI models. One of the sources of these copyrighted materials was the LibGen database, which I took a peek at nearly six months ago to confirm what I was already sure to be true: that my scientific writing was also collected as training material by companies like Anthropic or Meta.
🔗 linkblog: Google Scholar Is Doomed
Oof, hadn’t thought of this, but as much as I’d like to further reduce Google dependence, this would really hurt.
🔗 linkblog: The Trump Administration Is Using Memes to Turn Mass Deportation Into One Big Joke
Bookmarking this so I can point to it if anyone asks why I’ve shifted my research from ed tech to right-wing Mormonism.
🔗 linkblog: Phénomène mondial sur les réseaux sociaux, que sont les Italian Brainrots, ces personnages absurdes générés par IA ?
Ma carrière se divise entre une valorisation des pratiques numériques perçues comme n’ayant pas d’importance et une critique des technologies qui permettent ces pratiques. J’avoue que je me sens vraiment divisé pour cet exemple !
🔗 linkblog: New executive order puts all grants under political control
Here’s Jacques Ellul on state funding of research:
The state demands that anything scientific enter into the line of “normal” development, not only for the stake of the public interest but also because of its will to power. We have previously noted that this will to power has found in technique an extraordinary means of expression. The state quickly comes to demand that technique keep its promises and be an effective servant of state power.
🔗 linkblog: Nouveau modèle d'IA: ChatGPT-5: «C’est comme parler à un expert de niveau doctorat»
À mon avis, l’expertise « au niveau doctorat » est surtout lié au processus de connaître et non à la connaissance elle-même, et l’IA générative ne respecte pas du tout ce processus.
🔗 linkblog: Google would like you to study with Gemini instead of cheat with it
This seems performative to me, and this paragraph gets at why I think so:
AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers.