BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science
I am an transdisciplinary 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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- kudos:
I will never not be angry about the term STEAM, even when it’s being used in good faith by people I respect.
trapped between generative AI and student surveillance
- kudos:We’re getting to the end of the semester here at the University of Kentucky, which is my traditional time to get overly introspective about grading. There’s a lot on my mind at the end of this semester, but one thing that has popped into my head tonight and that I think will be quick to write about is a dilemma that I’m facing this semester, when I’ve had faced more suspicions about student use of generative AI than in any previous semester.
new publication: Canvas and student privacy awareness
- kudos:For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.
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This semester, I have learned that: 1) if I have building toys on my desk, I will turn them into a robot, and 2) if I have a robot on my desk, I will fiddle with it during Zoom meetings.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Faculty Member’s Self-Evaluation at the End of the Semester'
- kudos:McSweeney’s content on academia is always darkly hilarious, and this is no exception. link to “A Faculty Member’s Self-Evaluation at the End of the Semester”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research''
- kudos:It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining. link to “Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research’”
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I love having a co-author who can provide the theoretical framing to turn my weird data from a dark corner of the internet into an interesting argument.
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Glad I already have tenure or else I’d be a lot more worried about what my colleagues think of me holding my numb fingers under running water in the break room, still dressed in four layers of warm and reflective clothing and before I’ve had a chance to fix my helmet hair.
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Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.
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This morning, I’m realizing (and somewhat to my horror) that some of my reflection on whether to change up one of my classes essentially mirrors the ed psych debates about constructivism versus direct instruction that I found so intolerable in grad school.
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Back in 2020-2021, I made the decision to pivot from Twitter as a research site in case data ever became less available—and so I could focus more on right-wing online spaces. It was a good call but still hilariously mistaken at the same time.
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Finally subscribed to the excellent, non-creepy Tinylytics service, and now I’m getting distracted trying to figure out why a couple dozen people clicked a Facebook link to my CV earlier this month. I’m not on FB, and I don’t know who else would be posting my academic credentials there.
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I teach in a tech-focused program, and I think it’s reasonable to ask how we’re going to address generative AI in our curriculum, but I still resent the expectation that we must jump on this bandwagon simply because it’s there.
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My most recent research compliance completion certificate was clearly thrown together in a few lines of HTML. Not only does that feel especially phoned in, but it also makes it harder to save for my records, which is the only useful aspect of one of these certificates.
on the performativity of teaching
- kudos:Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.
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Teaching my project-focused WordPress class keeps me humble: I answer so many student questions with “I don’t know how to do that, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.”
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In our big content management systems class project this semester, students are knocking it out of the park in a way that makes me proud of them but also reassures me that maybe I understand this stuff despite no formal training after all.
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Sometimes I feel like I’m nagging my data science students when I tell them to use function x in R instead of almost-identical function y. Other times, I remember that function y has awful output that makes grading their work a pain, and I stop worrying.
- kudos:
Some switch has recently flipped in my brain so that I can hand out Bs, Cs, and worse without being anxious about it. I still have real concerns about grading as a concept, but I’ve stopped worrying about taking off points as though I’m the one being penalized.
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I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.
I think the conference hotel wi-fi is blocking competitors' websites?
- kudos:I’m currently at the 2024 conference for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, where the Mormon Social Science Association always organizes a number of panels. (I presented on a reactionary Mormon Twitter hashtag earlier today!). MSSA traditionally has a Saturday evening no-host dinner, and as long as I’ve attended (okay, only since 2021), we’ve relied on a foodie board member to find a place for us to eat. Rick isn’t here this year, and somehow that got turned into my becoming responsible for finding us a restaurant to meet, eat, and chat at.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos'
- kudos:Wild to read this so soon after finishing Character Limit, because I’m getting very similar vibes. link to “Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos”
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That feeling when data you’re coding is just so bizarre that you don’t know what to make of it. Online communities are a heck of a thing to study.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren'
- kudos:What a gross offer to receive. link to “Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren”
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You know you’re working in the right place when you casually bring up Squirrel Girl in the copy room, and someone replies “oh, yeah, she defeated Thanos.”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
- kudos:Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book! What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.
- kudos:
I usually do too much qualitative work for them to be useful, but .Rmd-based slides are a delight to work in.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin'
- kudos:I am slowly writing something related to open source governance this semester, so naturally this story keeps getting wilder to give me things to think about. link to “WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin”
bad faith uses of scientific 'rigor'
- kudos:I have conflicted feelings about productivity books, but even as I increasingly reject the emphasis on productivity, I do find that there are some gems in these books that are helpful to me as I try to keep my life organized across all of its dimensions. While rereading one of these books over the summer, I came across the following quote (which appears to be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In'
- kudos:This was a hell of a semester to decide to not dedicate a whole lecture to WordPress in my CMS class. link to “‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In”
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This week, I’ve encountered Ursula K. LeGuin’s anarchist vision of what a university could be as well as a number of reminders of how much things aren’t like that vision.
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Today, I demonstrated I know just enough ed psych to be a troublemaker in relevant meetings.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'More academic publishers are doing AI deals'
- kudos:I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear. link to “More academic publishers are doing AI deals”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed'
- kudos:I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow. link to “If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed”