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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- kudos:
Today, I demonstrated I know just enough ed psych to be a troublemaker in relevant meetings.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'More academic publishers are doing AI deals'
- kudos:I keep thinking about the similarity of exploitation of academic labor by publishers to the exploitation of everyone’s labor by AI companies, and stories like this just make it more clear. link to “More academic publishers are doing AI deals”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:Cory Doctorow taking on Proctorio by proxy is such a delight. This story on how dumb proctoring software is, how it could be beat technically, and how it needs to be beat politically ought to be required reading for everyone in ed tech. It also has compelling characters, enough food porn to remind you who the author is, some fun technical asides (learned a lot about WannaCry!), and is just fun.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed'
- kudos:I teach WordPress, and I guess I should be covering this this semester. I’ve been avoiding reading about recent drama at Automattic, but if this is a taste of it, wow, wow, wow. link to “If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed”
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I had to visit Gab today to hunt down some data for a paper, and boy was this the wrong Monday to visit that hellhole of a site.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, by Zoë Schiffer
- kudos:I dedicated most of my early career to Twitter and probably owe my tenure to the ease of collecting Twitter data once upon a time. Were it not for some timely decisions to diversify what platforms I was looking at, the API cutoff documented in this book would have really messed me up. Because of how important Twitter was to me professionally, I followed a lot of this news as it was happening.
- kudos:
It feels weird to be giving advice to first-year faculty, because I still feel like I don’t know anything, but my spouse recently pointed out that I’m now more senior than most of the people I turned to for advice during my first year…
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'College Grades Have Become a Charade. It's Time To Abolish Them. - Slashdot'
- kudos:I really ought to read the original piece instead of just the Slashdot excerpt, but I tried that, and it just made me even more angry, and I don’t think it would change my response. I’m not opposed to doing away with grades, but I’m not convinced by hand-wringing about grade inflation. Grades do need to be meaningful to be useful, but the idea that As need to be reserved for an elite few speaks less to meritocracy (referenced in the full piece) than to a need for an elite.
- kudos:
Like much software, I only know as much Git as I need to get my stuff done, but I’m pleased to report that some code conflicts in class finally got me to learn .gitignore.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some'
- kudos:Interesting read wirh important implications for how we think about research quality. link to “Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'AI Checkers Forcing Kids To Write Like A Robot To Avoid Being Called A Robot'
- kudos:I am way more pessimistic about AI than Masnick is, but we agree on this sort of thing. Algorithmic surveillance is no more appropriate in response to AI concerns than it is to cheating concerns. link to “AI Checkers Forcing Kids To Write Like A Robot To Avoid Being Called A Robot”
- kudos:
I keep getting lured to meetings by free lunches, only to remember once I get there that my leftovers from home would be better than anything the college will pay for.
- kudos:
I don’t know if it’s summer amnesia, taking on some new responsibilities, or a coping mechanism, but boy did I forget how much of my workday emails can take up.
draft advice for intro to data science students
- kudos:I am, unbelievably, preparing my fourth offering of my department’s ICT/LIS 661 Intro to Data Science class, and this time around, I’ve decided to add a new section to my “about the class” page in Canvas to head off some concerns that I’ve seen over the past few years. I have a lot of students with no background in either statistics or programming who take my class, and it can be really intimidating for them.
- kudos:
One day, before I retire, I will remember how to cross-list sections in Canvas without having to look it up.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How MIT copes without Elsevier'
- kudos:Interesting—and hopeful—read. link to “How MIT copes without Elsevier”
- kudos:
This semester, I am encouraged to include in my syllabus links to student resources related to mental health, food insecurity, etc., but required to include instructions for how to respond to an “active aggressor.” How depressing.
- kudos:
More than once, I have gotten myself in trouble while teaching my WordPress class by getting out of my web hosting comfort zone. Today, though, I pulled off some DNS and cPanel stuff right on the edge of my limits, so let’s hope sailing stays smooth for the whole semester. 🤞🏻
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber
- kudos:I bought this book in the beginning of the year after coming into some gift card money for my local indie bookstore. Last summer, a mental health counselor on campus had recommended it as something I might look into; he hadn’t read the book himself, but it had come highly recommended from a colleague. I’m glad I picked up a copy, but I’m not sure it’s as good as I hoped it would be.
webcomics and the importance of content aggregation
- kudos:One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.
appearance in MSICT recruitment video
- kudos:I recently got a chance to be recorded as part of a video that my unit’s Information and Communication Technology master’s program put together for recruitment purposes. I feel weird about participating in marketing in an increasingly corporate university environment, but I like our program, I believe in what I had to say about the program, and I was pleased to hear what students (including one I advised!) had to say about what they got out of the program, so I’m pretty happy with the final product:
slides for guest lecture on platform perspectives, digital labor, and the digital divide
- kudos:A few months ago, some colleagues reached out to ask if I would be willing to record a guest lecture for our library science program’s LIS 600: Information in Society. In particular, they were interested in having me record something for a week on the digital divide. I am conversant on that topic, but it’s not an area of specialty for me, so I was unsure about it until I realized that some of the readings for that week touch on topics like platform design that I am really interested in through my work on social media communities.
