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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🔗 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?
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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.
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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).
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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…
far-right Mormonism and the boundaries of Twitter hashtags
- kudos:There are a couple of weeks before the deadline to submit abstracts for the Mormon Social Science Association’s sessions at the 2024 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so I’ve been filling some nooks and crannies of my busy work week by looking at some Twitter data. Last year, I published with my colleague Amy Chapman a qualitative look at the #DezNat Twitter hashtag, which blends Mormon orthodoxy with far-right and anti-feminist thinking.
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This week has enough writing (and deadlines!) that the utilitarian appeal of ChatGPT is finally clear to me; and yet, it’s also so much clearer that I would rather do fewer things well and on my own.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'UK looks to change role of faculty senate. Employees worry it will take away authority'
- kudos:Need to read more on this before I fully understand what’s being proposed and what the consequences will be. I struggle, however, with the argument that reducing the power of faculty is somehow improving faculty governance. link to “UK looks to change role of faculty senate. Employees worry it will take away authority”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living in a Fjällräven Parka'
- kudos:I really ought to be reading more McSweeney’s. link to “How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome in Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living in a Fjällräven Parka”
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Present me forgot to take pseudoephedrine this morning and was dreading having a congestion headache all day, but past me left a stash in my campus office that I’ve just raided. Thanks, past me!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI'
- kudos:This is straight-up awful. Shame on the university for doing this. link to “University of Michigan Sells Recordings of Study Groups and Office Hours to Train AI”
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Trying to figure out which circle of hell it is when three people in a row fail to recognize a message is coming from a university listserv and reply all with “hey, think you meant to send this to someone else!”
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I spent 12 hours last week working on a small, open journal’s WordPress site, and I came away from that with a new, begrudging respect for what they’ve done with the Gutenberg site builder. The same things that made me cranky in terms of my personal site make sense for larger scale projects.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'UK president to legislature: Proposed DEI, tenure legislation is ‘deeply concerning’ for Kentucky colleges'
- kudos:I appreciate it when our president speaks up against legislation that would hurt the University of Kentucky. link to “UK president to legislature: Proposed DEI, tenure legislation is ‘deeply concerning’ for Kentucky colleges”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on ' Ky. Senate passes bill to limit DEI in higher education in the name of free speech'
- kudos:Well, crap. Not a lot of hope that House will stop this. link to " Ky. Senate passes bill to limit DEI in higher education in the name of free speech"
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It’s remarkable how much of my service in academic organizations has come down to “oh, hey, you know WordPress, don’t you?”