BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Assistant Professor of ICT at University of Kentucky School of Information Science

I’m a digital methods researcher studying meaning making in educational, religious, and political communities on online platforms.

Work

This week, I will be putting my nose to the grindstone to meet the deadline for submitting an article to a special issue whose editors have repeatedly blown past their own deadlines. 🙄
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I recently had students modify a “life simulation” as an exercise in examining the values embedded in games, and their collective rage that choosing to read a book increases the “loneliness” score is so satisfying.
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I spent most of my morning preparing to give a methods workshop that only one person showed up to… and yet, it went much better than the only other time I’ve given a methods workshop.
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I’m currently phasing in a new “professional picture,” and every time I look closely, I see the compression shirt I had on under my dress shirt because it was freezing outside during the shoot.
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Tfw you and a co-author disagree on a question of punctuation, so you text your editor sister for backup.
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Hard to beat coming into the office with a post-bike commute endorphin rush. Doesn’t happen every morning, but it’s always welcome when it does.
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Funniest thing I’ve read all day is a tweet in the data I’m working with that proposes a Warcraft version of the French baccalauréat exam.
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Approximately 6 months after receiving my work laptop, I have finally collected all of the peripherals I need to use my work laptop at work. Until now, I’ve been using personal computer at work and work computer at home.
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I love that I do the kind of research where I have to define terms like “hashtag” and “meme,” but I hate trying to figure out how much of a 1,000-word conference proposal to dedicate to those definitions.
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Sure I scheduled a research Skype meeting for Saturday morning, but I attended in my pajamas, so that still counts as work/life balance, right? 😂😭
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I’m convinced that the hardest part of any research collaboration is figuring out what software everyone uses.
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Question I just asked some colleagues re: teaching a subject I know something about but have never been formally trained in: “How do you turn 100s of Stack Exchange searches into a syllabus?”
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I think the hardest part of teaching is figuring out how to explain something you don’t remember not knowing how to do to someone who currently doesn’t know how to do it.
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It’s amazing how much French I’m learning translating students’ tweets to English for a research project. Language is so rich, and limiting it to 280 characters arguably makes it more so.
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Tried to grab my box of Altoids with my eyes still on the article I’m reading, and grabbed a box of thumbtacks instead. Spotted my mistake before popping one in my mouth, though. 😅
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Sure, I’m eating cold leftovers (break room microwaves aren’t working), but today’s not a total wash: I got “Religion and Cyberspace” from the library and booked VIA Rail tickets from Quebec City to Montréal for an upcoming vacation.
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A lot of people are ragging on YouTube these days, so I’d just like to mention one thing it does really well: Consistently pick the least-flattering frames of my class videos for the thumbnail options.
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If you’re going to get an article you’re proud of rejected on a Friday, it is comforting for the rejection to be essentially “it’s a good paper but doesn’t fit our special issue focus as much as you think it does.”
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Nothing reinforces my professorial credibility quite like the wet bike gear from my rainy commute draped over the chairs in my office.
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Showing my information literacy class a clip from “Look Around You” this afternoon. Hope I don’t give anyone nightmares about the Helvetica Scenario.
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I’m having students in one of my classes mod a game as their assessment for the current module, and I’m as excited about the outcome as I am nervous (which is to say: very, very, very).
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We also looked at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as an example of the deep web. I don’t know how pedagogically effective that was, but the students definitely got a kick out of it.
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This week, I had students complete a “human web crawler/ human search engine” activity to give them a sense of how Google works. Room to improve the activity, but I’m reading student reflections, and it seems to have helped!
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I (an educational technology researcher) have just declined the opportunity to review for the journal “Cell Proliferation.” The weird thing is that it didn’t seem like the spammy requests from journals I sometimes get. Mistaken identity, maybe?
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On Monday mornings, I like to give myself a couple of hours to both plan the week and take care of a stack of odd jobs. It lets me ease myself back into work and frees up time to focus on more important things later in the week.
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Currently planning travel to an academic conference in France. Rule of thumb when flying to Paris is always to worry about consequences of disgruntled employees, but this time it’s the American ones I’m worried about.
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Reviewer 3 doesn’t understand why my study is important. I’m trying to find ways to articulate that better, but all I really want to do is JUST BOLD EVERYTHING I’VE ALREADY WRITTEN TO THAT EFFECT.
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I never know whether to be happy or frustrated when I’m able to respond to a reviewer’s objection by resurrecting a paragraph from the manuscript that I’d previously cut to slim things down.
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Oh look, it’s my favorite day of the week: “Welp-those-manuscript-revisions-are-due-today Wednesday”
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It’s only taken me five months, but I’ve finally updated my Alfred “search the library for such-and-such an article” shortcut to point to my current institution’s library.
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If anything helps you appreciate Vygotsky (and sociocultural theories of learning in general) more than being the parent of a young kid, I have yet to experience it.
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Tfw a seemingly small suggestion from a reviewer actually opens up new insights that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. Thanks Reviewer #1!
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Today’s manuscript revision fun is detangling the results of a coding error that left out 3 hours and 56 minutes worth of tweets from my analysis. Just enough to make some very small differences in reported results.
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Currently responding to reviewers of a journal article based on my dissertation. Feels especially difficult to make changes to a manuscript I’ve already had reviewed so many times.
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Today, I used the dumb “define a sandwich” meme as a pedagogical activity, so I’m feeling pretty good about my semester so far.