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, you can browse my research here, and my Google Scholar profile 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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I sometimes write in French! To only see the French content (which is also available below, alongside English content), please click on [fr] in the site header.
knowing when enough is enough
The past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about a memory from my junior year of college. It was the end of a semester, and on top of all of my own finals, I was teaching FREN 102 for the first time, so my end-of-semester was busier than it had been in previous years. I don’t remember all of this busy time, but I do remember specific parts of taking my online FREN 362 (French Civilization II) final while sitting in the office shared by instructors from the Department of French and Italian and the Department of Scandinavian Studies.
being a student's parent as an edtech researcher
Kiddo starts at a new school this year, so we got the chance to all go as a family today and get introduced to everything. Kiddo got to meet teachers and other kids while we filed into a meeting to fill out a ton of paperwork and learn about how this school does things. For years, I’ve been wondering when my research in educational technology (and, increasingly, critical research on social technologies more broadly) were going to become relevant as a parent with a kid in school, and it looks like it’s going to be this year.
thoughts on an in-press article—and on names and legitimacy in Mormonism
One of the highlights of the summer has been getting an article accepted in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. This article takes as a starting point Cragun and Nielsen’s argument (also published in Dialogue) that:
what is really at play in the debate over the use of “Mormon” is legitimacy.
Cragun and Nielsen are writing in 2009, at a time when Big Love is on the air and the April 2008 FLDS Temple raid is (or was recently) on the news.
research analytics for... industry collaboration?
Over the past several months, the University of Kentucky has been pushing us to set up profiles on a new research analytics platform. The platform looks… fine, but I’ve been irritated with some of how the platform works and curious why UK is so keen on having us fill out our profiles. It’s felt from the beginning like this is something more for UK’s benefit than for our individual benefits as faculty.
🔗 linkblog: Uber paid academics six-figure sums for research to feed to the media'
Disappointing to see academics implicated in the Uber Files. It’s a compelling example of how research funding is contingent on public and private interests. Of course, public interests are generally less worrying than Uber funding research perceived to be positive and profitable, but there are still times I have questions about the NSF’s priorities.
🔗 linkblog: After Dobbs, Advocates Fear School Surveillance Tools Could Put Teens at Risk – The Markup'
I’ve seen a number of headlines about how a post-Dobbs world changes the game for online privacy, but this is the first one that I sat down to read. School surveillance software is scary enough without this possibility, so let’s not make it worse. I can’t believe that this software gives schools any benefits that outweigh the heavy cost to students’ privacy.
🔗 linkblog: A (Wheatstone) bridge to the past – Punya Mishra's Web'
I’ve also been thinking recently about small but important influences on my career, so it was a real treat to read Punya’s thoughts here.
why 'open access' isn't enough
I just barely microblogged something about what I want to say here, but over the past hour, it’s been nagging at me more and more, and I want to write some more about it.
I was introduced to academia through educational technology, and I was introduced to educational technology through a class at BYU taught by David Wiley. This class was not about educational technology, but David’s passion for Web 2.
🔗 linkblog: Coverage in EdWeek of a recent article on uncertainty in science | Joshua M. Rosenberg, Ph.D.'
Really enjoyed this coverage of Josh’s work! I haven’t ever done Bayesian work, so it surprised me how closely the ideas in the article resembled thoughts I’ve been having about positivism and other research paradigms.
some thoughts on Gab pushback against research on Gab
I’m not going to link to it, but I am fascinated by a recent post on the Gab blog where Andrew Torba announced some new features to help Gab users push back against research on the platform. Not only do I have two or three ongoing projects using Gab data (one is in the very, very early stages and—ironically—uses Gab blog posts), but some of what Torba wrote also aligned with some of the (fortunately mild) trolling my co-author, Amy Chapman, and I have experienced because of my work on the far-right-influenced DezNat hashtag in Mormon Twitter.
job post: instructional communication lecturer position at University of Kentucky
My unit (the School of Information Science) at the University of Kentucky teaches all of the composition and communication courses for the College of Communication and Information, and I just received word this morning that we’re hiring a full-time lecturer for these courses. I feel conflicted about the existence of the lecturer position at UK, but I can say with some fconfidence that lecturers are valued, respected members of the SIS faculty.
🔗 linkblog: Schools Are Spending Billions on High-Tech Defense for Mass Shootings - The New York Times'
Gun violence can’t be solved with educational technology—and make no mistake, all of this is edtech.
🔗 linkblog: Diverse and inclusive stock photos for your next presentation, learning design, etc – George Veletsianos, PhD'
Really appreciated George’s post here. Looking forward to trying these out in future slide decks.
new publication: examining pseudonymous academic Twitter accounts
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Silver Bullet of Anti-Shooter Educational Technologies — Civics of Technology'
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’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Software to detect school threats online is costly but mostly ineffective.'
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
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.
🔗 linkblog: After Uvalde, social media monitoring apps struggle to justify surveillance - The Verge'
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?
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'
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
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.
interview with WEKU on Buffalo shooting and social media content moderation
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.