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:
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.
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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”
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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.
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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).
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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”
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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”
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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.
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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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI launches programs making ChatGPT cheaper for schools and nonprofits'
- kudos:Oh, please no no no. I usually read a whole article before posting it, but just the first few paragraphs are giving me such a visceral reaction that I don’t know if I’ll make it through the rest. The existing tech giants already have such a hold on us, let’s please not let OpenAI in the door. link to “OpenAI launches programs making ChatGPT cheaper for schools and nonprofits”
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I don’t know how this is possible, but I’m now at a stage of my career where I’m giving advice to junior faculty and newly-minted PhDs. I honestly don’t know if that diminishes or increases my feelings of imposter syndrome.
follow up on research ethics implications of Twitter's 'general amnesty'
- kudos:This is just a few words to say that this post that I wrote back in December 2022 has suddenly become relevant. In short, some of my recent work has been on an online Mormon community that has some overlaps with the far-right. In between my collection of the data and eventual publication of our various articles, my co-author and I have noted some prominent accounts’ being suspended from Twitter. Because we work hard to not use identifiable quotes in our writing, and because of Elon Musk’s decision to unsuspend nearly all suspended accounts after taking the platform over, I’ve been checking accounts I knew to previously be suspended as we work on a new manuscript.
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This morning, I’m reviewing a manuscript while watching a “cab ride” video on YouTube and thinking about how much calmer academic work is once final grades have been submitted.
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Today is the first day of that sacred season of “I’m done with school but kiddo isn’t yet,” so naturally, I am spending it with a kiddo home sick from school. 😅
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In hindsight, I should not have waited for the day I wanted to submit final grades to do the obligatory annual reset of my institutional password.
assessment as proof of learning or as learning itself?
- kudos:Recently, an idea has been bubbling in my head that’s the culmination of months—even years—of thinking about how I assess in my courses. I’ve typically taken the pretty-standard approach that assessment is the process of students’ proving that they’ve learned something. What if, though, assessment is itself the proof of the process of students’ learning something. That is, what if we doled out points for students’ proving that they appropriately participated in learning activities and then trusted the learning to happen on its own?
- kudos:
I reject surveillance culture in my teaching, which means I don’t ever make a systematic effort to check for evidence of cheating or plagiarism, which just means that the obvious evidence I find anyway just makes me all the more angry.
in memory of a mentor
- kudos:This morning, Mormon studies scholar Dr. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye passed away after a years-long struggle with cancer. Melissa was an amazing scholar, fantastic mentor, and just great person, and I think a lot of people—even just those who knew her professionally—are going to be spending time writing, thinking, and crying about her today and in the weeks to come. Other people will have more, and more important, things to say than I do, but I’m deeply grateful for Melissa, and I want to show that gratitude by sharing a few thoughts of my own.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'We Are Not a School—We Are a Hospital System with a Football Team'
- kudos:I don’t know if I love or hate that McSweeney’s has so much content for academia. link to “We Are Not a School—We Are a Hospital System with a Football Team”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal'
- kudos:This criticism of “learning things they won’t use in real life” has always been frustrating to me, so I appreciate this response. link to “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal”
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It’s convenient that I’ve been reconsidering my longtime taboo about swearing at the same time that “enshittification” is becoming such a professionally salient word.