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.
My CV is available here.
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Society for the Scientific Study of Religion/Mormon Social Science Association slides from this week
- kudos:A few hours after presenting at AECT on Thursday morning, I hopped on a plane to Salt Lake City, so that I could attend the 2023 conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion—especially the sessions associated with the Mormon Social Science Association. I’m giving three presentations today and wanted to include my slides here for anyone else who’s interested: I’d be happy to talk more about any of these!
AECT slides from this week
- kudos:On Thursday morning, I presented some work I’ve been doing with Dan Krutka at a session of the Association of Educational Communications and Technology. Here’s the title and abstract of our presentation: Teachers on Far-Right Social Media: The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Informal Learning We present the results of our studying a teachers’ group on a far-right social media platform. The identity of the platform and the persistence of far-right agenda setting overwhelmed any educational intentions of the group, which therefore had little to offer teachers looking to improve their craft.
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I was dreaming that some STEM-type was criticizing Bachelor of Arts degrees as “BS” and dream-me flew into a rage ready to defend the humanities until I woke up and realized that his joke didn’t even work.
attending a conference 'among my own kind'
- kudos:One paper that I read and reread as I was starting to get into Twitter research was Anatoliy Gruzd, Barry Wellman, and Yuri Takhteyev’s “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” published in a 2011 issue of American Behavioral Scientist. I thought of this paper again yesterday; more specifically, I thought about the anecdote that the article begins with: Barry and Beverly Wellman moved to Toronto more than 40 years ago.
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Is it too much to ask to put virtual conference attendees on a different listserv? One that doesn’t include the pleas to join the in-person social events taking place while I’m trying to clean my kitchen and put kiddo to bed?
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Thanks to a combination of personal hubris and inconvenient coincidences, this week involves 4 presentations at 2 conferences, catching up on 3 weeks of grading, and writing P&T letters for 4 colleagues. Hooray for free wifi on my flights.
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My Mormon Studies research will probably never get the citations that my edtech work has, but it’s neat how much more layperson and media interest it generates. That said, I hope late-night weekend presentations stay rare because I’m very tired this morning.
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I’m becoming more and more skeptical of “improve teaching and learning” as a motivation for education (and especially edtech) research—it’s a noble goal, but it distracts us from so many other important questions.
whose voices does ClassDojo prioritize?
- kudos:This morning, I read an excellent piece by Lam Thuy Vo at The Markup expressing concern about how services like Amazon’s Ring cameras can distort police priorities and perpetuate bias. Here’s a good summary passage: As a reporter, I’ve always been interested in systems that disadvantage some people—when it comes to policing, they are often Black or Latino—while prioritizing the wishes of a smaller, much more powerful subset—often affluent White folks.
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Don’t tell my students, but half the reason I have them work with Hugo in my web content management class is because I enjoy working with it so much. Over the past week, I’ve hacked together an author taxonomy for our class site, and I’m super pleased with it.
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You know, I think the combination of research training in ed tech and currently teaching ICT classes makes me particularly critical of the “digital native” idea.
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Just had a student explain that such-and-such a file wasn’t in a specific folder, it was just on their computer, in case anyone was wondering how digital native rhetoric is holding up. Need to bookmark that 2021 article from The Verge.
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I think academia undervalues teaching and that teaching-focused faculty deserve more status, recognition, and compensation. Yet, I’m still suspicious of the new BYU-Idaho president’s comments on the need for “a faculty free of the obligations of research.”
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing reminds me as much of teaching French as does teaching programming. It takes a lot of the same metacognition to learn both, and it’s really hard to teach that metacognition.
upcoming research talk on DezNat for Bainbridge Latter-day Saint fireside series
- kudos:A couple of months ago, Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune mentioned the work that Amy Chapman and I have been doing on the far-right-influenced DezNat movement. Shortly after Peggy’s article was published, someone who coordinates an unofficial series of Latter-day Saint-related firesides reached out to us about speaking to their group about our research on the DezNat movement. Before accepting, we made it clear that our work isn’t devotional, neither of us are practicing Latter-day Saints, and our work could be understood as critical of cultural and institutional Mormonism; however, the fireside organizers said that they were used to getting into controversial topics related to Mormonism and that our work was welcome with them.
