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:
I think what bothers me about “improving learning” approaches to educational technology is that it tends to prioritize utilitarianism at the expense of everything else. Ethical concerns about AI don’t matter if grades go up, what students should learn about is largely shoved aside, and so forth.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant | Punya Mishra's Web'
- kudos:Punya is a bit warmer on AI than I am, so I wasn’t sure what I would be reading based off of the title, but this is one of the best things I’ve read on generative AI in education. These companies have so much power and could use a little more Parkerian responsibility. link to “The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant | Punya Mishra’s Web”
- kudos:
Can anyone recommend a newsletter/CRM platform for a small academic organization with a limited budget? I’m managing our membership and emails through Mailchimp right now, but they’re pivoting hard to AI, and I’m ready to leave once I find a solid alternative.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Generative AI course statement – George Veletsianos, PhD'
- kudos:George’s example statement is one worth bookmarking. link to “Generative AI course statement – George Veletsianos, PhD”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'House education chair says professor review bill is not aimed at limiting tenure in Kentucky - Kentucky Lantern'
- kudos:You can say that, but it’s hard to understand how this isn’t limiting tenure. link to “House education chair says professor review bill is not aimed at limiting tenure in Kentucky - Kentucky Lantern”
- kudos:
ClassDojo sent me an automated “see how this week went!” email today even though school hasn’t been in session all week, and I feel like that’s telling.
on Scrabble, French, and what it means to learn
- kudos:In the summer of 2015, New Zealander Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championships despite not speaking a word of French. I heard this story on a Radio Télévision Suisse news show repackaged as a podcast (probably Le 12h30, but I can’t remember exactly) and wrote myself a note that if I ever got a chance to teach a class on games and learning, I would use this story in it.
- kudos:
I mean this as a general observation and not generational handwringing, but it’s amazing how many cues my students take from YouTubers when recording video presentations for my class.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘Student Should Have a Healthy-Looking BMI’: How Universities Bend Over Backwards to Accommodate Food Delivery Robots'
- kudos:I work on a campus with Starship robots, so this was a fascinating read. link to “‘Student Should Have a Healthy-Looking BMI’: How Universities Bend Over Backwards to Accommodate Food Delivery Robots”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides (16 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some interesting thoughts here from Doctorow. Makes me want to put more effort into OER. link to “Pluralistic: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides (16 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
- kudos:
It’s a Chromebook-heavy “non-traditional instruction” snow day for kiddo today, and I’m having a lot of thoughts about Larry Cuban and that recent UNESCO report about emergency remote teaching during the COVID shutdowns.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox'
- kudos:Lots of interesting comments in this article. I haven’t been following this story as closely as I should, but it—and articles like this—are making me think that I need to think harder about plagiarism: what it is and how I should respond to it. link to “Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox”
- kudos:
I like peer reviewing manuscripts that cite my work, and I especially like correcting manuscripts that misunderstand my work, but my favorite is reviewing a manuscript that gives my work too much credit so that I can say “hey, this guy doesn’t know as much as you think he does.”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 2 – Platypus'
- kudos:Strong follow up to the last post I just linked to. link to “Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 2 – Platypus”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 1 – Platypus'
- kudos:Lots of helpful thoughts in this post. Makes me think about the value of Mastodon for the academy—and other spaces that I care about. Also, I love seeing Doctorow and academic thinking come together. link to “Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 1 – Platypus”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'TikTok Quietly Curtails Data Tool Used by Critics - The New York Times'
- kudos:Don’t love it when platforms shut down tools because they don’t like outside research. Gift Link link to “TikTok Quietly Curtails Data Tool Used by Critics - The New York Times”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Are education and learning engineering problems? – George Veletsianos, PhD'
- kudos:I’m grateful for George’s comments here. link to “Are education and learning engineering problems? – George Veletsianos, PhD”
assessment statements in my Spring 2024 graduate syllabus
- kudos:I ended the Fall 2023 semester with a lot of anxiety and frustration about grades, and there was enough of both that I wound up making a lot of changes to a graduate class that I was sure I was going to keep mostly the same from last year. Not all of these changes were assessment-related (I replaced a lot of readings and shuffled content around some), but I also more-or-less threw out the assessment structure that I’ve been using since 2019 to replace it with something minimalist and closely tied to the course’s learning objectives.
