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: UK must be ‘partner-of-choice’ in using AI to advance Kentucky
Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.
Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?
🔗 linkblog: The AWS Outage Was a Nightmare for College Students
Universities are too platform dependent, and even those platforms are too dependent on the next layer of the stack. What a mess.
🔗 linkblog: UK quietly dismantles gender-inclusive housing and ties to identity-based groups
Good reporting from the Kernel on a really disappointing set of changes at the university.
🔗 linkblog: He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Death Threats Are Driving Him Out of the US
Well, this is terrifying.
🔗 linkblog: What the Arrival of A.I. Video Generators Like Sora Means for Us
Strong Ellul vibes in this passage:
The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words.
Unclear, though, whether Ellul would be cool with increased skepticism of the image or angry at the technology causing it.
Jacques Ellul contre l'appli Sora
Un peu par hasard, j’ai fini récemment ma lecture de deux livres différents par Jacques Ellul : Théologie et technique ainsi que Humiliation of the Word (la traduction anglaise de La parole humiliée, car je vais devoir en écrire en anglais, et j’avoue en plus que mon français n’est pas toujours à la hauteur d’Ellul « en V.O. »). Ça fait plusieurs jours que j’ai envie d’écrire quelque chose sur la relation image-parole qu’il établit dans les pages de La parole humilié, et je compte toujours écrire ce post-là, mais en terminant Théologie et technique, j’ai été frappé par un passage qui ressemble beaucoup ce dont j’avais envie d’écrire dans l’autre livre.
🔗 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.