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Because we have a library science program, my dept. often gets sample books from publishers that faculty can take for free. Today, kiddo is with me at work, and one of the new sample books just happens to be a long graphic novel from an author she likes. Serendipity is great.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:14:04 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
- kudos:Soooo very close to being done here, but need to take care of something else.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:43:34 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
- kudos:It’s a work weekend, and these posts need coding. Nearly finished with these, but now it’s time to wind down for the day.
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I don’t know if I’m using OneDrive wrong or if it is just that much worse than Google Drive for syncing local files.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:38:11 on 'publish data ethics in educational technology chapter'
- kudos:Family is out of town this weekend, so I’m catching up with work, including going over the proofs for this long-in-the-making chapter.
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Another set of proofs, another set of complaints about a copyeditor making changes to my writing in ways that distort my meaning. If I get grumpy about a human doing my writing for me, why would I ever want generative AI to do it?
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository | Techdirt'
- kudos:I bristle a bit at Moody’s suggestion that academics are dumb for signing over copyright—it’s dumb that we have to, but there are systemic issues at play here. Yet, especially now with tenure taken care of, I do wonder if we consent too readily to the system. link to “Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository | Techdirt”
📝 writeblog: spent 0:26:43 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
- kudos:Squeezed some coding in between meetings!
Novák, Orbán, and Ballard: the far right and Mormon boundary maintenance
- kudos:Next month, I’m flying to Salt Lake City to attend the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present some of my work about social media, religion, and the far right. I’ll be presenting on three different projects at SSSR—this was biting off more than I could chew, but since two of them connect with Mormonism, Salt Lake suggested the possibility of a larger-than-usual audience for that work, so there you go.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Leveling the technological playing field with Apple | UKNow'
- kudos:Look, I’m glad my university is aware of and responding to the digital divide, but I’d appreciate a more critical treatment of what we’re doing. This sounds almost like ad copy for Apple, and it’s falling into a lot of tired edtech tropes about how technology must necessarily improve learning. link to “Leveling the technological playing field with Apple | UKNow”
📝 writeblog: spent 0:16:40 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
- kudos:Squeezed in a few minutes of coding before meeting with a student.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:56:02 on 'publish UNHCR Instagram study'
- kudos:I’ve recently been supporting a grad student with this study of messaging strategies on the UNHCR’s Instagram account. We’re meeting later this week, so I needed to get some coding done!
new publication: ClassDojo and student conflation of educational technologies
- kudos:Last year, Daniela DiGiacomo, Sarah Barriage, and I published an article on student and principal perceptions of ClassDojo. Our findings weren’t entirely what we expected, even if they weren’t a huge surprise. In short, students and practitioners don’t always share the concerns about edtech platforms (like ClassDojo) that are gaining steam in the critical educational technology literature. I don’t say this to shame edtech users for not thinking the way that we ivory tower types do—rather, it speaks to a long-recognized tension between theoretical and conceptual concerns held by academics vs.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:16:16 on 'publish Mormon conservatism on Gab study'
- kudos:I need to present on this in about a month at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, so it’s time to hussle! I spent some time coding Gab posts according to a codebook I put together last week.
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I don’t know if I’m pleased or disturbed by how often the classic British political sitcom “Yes, Minister” is relevant to my work in academia.
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One of the Vice journalists currently reporting on the Tim Ballard allegations just followed my (now dormant) Twitter account, and I’m going to take that as validation of my research on far-right Mormonism.
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It’s already indefensible that ClassDojo promises greater access to teachers for parents willing to pay, but these features also translate into letting richer parents put more pressure on teachers. This business model is awful.
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Another paper, another fight with copyeditors about not capitalizing danah boyd’s name.
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Journal copyeditors are great when they fix things, but when they break my sentences and don’t ask questions about “[information removed for blinding]”, I wonder what the point is.
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Journal copyeditor changed a bunch of first-person language in our abstract to third-person “the authors,” and I am peeved.
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Every copyright transfer I sign destroys another part of my soul.