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.

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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🔗 linkblog: Twitter's new data access rules will make research harder : NPR'



Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status.




One of my academic pet peeves is when people use the word rigor as a validating synonym for something else, like “quantitative” or “giving out lots of Cs.” Rigor is important, but narrow definitions aren’t useful.




Pleased to see that page proofs I’m reviewing have preserved the emojis in quoted tweets. It’s frustrating for this social media researcher how many journal publication platforms do not support them.


🔗 linkblog: OpenAI Wants To Help You Figure Out If Text Was Written By OpenAI; But What Happens When It’s Wrong? | Techdirt'



Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.


🔗 linkblog: Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge'



I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating.


🔗 linkblog: Florida Teachers Are Emptying Classroom Libraries to Avoid Going to Jail'



What a dumb world we live in.


🔗 linkblog: Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members'



Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research.




Ce matin, j’ai préparé du muësli fait-maison au lieu de faire des corrections, et je n’ai aucun sentiment de culpabilité.


Cory Doctorow on behaviorism



After bouncing off of it a year or so ago, I recently decided to restart Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway (which led NPR reporter Jason Sheehan to describe Doctorow as “Super-weird in the best possible way”). The audiobook is excellent, and since I started a couple of days ago, it’s displaced my podcast listening and given me another chance to wrestle with Doctorow’s ideas here. There is way too much going on (and I’m not far enough into the book) for me to engage with the underlying message of the novel (or even to be sure of what it is yet), but one passage stood out to me so much this morning that I have to write it down now.




The desire to “enhance” or “improve” learning is a noble one, but I’m increasingly convinced it gets too much attention—and distracts us from as (or more) important questions about education and technology.




In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”




Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”


🔗 linkblog: Instagram Has a White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Problem'



I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are.




Reading through the data available through Canvas analytics, I’m reminded of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s argument (in their excellent book “Data Feminism”) that structured, “clean” data is most necessary for “strangers in the dataset.”




My tenure dossier has passed all the college-level steps, and I just finished reading the kind letter my dean wrote. Now off to the Provost’s office for months of waiting!


🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees'



Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing.


quoted again about Gas app in EducationWeek



This week, Discord announced that it has acquired the Gas social media app popular among secondary students. Presumably in response, Alyson Klein ran an explainer today at EducationWeek on the subject of the app. In doing this, she re-ran a quote that I provided to her for a December article that she also wrote: “It feels a little exploitative to me,” said Spencer Greenhalgh, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s school of information sciences.


🔗 linkblog: Discord acquires Gas, the popular app for teens to compliment each other - The Verge'



A couple of months ago, I spoke to Education Week about the Gas app. I thought it had an exploitative business model then, and its being acquired does nothing to calm that fear.




It’s been a long day at the end of a long week, but it ended with an “are you working on anything interesting so I can write about it?” message from a reporter and a kind compliment from a grad school friend, so all in all, not too bad.


R. Sikoryak's 'Terms and Conditions' and ed tech



My sister-in-law recently gifted me a copy of R. Sikoryak’s weird but wonderful comic Terms and Conditions, which “adapts” the 2015 iTunes terms and conditions into a comic format. I was as delighted by the gift, which I’m sure only contributed to her bewilderment (she knew I wanted the book, but I can’t blame anyone for not understanding why I wanted it). One of the gags of the comic is, obviously, the idea that a comic adaptation would get you to actually read through the whole document instead of just pretending that you have.




Remembering the time some trollish critics of research I’m doing with a colleague grabbed the audio from a YouTube video of our conference presentation and remixed it into a song they posted to SoundCloud. It’s supposed to be mocking, but I find it funny.


quoted in EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools' social media lawsuit



Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article. I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:




I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.




Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.


🔗 linkblog: A CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text'



See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to.




Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.


🔗 linkblog: New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge'



Personally, I’m not very optimistic about ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI should have better considered disruptions to fields like education before releasing the tool. That said, I don’t think a ban is the solution here.




Nothing says unwarranted optimism quite like the big pile of books I brought home from campus in case I had time to work on “that manuscript” over the break. Lugging them back to campus tomorrow morning.


three grumpy observations from a Twitter researcher on requests for 'quote toots'



Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick.


🔗 linkblog: Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap - Neal A. Maxwell Institute'



Such an interesting book. I’m going to have to get a copy to read one day.




Dreamt this morning that I was applying for PhD programs. It wasn’t until dream-me began reviewing my research record that I remembered that I already have a PhD and am actually applying for tenure right now.


🔗 linkblog: Schools and EdTech Need to Study Up On Student Privacy: 2022 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation'



Edtech professionals aren’t paying nearly enough attention to this sort of thing.




I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.




I’m normally a big “break is break” advocate, but family illness meant being behind on work, which meant taking over my father-in-law’s WFH setup today to finish a syllabus and course shell I needed to prep so other instructors could work off them.


end-of-semester thoughts on hating grading



When I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I took a job as a student instructor for FREN 102, the second half of a two-course sequence in first-year French. I had a lot of weird experiences as an undergraduate student teaching and grading other undergraduate students, but the one that I remember this morning is the time that I held a student’s scholarship in my hand. I don’t remember the student’s name or much about her, except a vague recollection of her face and a couple of conversations with her.




This semester, my efforts to trust students feel like they’re backfiring. I ungrade, but they don’t take work seriously. I never use plagiarism checkers, but I still have to deal with a last minute case. Not saying I’ll stop effort, but still sucks.