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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My most recent research compliance completion certificate was clearly thrown together in a few lines of HTML. Not only does that feel especially phoned in, but it also makes it harder to save for my records, which is the only useful aspect of one of these certificates.


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.




Teaching my project-focused WordPress class keeps me humble: I answer so many student questions with “I don’t know how to do that, but I know it’s possible. Let’s figure it out together.”




In our big content management systems class project this semester, students are knocking it out of the park in a way that makes me proud of them but also reassures me that maybe I understand this stuff despite no formal training after all.




Sometimes I feel like I’m nagging my data science students when I tell them to use function x in R instead of almost-identical function y. Other times, I remember that function y has awful output that makes grading their work a pain, and I stop worrying.




Some switch has recently flipped in my brain so that I can hand out Bs, Cs, and worse without being anxious about it. I still have real concerns about grading as a concept, but I’ve stopped worrying about taking off points as though I’m the one being penalized.




I do not believe in using AI detection software, but I reserve the right to be annoyed by the students whom I suspect of taking advantage of that belief.


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: my thoughts on '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. link to “Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos”




That feeling when data you’re coding is just so bizarre that you don’t know what to make of it. Online communities are a heck of a thing to study.


🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren'



What a gross offer to receive. link to “Invitation to Commit Scientific Fraud – Ryan and Debi & Toren”




You know you’re working in the right place when you casually bring up Squirrel Girl in the copy room, and someone replies “oh, yeah, she defeated Thanos.”


📚 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.




I usually do too much qualitative work for them to be useful, but .Rmd-based slides are a delight to work in.


🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '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. link to “WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin”


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: my thoughts on '‘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. link to “‘The Community Is In Chaos:’ WordPress.org Now Requires You Denounce Affiliation With WP Engine To Log In”




This week, I’ve encountered Ursula K. LeGuin’s anarchist vision of what a university could be as well as a number of reminders of how much things aren’t like that vision.




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'



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



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'



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”




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



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.




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'



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.




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'



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'



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”




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.




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



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.




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'



Interesting—and hopeful—read. link to “How MIT copes without Elsevier”




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.




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. 🤞🏻