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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I’ve been skeptical of writing manuscripts in Markdown or LaTeX for ages, but today I found myself asking where the “code editor” was in Word, so maybe it’s time to give it a try.
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Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
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Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.
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I’m currently on a search committee for the new director of our School of Information Science, and it’s kind of neat that academics get to hire their own bosses. My students’ minds were blown yesterday when I explaned this.
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There was a brief period of publisher generosity early in COVID times where I snagged so many PDFs of books my uni library usually doesn’t have access to. Still making my way through them.
new report on Google Classroom and ClassDojo
- kudos:I have been writing a lot about ClassDojo recently, spurred by a combination of my professional concerns about the app and by my frustration that my kid’s school is now using it. Last week, I was pleased to see a new report from the United Kingdom-based Digital Futures Commission about not only ClassDojo but also Google Classroom. I’m sure my kid will have to use this latter software as well, so it’s good to be aware.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED'
- kudos:Maybe it’s because of my area of research, but I think the headline here is misleading. Being a teacher on TikTok is one thing, and I’m not opposed to that. Putting your students on TikTok is entirely different, and I struggle to see that being ethically justified. Josh’s research is absolutely the right reference point here. link to ‘The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED’
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I just got paid by a journal after they accepted one of my papers, and as happy as I am about this, it is so far out of my normal academic experience that I feel disoriented.
to be loved is to be 'liked'
- kudos:Thanks to the magic of the internet, I often listen to Francophone radio stations while working (most often French and Swiss—Radio-Canada doesn’t support streaming outside its own apps and sites). This is a great way to keep up with my French, and because there seems to be a minigenre of Francophone songs critiquing social media (Stromae’s Carmen comes to mind, but there’s at least one other whose name I can’t remember right now), it sometimes ends up being professionally relevant as well.
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I’m very glad that figuring out my office phone is not a prerequisite for tenure, or else my application would be in real trouble right now.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED'
- kudos:Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility. link to ‘Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED’
ClassDojo and the creation of artificial demand
- kudos:Yesterday, I complained about Apple putting artificial limitations on what its hardware and software can do in terms of music syncing in order to make more money out of its consumers (and, probably, keep music companies happy). As I was writing that, I was thinking about similarities with the business model of a lot of mobile apps—let people download the app for free, but keep bonus features (or even the best features) behind a paywall.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'List of 5 unique classes offered at University of Kentucky | Lexington Herald Leader'
- kudos:This ‘Black Mirror’ class comes out of my department—happy to see a colleague get credit for such an interesting class! link to ‘List of 5 unique classes offered at University of Kentucky | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘Girls Who Code’ Team Up With Tomahawk Missile Maker Raytheon'
- kudos:This is my issue with CS education efforts, especially ’teaching people to code.’ It’s narrowly focused on technical skills and not broader social and ethical reflection. I’d never argue that programmers shouldn’t work for defense contractors, but I’m uncomfortable with associating them so closely with CS education. link to ‘‘Girls Who Code’ Team Up With Tomahawk Missile Maker Raytheon’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Rentrée : Le désespoir de « MonsieurLeProf », l’enseignant le plus célèbre des réseaux sociaux'
- kudos:C’est dommage de perdre un tel prof. Je ne suis pas de près la situation des profs en France, mais vu combien de problèmes il y a aux États-Unis, ceci ne m’étonne pas trop. Il est peut-être temps de relire « Le hussard noir ». link to ‘Rentrée : Le désespoir de « MonsieurLeProf », l’enseignant le plus célèbre des réseaux sociaux’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun Detecting AI Scanners in Schools Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show'
- kudos:What a mess of a story. School safety tech is edtech, and like edtech, a lot of it appears to be more posturing and theater than effective practice. link to ‘‘The Least Safe Day’: Rollout of Gun Detecting AI Scanners in Schools Has Been a ‘Cluster,’ Emails Show’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'US government to make all research it funds open access on publication | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Exciting news! This still leaves a lot of research behind paywalls, though. link to ‘US government to make all research it funds open access on publication | Ars Technica’
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It’s a work from home day, but I put on real work clothes to meet with a student, only for them not to show. I think it was genuine miscommunication rather than irresponsibility, but still grumpy that I’m in a button-down shirt right now.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Scanning student rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional, judge rules : NPR'
- kudos:Well, here’s some happy news! I hope this ruling sticks. link to ‘Scanning student rooms during remote tests is unconstitutional, judge rules : NPR’
some thoughts on platforms and 'community'
- kudos:I’ve thought a lot about “community” in online spaces over the course of my (still-short) academic career. Early drafts of my dissertation had a lengthy discussion about the benefits and disadvantages of Étienne Wenger’s community of practice framework (which emerged from Wenger’s work with Jean Lave) as compared to James Paul Gee’s affinity space framework. From a research perspective, I tend to prefer Gee’s space-focused perspective and agree with many of his arguments for why it makes more sense to use that language in an online setting.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Tool That Monitors How Long Kids Are in the Bathroom Is Now in 1,000 American Schools'
- kudos:I’ve been grumpy about ClassDojo all week, and this is the only thing that’s made me feel better about it—BECAUSE THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE. link to ‘A Tool That Monitors How Long Kids Are in the Bathroom Is Now in 1,000 American Schools’
ClassDojo and 'data as oil'
- kudos:The new semester at the University of Kentucky starts on Monday, and I am flailing to try to get my data science course ready to go—including putting together an open, alternative textbook for my students. I’ve been borrowing heavily from Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s Data Feminism for my textbook: It’s a fantastic resource, and I’m hoping my students take a lot from it. Of course, my kid’s semester has already started, and I’ve already blogged a bunch about my frustrations with her new school’s use of ClassDojo this year.
