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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Thinking today about all the faculty performance I could do with the time it takes to do data entry for my faculty performance review.
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One of the biggest perks of teaching in an ICT program is the ease with which scenes from the fantastic 1992 hacker/heist movie Sneakers can be worked into one’s lectures.
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The stress I feel when assigning final grades is compelling evidence that I would never make it as a judge.
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TIL that if you find out your content management students aren’t accessing the LMS course in the way that you told them to (some only check “to do” page, not main course page), you can at least turn it into a review of course material!
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Will they take my PhD away if I admit that I never talked about my dissertation in terms of “chapters” and that I don’t understand fully what that means?
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One underrated affordance of writing a journal manuscript in Google Docs is being able to have two identical copies of the manuscript open simultaneously. Really helps for checking consistency across paper or comparing two sections.
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Answering an email from a colleague is requiring me to look through undergraduate courses offered in other colleges on my campus, and now I want to take a bunch of them!
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Peak Fall 2020: Sending an apology to my students in case the person I ejected from a family Zoom gathering as soon as I realized it wasn’t a sibling (but before I could fully process the face) was one of them looking for help on a Sunday night.
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Having my students post a weekly report on what they did that relates to each course objective. When it works, it’s the best kind of assessment—it assumes that there’s learning always happening and that we just need to notice it.
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One of the biggest things that the pandemic is teaching me is how much of good pedagogy is just treating your students like human beings (and how much of bad pedagogy is not doing so). Knew this before, but this semester is really driving it home.
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Sick family member, so I moved my blended class to 100% asynchronous online this week. Almost definitely not COVID, but it’s a slower week in class, and this seems like the kind of semester to be overly cautious.
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Rewriting a syllabus + recurrence of a particular, ongoing personal anxiety + general pandemic stuff = some high levels of pre-semester stress today.
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Lots of talk right now about students dissatisfied with online teaching. While those voices shouldn’t be ignored, I’ve also already had three students (of thirty) in my fall hybrid class specifically ask to take it fully online.
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One of my earliest publications has been added to a research anthology without my knowledge or consent, since publisher owns copyright. Not necessarily opposed to end result, but still miffed about lack of control.
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One of my favorite things about university libraries and ILL is that they’re officially there for research, but no one will stop you from reading the books just because you want to.
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Is my brain mush right now because grading is hard? Or is grading hard right now because my brain is mush?
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One of the best things I did as a brand new faculty member was to decide on a standard files and folders scheme. Still thanking myself for it.
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This afternoon, a career in academia looks like working from the kitchen table, playing a French 80s radio station, and fuming at Reviewer B’s complaints about my using the journal’s template like I was asked to.
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Trying to collect tweets from a very-new account, but advanced search with “from:” doesn’t seem to work. Has anyone ever had this happen before?
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35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.
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I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍
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Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.
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The only bad thing about having volunteered to maintain the Global Mormon Studies website is that every time I update the program for the 2020 conference, I am increasingly disappointed that I didn’t have anything to submit myself.
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Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.
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Currently completing my annual review, which has me thinking how much of my career I owe to more senior academics who have been kind and generous to me when they didn’t have to be. Hope I can follow that example myself.
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If only I had known as a middle schooler who was uncool for not knowing who Eminem was that one day I would be explaining a “Real Slim Shady” joke in an academic research paper about how Mormons use Twitter 😂🤷🏼♂️
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Seven years ago, I was applying for grad school, wrestling with the idea of leaving French teaching behind. The longer I spend in this career, though, the more I believe my experience learning and teaching language and culture affects my work.
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I had my information literacy and critical thinking students annotate the Wendy’s roleplaying game with comments about how it functions as a persuasive document, and the results are delightful.
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The hardest manuscripts to review are the ones that promise something that’s legitimately needed in the literature but then fail to follow through with that promise.
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Starting to wonder if Solomon’s “wise” suggestion to cut the baby in half was actually his editorial summary of the advice provided by three conflicting reviewers.
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I feel subversive (but absolutely justified) whenever I argue for interpreting “quantitative” data through an interpretivist lens.
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I keep getting automated emails from work that I shouldn’t be getting, but I’m an edge case of what the inclusion criteria are. It’s frustrating, but also a good reminder of need to reflect on variable definitions in computational research. 😂
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Just had the surprising experience of seeing the term “NPC” defined and explained in a responsible conduct of research training.
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I set up a private Slack group for one of my classes today, and within 15 minutes, they had turned my face into a custom emoji. 😂
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I just misread an email from my professional organization of choice as announcing the creation of a number of “research submarines.” Turns out they’re just working on “summaries.”
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Beginning of semester dreams: I have written a not-great paper with my wife and the interim dean. We got feedback from Lyon-based bloggers (who like my Olympique de Marseille reference), and the dean wants to submit it to a top chemistry journal.