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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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. 🙄
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I recently had students modify a “life simulation” as an exercise in examining the values embedded in games, and their collective rage that choosing to read a book increases the “loneliness” score is so satisfying.
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I spent most of my morning preparing to give a methods workshop that only one person showed up to… and yet, it went much better than the only other time I’ve given a methods workshop.
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I’m currently phasing in a new “professional picture,” and every time I look closely, I see the compression shirt I had on under my dress shirt because it was freezing outside during the shoot.
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Tfw you and a co-author disagree on a question of punctuation, so you text your editor sister for backup.
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Hard to beat coming into the office with a post-bike commute endorphin rush. Doesn’t happen every morning, but it’s always welcome when it does.
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Funniest thing I’ve read all day is a tweet in the data I’m working with that proposes a Warcraft version of the French baccalauréat exam.
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Approximately 6 months after receiving my work laptop, I have finally collected all of the peripherals I need to use my work laptop at work. Until now, I’ve been using personal computer at work and work computer at home.
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I love that I do the kind of research where I have to define terms like “hashtag” and “meme,” but I hate trying to figure out how much of a 1,000-word conference proposal to dedicate to those definitions.
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Sure I scheduled a research Skype meeting for Saturday morning, but I attended in my pajamas, so that still counts as work/life balance, right? 😂😭
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I’m convinced that the hardest part of any research collaboration is figuring out what software everyone uses.
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Question I just asked some colleagues re: teaching a subject I know something about but have never been formally trained in: “How do you turn 100s of Stack Exchange searches into a syllabus?”
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I think the hardest part of teaching is figuring out how to explain something you don’t remember not knowing how to do to someone who currently doesn’t know how to do it.