- kudos:
One of my favorite perks of academia is finding a personally interesting book through the university library.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Wife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism - The New York Times'
- kudos:Plagiarism is clearly bad, but its weaponization as part of a culture war could well he worse. I don’t love the idea of its escalation. Gift link. link to “Wife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism - The New York Times”
- kudos:
It’s that time of year where I have a text editor open alongside Canvas so that I can strip out all the extra HTML tags that LMSs like to add to my content.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Kentucky Senate leader files bill to curb 'divisive concepts' in public higher education - Kentucky Lantern'
- kudos:Welp, here’s something to pay attention to this legislative session. link to “Kentucky Senate leader files bill to curb ‘divisive concepts’ in public higher education - Kentucky Lantern”
- kudos:
My department has a copyright class on the books that’s never been taught—even when I offered to take it on after being hired. I understand why that offer wasn’t taken up, but I can’t help but think about all I could do in that class with Mickey Mouse this semester.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'UK School of Information Science researchers awarded nearly $700,000 in IMLS grants | UKNow'
- kudos:Proud of my colleagues! link to “UK School of Information Science researchers awarded nearly $700,000 in IMLS grants | UKNow”
publication copyright and reprinting consent
- kudos:Ben has been one of my best students over the past 5.5 years. He was a non-traditional student who flunked out of UK decades ago, went on to be a successful small business owner elsewhere in the country, and then leapt at the chance to come back to UK through an online degree completion program. As part of that program, he took one of the classes I was teaching at the time, which counted toward general education credit.
on the arbitrary nature of grades
- kudos:As often happens at the end of a semester, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about grades: What they mean, what purpose they serve, and how to best assign them. In thinking about this, I’m also thinking about a comment that a number of my colleagues put on each class syllabus: something to the effect of “I don’t give grades, you earn them.” These colleagues are gifted teachers whose examples I strive to follow, and I appreciate the sentiment behind their statement, but it’s also always struck me as oversimplifying what it means to grade.
- kudos:
My rule is that if it’s a personal project, but I learn some regex and bookdown along the way, it still counts as professional development.
frustration with institutional research analytics
- kudos:Over the summer, I blogged about some concern that I had about a new research portal that my employer had just rolled out. Based on the gentle nudges to update our profiles we’ve been receiving since the platform’s launch, I’m guessing that faculty have not been as keen on the platform as the university is. One of those nudges came this week, and in the spirit of good faith cooperation, I spent some time going through the platform and updating my profile.
- kudos:
Kiddo’s awesome “advent calendar of magic” is prominently advertised as a STEM toy, and that’s been bugging me. Not because it isn’t true, but because things don’t need to be STEM to be valuable.
- kudos:
My journaling app just let me know that today is the 6-year anniversary of my campus interview here at the University of Kentucky. Hard to believe it’s been that long!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Why We're Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs'
- kudos:Lots to appreciate in this post. link to “Why We’re Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs”
- kudos:
My second-to-last class meeting for my content management course featured an impromptu lecture on how URL structure is undervalued by both web users and site designers. It wasn’t irrelevant to course concepts, but I hadn’t been planning on it either.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None – The Markup'
- kudos:This is a really important read. It’s why educational technology researchers should be concerned about more than “does it improve learning?"—and why our understanding of edtech needs to include all of these platforms, not just the obvious stuff. link to “He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None – The Markup”
- kudos:
The bassist for one of my favorite bands is an academic by day, which must be the reason why they have the only song I’ve ever heard with “post doc” in the lyrics.
- kudos:
I have been feeling bad all semester for the students who signed up for my data science class because they enjoyed my games and learning one. I’m the same professor in both, but games and learning is very fun-focused and sociocultural, whereas data science is a firehose of stats and coding.
- kudos:
Helping a student distinguish between backticks and single quotes and remembering the 8th grade keyboarding students from a decade ago who complained that I made them do code in a class they thought should be about learning to type properly. Gotta do the latter to do the former.