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I’ve been getting “Welcome to Canvas during this difficult time, here’s some documentation” pop-ups for nearly 2.5 years now. Only way to dismiss it is to accept a cookie, and I use relatively locked-down Firefox, so I may just see it for eternity at this point.
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We had a short unit retreat this morning, and then I spent more time catching up with colleagues after the retreat than the retreat itself lasted. Both remind me that I work with great people.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'University of Kentucky COVID guidelines for fall 2022 semester | Lexington Herald Leader'
- kudos: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. link to ‘University of Kentucky COVID guidelines for fall 2022 semester | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica'
- kudos:Interesting perspective on what’s happening on “alternative” platforms. link to ‘What Happened After the Digital Crackdown on Extremists — ProPublica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bad Data “For Good”: How Data Brokers Try to Hide in Academic Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
- kudos:I hadn’t realized so many academics were working with data brokers. It’s kind of scary! The EFF has some good points here about so-called “data for good”—and rightly brings up that ethics review boards should be thinking about this sort of thing. link to ‘Bad Data “For Good”: How Data Brokers Try to Hide in Academic Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
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Got happy news this morning that a paper that may be one of the most important research projects I’ve worked on has been accepted into an open access journal! Making it hard to focus on my semester prep.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Some Thoughts on the Open Scholarship in Education (OSE) Working Meeting | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.'
- kudos:Appreciate Joshs’s reflections here—espeically as it relates to disciplinary and language differences within education. link to ‘Some Thoughts on the Open Scholarship in Education (OSE) Working Meeting | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.’
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I hate myself for creating a ClassDojo account, but kiddo’s school is going all-in, so not sure I have the choice. First observation is how confident the app is that it can make me pay extra for free software I don’t want to use in the first place.
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I spent most of the summer working from home, so I’m working in my campus office for the first time in over two months today. Nice to be back, but I also didn’t realize how many software updates were waiting for me!
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Spent part of this morning reviewing proofs for a chapter-length autoethnography that is not going to add much to my CV but may be the most personally important thing I’ve ever written. Really excited to see this so close to print.
teacher agency and edtech
- kudos:Last night, my spouse and I took kiddo to her new school to find her classroom, officially meet her teacher, and all that fun stuff. While we were there, we got confirmation of what we’d heard earlier: ClassDojo is going to be used in all classrooms this year as part of a school-wide initiative. It was helpful to talk to kiddo’s teacher about this. She understood my concerns, she had her own trepidations about being required to use ClassDojo, and she honestly wasn’t sure how she was going to bring it into the classroom.
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Really leaning into ethics and justice elements of data science in my fall class, and I’m wondering how much pushback I’m going to get. I’ve taught about racism, sexism, and colonization in games in another class with very few complaints, but this feels different somehow.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs | Techdirt'
- kudos:Masnick’s critiques of Pearson here are better than anything I could have written. link to ‘Absolutely Terrible Textbook Publishing Giant Pearson Wants To Make Everything Even Worse With NFTs | Techdirt’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them'
- kudos:Some really worrying privacy implications in this kind of edtech—and edtech as a discipline doesn’t care nearly enough about this kind of thing. Makes me worried as a scholar and a parent. link to ‘Kids Are Back in Classrooms and Laptops Are Still Spying on Them’