interviewed for Salt Lake Tribune article on far-right influences in Mormon Twitter
- kudos:I recently had the wonderful opportunity to be interviewed by Salt Lake Tribune religion reporter Tamarra Kemsley about work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the reactionary DezNat movement within Mormon Twitter. Our conversation largely focused on the article that Amy and I published last year on far-right and anti-feminist influences within DezNat, but I got to pull in some observations from an article on DezNat perceptions of religious authority that is currently under review and some work on broad patterns in DezNat activity between early 2019 and late 2022 that we’ll be presenting at October’s meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (more specifically, within a session organized by the Mormon Social Science Association).
- kudos:
I follow higher ed coverage from both The Guardian and my local paper, so when “UK” shows up in my RSS reader, I nearly always have to pause before I can parse whether it refers to the University of Kentucky or the United Kingdom.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It'
- kudos:This is a darker version of some of the thoughts I had when I first heard about the “PhD comparison.” Before you click through to the article, I also want to use this short post as a complaint that I don’t think “intelligence” is a thing—and that PhDs certainly wouldn’t be a measure of it if it were. link to “ChatGPT Now Has PhD-Level Intelligence, and the Poor Personal Choices to Prove It”
- kudos:
Woke up from a dream that I’d been charged with sharing results for federal grant applications from my college. Looked up myself, and was relieved to not get the grant that I’d applied for—but surprised to be awarded funds for a “bike book” project I didn’t remember proposing.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'On What We Lose: Chai, AI and Nostalgia | Punya Mishra's Web'
- kudos:I appreciate Punya’s essay here. I’m very grumpy about generative AI, but that doesn’t change the fact that some grumpiness has more to do with moral panic than a reasoned response—but THAT doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for some of this kind of careful nostalgia that Punya is sharing. link to “On What We Lose: Chai, AI and Nostalgia | Punya Mishra’s Web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'My Encounter With the Fantasy-Industrial Complex'
- kudos:We should all be worried about what’s happening here. link to “My Encounter With the Fantasy-Industrial Complex”
- kudos:
Summer is my traditional time for messing around with my Hugo site. It’s relaxing, but it’s also professional development, given that I teach content management systems every fall.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A major disinformation research center’s future looks uncertain'
- kudos:What a sucky situation. link to “A major disinformation research center’s future looks uncertain”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'UK board votes to dissolve university Senate, outlines role of new faculty body'
- kudos:I have tried to be open minded about this, and I am always hesitant to take a position on something that I haven’t done all the homework on. I also agree with the point the president’s made that staff, students, and non-tenure-track faculty don’t have enough of a voice, so I’m open to changing what inclusive governance looks like at UK. This doesn’t seem to me to be it, though. Even without having done all the homework, the president’s arguments don’t land for me, and I don’t see how removing the faculty’s voice gives staff and students more of a voice.
research on anti-feminist online Mormonism referenced in Salt Lake Tribune column
- kudos:I enjoy reading Natalie Brown’s columns for the Salt Lake Tribune, so it was a real honor that she referenced research that Amy Chapman and I did on the “DezNat” Twitter movement in last Saturday’s installment. In particular, Brown referenced a comment I made to the Tribune last summer that our findings highlighted anti-feminist influences on the DezNat movement (which has typically been criticized for its far right influences) and that while the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'UK, KCTCS create pathways allowing community college students to transfer into UK'
- kudos:I’m all for this, but in line with earlier posts from today, I wish it weren’t just about workplace readiness. Higher ed needs to be more than that. link to “UK, KCTCS create pathways allowing community college students to transfer into UK”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Academia’s emphasis on job training harms free speech, bodes ill for democracy | Opinion'
- kudos:Some important points in this op-ed from a UK colleague. I was just thinking earlier today how I have trouble getting concerned about the “summer slide” when I know that even K-12 education is increasingly seen as an economic—not democratic—priority. link to “Academia’s emphasis on job training harms free speech, bodes ill for democracy | Opinion”
follow up on not having control over my own research
- kudos:Back in December, I wrote a frustrated post about an article I’d submitted to a special issue that was now being repackaged into an edited volume, in which my research would appear as a chapter. At the time, I wrote about how frustrated I was at the lack of control I had over my own research output. I might well have consented to having my work reprinted in this new format, but I was frustrated that my consent was neither sought nor necessary for the process.
- kudos:
Let’s be honest: I’d much rather be at my department’s writing retreat today (with free lunch, to boot!) and that my kid be going to (definitely not free) summer camp. All that said, I’m deeply grateful that a professor’s schedule is flexible enough that I can respond to a sick kid pretty easily.