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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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.
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Flipping through an old notebook in my office, I found my notes for my campus interview here at UK (nearly two years ago now), including lists of now-colleagues’ publications and phonetic alphabet spellings of names so I wouldn’t mess them up.
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Responding to reviewer who has a specific picture in their head of what “good” edtech research “should” look like. Thus, they’re confused by things in my paper that I’m sure aren’t problems—but don’t fit that picture.
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I am pleased to report that in the ~4 weeks since moving into my new office, I have only tried to enter the old one once.
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Unexpected topics in research meetings: The difficulty of choosing English translations for French swearing in your data.
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Totally blanked on bringing work clothes into the office today, so I’ll be working in the t-shirt and shorts I wore biking in. The t-shirt has an anti-imposter syndrome message, though, so that’s helping.
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Teaching a summer class that includes fundamentals of computer hardware. Peak so far was this morning, when a student came in excited that she’d been able to follow along watching someone replace a server motherboard.
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Trying to do revisions on an article that isn’t my best work and that I don’t really love is haaaaaaard. I’m committed enough to the core idea to see things through, but I’m also tempted to tell the reviewers that they win and I’m out.
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My first rule as a low-budget Twitter researcher is to collect interesting data first, ask (research) questions later. I have a lot of data I’ve never used, but I’d rather deal with that than a missed opportunity.
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Does anyone know of research on social media surveillance by school districts? Some local news stories have me thinking of a potential future project…
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Just had a paper rejected from a special issue, but the journal has been such a pain to work with over the last 8(!) months that I’m frankly just glad it’s over.
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I got a reminder today that I do the kind of research where something as hilariously unintuitive as telling a program to treat long numbers as “words made up of 0-9” is actually a critical step to making sure you get the right results.
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The welcome surprise of finding that a book I checked out for personal reading will be helpful for research outweighs all the guilt I felt about using my university’s interlibrary loan to request books for personal reading.
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Nothing like the release of teacher course evaluations to remind me how much of my self-worth is still tied to what other people think. 😬😬😬
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Learning that you can request article PDFs through UK’s interlibrary loan has been a GAMECHANGER.
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Being an assistant professor of ICT means a constant fear that I won’t get tenure once they figure out how baffled I am by the copier.
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Repeatedly stopping this afternoon to jot down notes for next offering of a particular course. Not sure if this makes me a good prof (thinking ahead) or a bad prof (I’m supposed to be grading)
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Today I get to teach about copyright and fair use in class, which is basically an excuse to watch YouTube videos and discuss whether they meet fair use or not.
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Getting in touch with my BYU roots in educational technology by applying for a grant to move to alternative textbooks for my Fall 2019 course.
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It looks like I can’t access my institution’s Qualtrics survey when I have my VPN turned on. Is this an anti-spam measure, or is something else going on?
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I have been getting emails incorrectly calling me “Dr.” or “Professor” since I was an undergrad with my own section of French 102. Now, it’s nice to get one of those and be able to suppress the instinct to correct the sender.
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One of the things I like most about a manuscript I’m currently working on is the chance to visit literature from a few fields that are adjacent to where I usually cite from.
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Have not made as much writing progress today as I’d like, but today’s progress has validated both my use of a structured folder system as a “reference manager” AND my decision to memorize the keyboard shortcut for French guillemets.
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This week, I will be putting my nose to the grindstone to meet the deadline for submitting an article to a special issue whose editors have repeatedly blown past their own deadlines. 🙄