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:
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.
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Catching up on grading today, and I’ve been laughing out loud at some of my students’ Hypothesis annotations of class readings. I’m so glad I use this instead of discussion board responses: It’s so much more organic and creates more social presence in online classes.
- kudos:
Teaching password security in class today, so time to talk about Ozymandias’s total lack thereof in Watchmen (and how dumb it is for a computer to say “almost there!” when you enter an incomplete password).
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy'
- kudos:Gab’s been showing up more in the news lately, so I guess I should dust off some of that Gab data I have and move it closer to publication. link to “How anti-vaccine activists and the far right are trying to build a parallel economy”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'College DEI programs survive as clock runs out on KY Republican supermajority'
- kudos:This feels too good to be true? But if the legislation is really dead (at least this time around), I’ll take it. link to “College DEI programs survive as clock runs out on KY Republican supermajority”
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I’m getting this second-hand, but it sounds like the textbook for one of our classes is giving students the impression that Aaron Swartz was a cybercriminal, and now I have lots of curriculum questions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Class Is Canceled Until Further Notice While I Do My Job'
- kudos:Too much truth in this. link to “Class Is Canceled Until Further Notice While I Do My Job”
religious authority, Mormonism, and Instagram
- kudos:As I hinted at in a recent linkpost, something really interesting happened this week that serves as a sort of microcosm of my research interests related to online Mormonism and religious authority. Here’s a rundown of what happened, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune (and republished here via MSN). First, a leader of the official Latter-day Saint women’s organization gave a sermon last Sunday, one quote from which was uploaded to the official Latter-day Saint Instagram account:
do you want to be good or to be optimized?
- kudos:This Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic from yesterday spoke to me at a deep level: My first thoughts went to generative AI, an area in which I feel like a fetishization of optimization is crowding out really important questions of what is good. As I put it in a university survey earlier today, there are undeniable benefits to the use of AI tools, but there are important questions as to who benefits.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Call for Submissions: The Deleted Comments Department - Exponent II'
- kudos:Bookmarking for future research. What a fascinating (if frustrating) interplay of social media platforms and religious authority. link to “Call for Submissions: The Deleted Comments Department - Exponent II”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Hackers are targeting a surprising group of people: young public school students'
- kudos:Audrey Watters was warning about something like this almost a decade ago. It’s time for edtech folks to step up and recognize that technology in schools goes far beyond that exciting new classroom tech—and that we can’t do something about stuff like this if we’re overly focused on efficiency and effectiveness. link to “Hackers are targeting a surprising group of people: young public school students”
what would Doctorow University look like?
- kudos:One of my favorite academic anecdotes to share in conference rooms and university hallways is for my dissertation defense, two of my committee members were there via telepresence robot. This is less impressive post-2020, when a lot of defenses happen entirely over Zoom, but it’s still different than an online-only defense, so the story still attracts some interest. At any rate, as good as I thought my story was, I got a real kick out of this bit in the prologue to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:
hooray for faculty collegiality
- kudos:My unit is currently hiring three new faculty members, which means that we’re right in the middle of nine(!) campus visits. We’re all getting well practiced at talking about the strengths of our unit and why people might want to work here. One thing that we’ve said over and over in meetings and interviews with candidates is that we work together well and get along with each other, too (we also acknowledge that this is not true 100% of the time, but that the exceptions prove the rule).
- kudos:
Several times in recent weeks, I’ve packed a lunch, “realized” I’d forgotten a fork, rushed to add one to my lunch bag, and then opened my lunch on campus to find two forks in there. I often joke that I became a professor because I already had the “absent-minded” part down, but still…