BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science

I am an interdisciplinary 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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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.




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.




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.




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: Intel Wants To Add Unproven ‘Emotion Detection’ AI To Distance Learning Tech | Techdirt'



The only way to make emotion detection tech worse is, of course, to make it ed tech.




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.




Pleased with my decision to no longer tackle email on weekends; less pleased with the Mailbox Mondays that have resulted.




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.




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.




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!




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.




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: Columbia Professor Expresses Doubts over University Ranking - The New York Times'



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.


🔗 linkblog: George Washington University apologizes for tracking locations of students, faculty | TheHill'



Certainly not the worst news I’ve read this morning, but still tremendously worrying.


🔗 linkblog: Proctorio subpoenas digital rights group in legal spat with student - The Verge'



Boo on Proctorio.




Every selling point on this cold call email for an ed tech product is a reason that I would never consider using it.


🔗 linkblog: A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students – The Markup'



Let me get this straight: Invasive surveillance isn’t enough, now companies are creating opportunities to cheat just so they can ding them and take credit for stopping it?


🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: 16 Feb 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'



Doctorow tackles the grossest parts of ed tech. It’s a great read.




Just explained something I learned from studying far right spaces in Mormon social media to collaborators on a project studying queer spaces in far right social media, which is not an experience I expected when starting grad school in ed tech.


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'College Prep Software Naviance Is Selling Advertising Access to Millions of Students – The Markup'



Ed tech should not be ad tech.




I wonder how many people right now believe both that university instructors indoctrinate students and that they shouldn’t be allowed to do so online because it wouldn’t be effective.




I got to teach counting in binary today, and it might be one of my favorite things to teach. Not every day you get to deconstruct and reconstruct your students’ understanding of numbers.


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Amazon Paid for a High School Course. Here’s What They Teach.'



So much ugh. Big Amazon presence here in KY, so wonder when we’ll start to see this.




I was born into the dominant language of research, I’m reasonably fluent in a second language, and there’s still so much literature beyond my reach. Bring back langauge requirements in U.S. doctoral training.




One of my favorite students will always be the undergrad from a few years ago who expressed outrage when I explained that researchers frequently have to sign over the copyright to their own studies.




There are worse times than three days before the start of the semester to realize that you were preparing the wrong modality for a course, but not many!


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Students Are Learning To Resist Surveillance: Year in Review 2021 | Electronic Frontier Foundation'



Such an important read.


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Personalized Learning Debates Put Too Much Emphasis on Technology, School Leaders Say'



Lots in here that reminds me of Watters’s comments on personalization.




It breaks my heart to hear from a student explaining they’re going to a funeral and in the same breath asking what documentation they need for it to be officially excused. I know there are bad actors out there, but why do we do this to our students?


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Report - Sharing Student Data Across Public Sectors: Importance of Community Engagement to Support Responsible and Equitable Use - Center for Democracy and Technology'



Looking forward to reading—and citing—this full report.


🔗 linkblog: just finished 'Automated Proctoring Swept In During Pandemic. It’s Likely to Stick Around, Despite Concerns | EdSurge News'



Glad UK is stepping back from proctoring, but worried about the foothold it’s gained.


🔗 linkblog: just read 'Ed Tech Usage is Up. So Are Parent Privacy Concerns'



Interesting read on an important subject.


🔗 linkblog: just read 'Inequitable Access: An Anti-Competitive Scheme by Textbook Publishers | Electronic Frontier Foundation'



OER forever. This article makes me sad.




One of my data science students just did a t-test to demonstrate that evil-aligned monsters in D&D 5e tend to have lower Armor Class than good-aligned monsters. This course demands a lot of effort, but moments like this make it worth it.




grad student, immediately after entering my office: “Wow, you really like Star Wars, huh?” me: “Yes, but have you also noticed all my cool train magnets?”




Dreamt that despite having a PhD, I had somehow never finished my BA. Had to explain a lot to employer and was trying to transfer to Centre College to make completing the degree earlier.