BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Associate Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science. My CV is available here, you can browse my research here, and my Google Scholar profile here

Supported by digital methods, my research focuses on online social spaces, community practices within these spaces, and the influence of the platforms where they are found. My research is interdisciplinary, exploring spaces associated with teaching and learning, Mormonism, the far right, or even combinations of these themes.

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I sometimes write in French! To only see the French content (which is also available below, alongside English content), please click on [fr] in the site header.



So, it turns out that spending time with Jacques Ellul’s mid-20th century critiques of systematization, abstraction, “productivity,” and “efficiency” does NOT make it any easier to write letters evaluating colleagues’ progress toward tenure.


🔗 linkblog: Etats-Unis : un chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par l’administration Trump »



C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.


🔗 linkblog: UK ends relationship with nonprofit amid Trump admin investigation



On one hand, if the university’s connections are tenuous, I can understand making the easy move to get the administration off our back—especially when I’m confident that UK is pushing back against NIH indirect costs and other issues. On the other, I certainly hope that our response to every attack isn’t going to be to roll over and wash our hands of things.


🔗 linkblog: NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider 'Scientific Exile,' French University Says'



I mean, I’ve always wanted to live and work in France, but I’ve never wanted to feel like I would have to.


doubling down on Hugo in ICT 302



I’ve been teaching my department’s class on content management systems since Fall 2019, which means that I’m coming up on my seventh(!) time with the course next August. Every time that I’ve taught it, I’ve used the Hugo static site software and the WordPress CMS as examples of content management concepts. WordPress is the more (most!) popular web CMS out there, and so it’s always been my main area of focus; I think that Hugo does a wonderful job of illustrating some CMS concepts, but it also has a higher technical learning curve, so I’ve always felt conflicted about its role in the classroom.


🔗 linkblog: Changes Our University Is Making to Pre-Comply with Possible Future Regulations'



Laugh to keep from crying.


🔗 linkblog: Bill professors fear might erode tenure at Kentucky universities passes House • Kentucky Lantern'



Hmmm. Don’t love this.




In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen two different CFPs that apply perfectly to a paper I wrote and then abandoned after a rejection and a paper I’ve wanted to write but had no good reason to. This may be what gets me back into a research groove this semester.


research referenced in Salt Lake Tribune article on social media and Mormon masculinity



This last weekend, I made a brief appearance in an article from the Salt Lake Tribune discussing the influence of social media on Mormon masculinity. As I’ve noted before, the Tribune aggressively paywalls, but it’s hard to fault them. I get access to their religion coverage by paying $3/month to the Patreon for their Mormon Land podcast. My appearance is brief—a simple mention that Jordan Peterson is mentioned a number of times in a forum site I’m studying with colleagues—but those colleagues (Levi Sands at the University of Iowa and Amy Chapman at Arizona State) have more to say about the unsurprising, ambiguous, and worrying overlap between figures like Peterson and Andrew Tate and online Mormonism.


🔗 linkblog: The EPFL community gets a Mastodon server'



This is very cool, especially the SSO bit.




I feel like half of ClassDojo’s business model is “let’s prey on parental anxiety.”


the purpose of research isn't to fund universities



My stress and anxiety levels have been high ever since the second Trump administration began and immediately started taking an axe to all sorts of things that one should not take an axe to. For admittedly selfish reasons, though, I’ve been particularly anxious since Friday, when the NIH announced that it was dramatically cutting its support to universities (and other research institutions) in the form of indirect costs. I don’t do NIH-funded work, but we’re a very medically focused campus, and there’s no way that the $40 million that the University estimates we could lose over the next year isn’t going to have ripple effects across campus (not to mention the fact that my colleagues in the College of Communication and Information regularly look to the NIH as a source of funding health communication research).




Been waiting for this email all day: the University of Kentucky estimates that the NIH limits on indirect funding, if maintained, would cost us $40 million over the next year.




Me, all of December: “Next semester, I have a course release and a once-a-week evening class. I’m going to get so much research done during the day!” Me, on February 7th: “Wow, it’s great to finally be getting to research this semester.”


🔗 linkblog: Can anyone stop President Musk?'



I’m teaching a social media research methods class this semester, and I’m pretty sure I need to bring this article up in this week’s class.


Jacques Ellul's technique and generative AI



Throughout my career, I’ve been a data-first researcher, and theory has always been one of my weak areas. This is not to say that I dismiss the importance of theory: I appreciate danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s critique of Chris Anderson’s “the numbers speak for themselves” in their 2012 paper Critical Questions for Big Data as much as I appreciate Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s similar critique in their book Data Feminism.




Tonight’s ethics lecture for my internet research class this semester will include a brief discussion of protecting researchers, so I got to go through my collection of screenshots of when a reactionary Mormon group took issue with our studying their posts.


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I intentionally keep receiving ClassDojo marketing emails because I keep thinking I ought to archive them all to write an autoethnography of my (negative) experience with it as a parent with an ed tech PhD, but I keep not doing that and just being angry at the emails.




I’m proud of the research I’ve done on online communities taking cues from dark corners of the internet, and I’m glad that some reporters find it interesting. It’s still uncomfortable to read certain excerpts from my data out loud to people over the phone.




A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.




No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.


🔗 linkblog: Evolution journal editors resign en masse'



More suckiness in the world of academic publishing.




Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…




I’m stress-eating banana bread to put off grading, how’s your end of semester going?




This is a busy week, so I really don’t want to be spending time updating a shared course that I’m not even teaching next semester… but I am getting to learn more about SSHing into a VM, and that’s legitimately cool.




Reread some feedback from a journal editor after a couple of days, and while I still disagree with it, it’s at least more reasonable than I remembered it being.




I will never not be angry about the term STEAM, even when it’s being used in good faith by people I respect.


trapped between generative AI and student surveillance



We’re getting to the end of the semester here at the University of Kentucky, which is my traditional time to get overly introspective about grading. There’s a lot on my mind at the end of this semester, but one thing that has popped into my head tonight and that I think will be quick to write about is a dilemma that I’m facing this semester, when I’ve had faced more suspicions about student use of generative AI than in any previous semester.


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.




This semester, I have learned that: 1) if I have building toys on my desk, I will turn them into a robot, and 2) if I have a robot on my desk, I will fiddle with it during Zoom meetings.


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🔗 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.




I love having a co-author who can provide the theoretical framing to turn my weird data from a dark corner of the internet into an interesting argument.


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Glad I already have tenure or else I’d be a lot more worried about what my colleagues think of me holding my numb fingers under running water in the break room, still dressed in four layers of warm and reflective clothing and before I’ve had a chance to fix my helmet hair.




Between my kid’s nascent interest in search engines and my students’ using generative AI despite my discouraging it, I’m thinking a lot this week about directly teaching epistemology as a foundation for other concepts.




Currently feeling some Chidi Anagonye levels of nihilism about grading.


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