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.
My CV is available here.
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- kudos:
Logging into Zotero for the first time since (early) grad school reminds me why I don’t like reference managers.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Diverse and inclusive stock photos for your next presentation, learning design, etc – George Veletsianos, PhD'
- kudos:Really appreciated George’s post here. Looking forward to trying these out in future slide decks. link to ‘Diverse and inclusive stock photos for your next presentation, learning design, etc – George Veletsianos, PhD’
new publication: examining pseudonymous academic Twitter accounts
- kudos:I’m happy to report that a paper of mine (in collaboration with David E. Williams at the University of Saskatchewan) has just been published in The Internet and Higher Education. We topic modeled 77,514 tweets from 59 academically-themed but anonymous or pseudonymous Twitter accounts. This resulted in five broad topics, and we followed up with a qualitative analysis of the 100 most-representative tweets from each of those topics to generate some narrower codes.
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I have some regrets about being a week late on this article review because I took my kid camping—but not a lot, to be honest.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology'
- kudos:Solid thinking by researchers I respect and admire. I especially appreciate the point that no solution exists outside politics. link to ‘The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology’
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Kiddo catches a glimpse of the ref list for the research statement I’m preparing for tenure: “Why does it say Greenhalgh so many times?”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.'
- kudos:This kind of social media surveillance has been bothering me for years. I’m happy it’s getting some attention, even if the impetus for that attention is such a tragedy. This is edtech and our discipline needs to treat it as such. link to ‘Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.’
why I will (probably?) always agree to write a letter of recommendation for a student
- kudos:Today, I heard from a student that I had a couple of semesters ago asking for a letter of recommendation for a master’s program. I only had the student in one class, his attendance was spotty, and I didn’t have a lot of sustained interactions with him, so I am questioning whether I would be the best letter writer for him. However, while I said as much to the student in my reply, I also told him that despite all of that, I would still be willing to write him a letter.
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Reviewer 1 has missed the key argument and main throughline of my paper, and even though the editor says I can ignore them, it’s still making me SO MAD.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'After Uvalde, social media monitoring apps struggle to justify surveillance - The Verge'
- kudos:This article may make its way into a chapter I’m writing on how assumptions about education shape our understanding of what appropriate data collection looks like. As Audrey Watters has written, this kind of thing is very much edtech, and we need to be critical about how we deploy it. Even if it did work, I’m not sure the surveillance would be worth it. If it doesn’t work, all the more reason to be skeptical.
a culmination of previous work, or a steppingstone for the future?
- kudos:Like in many PhD programs, my comprehensive exams included an element that was intended to help me prepare for my dissertation proposal, dissertation, and dissertation defense. Building off of my research interests and experiences up to that point, my advisor wrote me a lengthy question asking me to define and describe simulation games—the intent, of course, being that at least some of this could be worked into a literature review for a dissertation.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times'
- kudos:Why can’t we just learn to assess differently? There’s so much about proctoring software that ought to be worrying us. link to ‘Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met - The New York Times’
new(ish) publication: investigating offerings and downloads on TeachersPayTeachers
- kudos:I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter.
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I am, technically speaking, a STEM educator, but the reason I get so cranky about STEM hype is that these disciplines cannot on their own address the problems I’m most worried about right now.
interview with WEKU on Buffalo shooting and social media content moderation
- kudos:Last week, I was interviewed by a reporter at WEKU about social media and content moderation in the context of the horrific recent shooting in Buffalo, and I was pleased to see the interview appear on the WEKU website this morning. I wish that the headline didn’t frame this as a question of “free speech”—and that I’d perhaps been more forceful in emphasizing that these really aren’t questions of free speech so much as content moderation.
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Just used the phrase ‘hashtag ontology’ in a draft manuscript, and I think that will keep me happy the rest of the day.
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Trying to convince employer that a combination of flights and rail is best way for me to get to upcoming conference, wish me luck!
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The more I mess around with hacking my Hugo site, the more qualified I feel to teach my content management systems class.
quoted in Salt Lake Tribune on LDS missionaries' use of social media
- kudos:Last week, I got the chance to chat with Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Peggy Fletcher Stack about Latter-day Saint missionaries use of social media videos, and I was pleased to see the article published on Sunday. I hadn’t been paying attention to online missionary videos, but the subject fit nicely with the reading I’ve been doing on platform and platform values recently: Both kinds of accounts “are drawing from the internet/influencer cultures of these platforms,” [Greenhalgh] says.
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In addition to cheating being flat-out wrong, students should also consider just how much regulation-reading and paperwork it creates for their professors.
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Do other internet researchers find themselves citing journalists to explain things like memes? Or am I just not reading the right scholarly sources?
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Today’s writing music is Manu Chao, whom I was surprised to discover in the 2010s was a real musician, not someone my 1990s-era high school French textbooks had made up for sample dialogues.
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This is my first summer not teaching since beginning grad school, so even though my to-do list is still long (including, y’know, a tenure dossier to put together), I don’t know what to do with myself.
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I think it’s funny (but delightful) that my secondary area of research has gotten more media attention than what I was specifically trained to do.
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Developing automations for posting to my website and microblogging platforms is one way I deal with my insecurities as an ed. researcher turned ICT instructor.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech | Techdirt'
- kudos:The only way to make emotion detection tech worse is, of course, to make it ed tech. link to ‘Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech | Techdirt’
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Frustrated by the way that blinding self-citations (that aren’t explicitly self-citations) can actually work against blind review. When I’m reviewing stuff in my niche area, I can sometimes tell who the authors are based on that alone.
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Pleased with my decision to no longer tackle email on weekends; less pleased with the Mailbox Mondays that have resulted.
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Discussing networks in class today, which is as good an excuse as any to show a clip from Battlestar Galactica. Computers without networks is one of the most interesting worldbuilding details in that show.
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We should promote open science practices in social science projects where they make sense but also stop normalizing it in a way that ignores non-positivist paradigms.
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The focus on student learning in this year’s AECT reviews is good, but I worry that it blinds us to other important ed tech questions. I’d struggle to describe how surveillance, ethics, privacy impact student learning, but we desperately need that research too-or more!
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I prefer not to get into the bad news, but the good news is that I’m learning a lot about how MySQL and WordPress work.
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Learned an important lesson about platform dependence today. When I got hired at UK, I went all in on Google Drive to back up all my files; now, our institutional access is going to limit us to about 10% of the storage I was using. Going to be messy.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Columbia Professor Expresses Doubts over University Ranking - The New York Times'
- kudos:This is why I’m skeptical of terms like data driven decision making, which are meant to sound objective but cannot live up to their rhetorical power. link to ‘Columbia Professor Expresses Doubts over University Ranking - The New York Times’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'George Washington University apologizes for tracking locations of students, faculty | TheHill'
- kudos:Certainly not the worst news I’ve read this morning, but still tremendously worrying. link to ‘George Washington University apologizes for tracking locations of students, faculty | TheHill’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Proctorio subpoenas digital rights group in legal spat with student - The Verge'
- kudos:Boo on Proctorio. link to ‘Proctorio subpoenas digital rights group in legal spat with student - The Verge’