BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science
I am an interdisciplinary 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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new publication: Canvas and student privacy awareness
For the past couple of years, my colleague Dr. Meghan Dowell and I have been working on a paper on students’ awareness of what data the Canvas learning management system collects (and subsequently makes available to certain stakeholders). I’m a fan of Nick Proferes’s paper [Information Flow Solipsism in an Exploratory Study of Beliefs About Twitter] and have long wanted to do something similar related to LMSs. This is even more Meghan’s area of specialty than mine, though, so I was grateful that she was also interested in the subject and took the lead in turning this idea into reality.
🔗 linkblog: A Faculty Member’s Self-Evaluation at the End of the Semester'
McSweeney’s content on academia is always darkly hilarious, and this is no exception.
🔗 linkblog: Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research''
It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining.
on the performativity of teaching
Before writing what I want to write, I want to make a few things clear. Teaching is an important and noble profession, I love being a teacher, and it’s possible (and often easy) to distinguish between better and worse ways of teaching. With that out of the way, I want to start off this post by arguing that teaching is less of “a thing” than learning is. That is, learning is the real phenomenon here, and teaching is sort of an auxiliary practice that aims to support learning but can’t ever quite be the same thing.
I think the conference hotel wi-fi is blocking competitors' websites?
I’m currently at the 2024 conference for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, where the Mormon Social Science Association always organizes a number of panels. (I presented on a reactionary Mormon Twitter hashtag earlier today!). MSSA traditionally has a Saturday evening no-host dinner, and as long as I’ve attended (okay, only since 2021), we’ve relied on a foodie board member to find a place for us to eat. Rick isn’t here this year, and somehow that got turned into my becoming responsible for finding us a restaurant to meet, eat, and chat at.
🔗 linkblog: Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos'
Wild to read this so soon after finishing Character Limit, because I’m getting very similar vibes.
🔗 linkblog: Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren'
What a gross offer to receive.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter, by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac
Like Zoë Schiffer’s Extremely Hardcore, I think this book will be even more valuable in the future than it is right now. I also wish I’d waited to read it for a bit instead of so soon after Schiffer’s book!
What a wild, depressing story the Musk acquisition has been. I appreciate this book for giving more insight into the pre-Musk troubles of the company, but it still doesn’t shy away from how disastrous one billionaire’s ego has been.
🔗 linkblog: WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin'
I am slowly writing something related to open source governance this semester, so naturally this story keeps getting wilder to give me things to think about.
bad faith uses of scientific 'rigor'
I have conflicted feelings about productivity books, but even as I increasingly reject the emphasis on productivity, I do find that there are some gems in these books that are helpful to me as I try to keep my life organized across all of its dimensions. While rereading one of these books over the summer, I came across the following quote (which appears to be a misquotation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
🔗 linkblog: ‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In'
This was a hell of a semester to decide to not dedicate a whole lecture to WordPress in my CMS class.
🔗 linkblog: More academic publishers are doing AI deals'
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.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Vigilant, by Cory Doctorow
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: If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed'
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.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, by Zoë Schiffer
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.