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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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?


đź”— 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.


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



Interesting read on an important subject.


đź”— 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.




What if our collective disdain as education researchers for learning styles is the result of an overemphasis on efficacy and improvement and a corresponding undervaluing of accessibility and equity?




Teaching R for the first time, and many students are first-time programmers. I’m reminded of teaching French in terms of how easy it is to take for granted things that aren’t obvious to beginners.




I brought up the federal German elections in class today to make a point about WordPress; I’d say it made sense in context, but I can’t promise that was true for the students!


đź”— linkblog: just read 'Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever - The Verge'



Very interesting to think about how mental models re: file storage may be changing.




I have finished the article review I was a week behind on, so now I just need to tackle the two-weeks-late and six-weeks-late projects on my plate. After I get the course prep done that I was hoping to do yesterday.




Unsatisfied with the Intro to Data Science textbook I’ve inherited. Fortunately, an earlier version is Creative Commons-licensed, as are some other fantastic resources. Guess who’s going to remix himself a new textbook for next Fall!




Looks like the NSF is now using the term STEAM, which just makes me dislike the term even more.




I know I’m going to make plenty of mistakes teaching Intro to Data Science for the first time, but one thing I’m already proud of is teaching my students to use tags to format code and output in their Canvas posts.




I often think of Nel Noddings’s argument that while increasing women’s participation in STEM is a must, we haven’t achieved victory until we’ve also increased men’s participation in historically-feminine fields.




I just had to annotate a class reading to explain first that “AIM” stands for AOL Instant Messenger and second what instant messaging was, all because I wasn’t sure my students would understand either. This makes me uncomfortable.




Beginning of semester stress dreams, Fall 2021 edition: Dani Rojas is enrolled in my content management systems class but is refusing to comply with the mask mandate.




Is there anything sweeter to a professor’s ears than “I use what I learned in your class all the time”?




You would think I’d have stopped being surpised by anything posted to the Gab blog by now, but “actually, platforms should be held responsible for content they host, but none of our content is problematic” is still a take I wasn’t expecting.




Small sample size (and very non-representative), but my summer students seem to be on board with treating internet access as a public good. Hope for the future!




I have a burner reddit account (for research purposes) that I only access through Tor, so the “communities near you” that pops up whenever I log in is consistently both amusingly wrong and genuinely (if not completely) informative.




There are a lot of joys in teaching, but there’s something awesome about being able to assign students to watch a scene from 1992’s Sneakers—the world’s finest hacker movie.




I have no doubt that neuroscience is making important contributions, but I will never not be annoyed by its fetishization by individuals, media outlets, or academic disciplines.




Experiencing the best of being a peer reviewer today. Article is genuinely good, and I really want to see it get published, but I also know specific things that will make it stronger before it gets there.




PhD programs can be different from each other, but so many PhD students and their instructors believe that everyone will understand their particular lingo and milestones if they just throw them around.




Just got one of those emails that makes me very glad I gave a student flexibility no matter how inconvenient it was for end of semester. It’s helpful to remember that many students are dealing with way more important things than my class.




I know someone who apparently agreed to review three articles the same week as final grading, and boy does he look dumb staring back from the mirror.




Looking back, I owe a lot to the semester I took both “Intro to CS” and “History of French,” which culminated in writing a Java program to help with a “invent your own Romance language” group final.




Today I learned that if you replace code that’s held together by other code serving the role of duct tape with actual good code but forget to remove the metaphorical duct tape, the good code still doesn’t work.




What is the most soothing form of digital data collection, and why is it forum scraping?




Special thanks to Google Drive for breaking the iframes I’ve been using to set up annotation-enabled readings in Canvas this semester… during the week that students are reviewing readings for their final papers. Really appreciate it.




I learn a lot of ggplot2 responding to reviewers’ suggestions about plots and a lot of CSS helping students with their questions about Twine games. Turns out I only learn code when I have a project that forces me to.




Saturday afternoon online conference presentation means a bunch of fiddling with lighting in my home office on Saturday morning!




Proposing a new syllabus on department’s class on fundamentals of hardware and software, and I’m adding reflections on equity, society, culture as they relate to ICT. Tech isn’t just technical.