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.

You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account. This also gets pushed to Bluesky along with content from my other subblogs.



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: ‘Student Should Have a Healthy-Looking BMI’: How Universities Bend Over Backwards to Accommodate Food Delivery Robots'



I work on a campus with Starship robots, so this was a fascinating read.


🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: American education has all the downsides of standardization, none of the upsides (16 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'



Some interesting thoughts here from Doctorow. Makes me want to put more effort into OER.




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: Plagiarism is the latest weapon in the culture wars. But what even is it? - Vox'



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.




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: Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 2 – Platypus'



Strong follow up to the last post I just linked to.


🔗 linkblog: Open Infrastructures and the Future of Knowledge Production, part 1 – Platypus'



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.


🔗 linkblog: TikTok Quietly Curtails Data Tool Used by Critics - The New York Times'



Don’t love it when platforms shut down tools because they don’t like outside research. Gift Link


🔗 linkblog: Are education and learning engineering problems? – George Veletsianos, PhD'



I’m grateful for George’s comments here.


assessment statements in my Spring 2024 graduate syllabus



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.




One of my favorite perks of academia is finding a personally interesting book through the university library.


🔗 linkblog: Wife of Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Is Accused of Plagiarism - The New York Times'



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.




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: Kentucky Senate leader files bill to curb 'divisive concepts' in public higher education - Kentucky Lantern'



Welp, here’s something to pay attention to this legislative session.




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: UK School of Information Science researchers awarded nearly $700,000 in IMLS grants | UKNow'



Proud of my colleagues!


publication copyright and reprinting consent



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



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.




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



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.




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.




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: Why We're Dropping Basecamp - Duke University Libraries Blogs'



Lots to appreciate in this post.




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: He Wanted Privacy. His College Gave Him None – The Markup'



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.




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.




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.




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.


new publication: Deep assumptions and data ethics in educational technology



When I learned that Stephanie Moore and Tonia Dousay were editing a volume on ethics in educational technology, I jumped at the chance to write something on data ethics. Stephanie and Tonia’s book is now published on Royce Kimmons’s open access EdTechBooks platform as Applied Ethics for Instructional Design and Technology, and my chapter is available alongside six others on other subjects related to ethics and educational technology. Here’s a link to the online version, and I have a PDF archived on my website.




It weirds me out that linking to a file in an email is starting to become the new attaching a file to an email. It isn’t that I’ve never done this, but it seems like it’s the default for my students—even for file types that I don’t think of as cloud-specific.




The sheer hassle of ordering an instructor copy of this McGraw-Hill textbook is only strengthening my commitment to eventually replacing it with an open textbook.


🔗 linkblog: Major critic of X sues after being banned from platform | Ars Technica'



The headline obscures something important—that this is about research, access to data, and Terms of Service. Worrying stuff.




I have thought for years about the way that Twitter research (in the aggregate) serves as a largely unintentional history of Twitter, but I’ve never thought to wonder what that specifically looks like right now.




Five years ago, a few of us who had (had) the same PhD advisor started a group chat on Keybase and added that advisor. It’s been a source of music recommendations, professional advice, sympathy during rough personal moments, and much more. It’s wholesome, helpful, and all around great.


tenure-track positions in library and information science, information communication technology, and instructional communication at UKSIS



I’m happy to share that we’re hiring this year in all three of the areas in our multidisciplinary unit. I’m including the official announcement below, and I’d be happy to talk to anyone who has questions or interest in the positions! The University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science invites applications for three positions at the rank of tenure-track assistant professor. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2024. Qualification and Responsibilities: Candidates are expected to hold an earned Ph.