BA in French Teaching; PhD in Educational Technology; Assistant 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.

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I turn in a frustrating number of reviews THAT I’VE ALREADY WRITTEN ON TIME a week late because the system’s “please confirm before submitting” page looks an awful lot like a “thanks for submitting, and here’s what you wrote” page.

Just because you can topic model something doesn’t mean it actually tells us anything (and please don’t ever describe computational text analysis as “objective”).

I am increasingly of the opinion that the distinction between “qualitative” and “quantitative” isn’t all that useful and that what we actually mean is usually better expressed in other terms.

The thing with any tech that promises to insert citations for you is that you still need to check the cites for mistakes and know the citation style well enough to catch the mistakes, and at that point, why bother using it in the first place?

Can anyone recommend a good video essay, blog post, etc. on the absence of networks in the Battlestar Galactica reboot? Need it for a class. (Also frightened by the possibility that BSG is “too old” for my undergrads to know about).

I am frustrated both by journals who don’t employ copyeditors and by journal copyeditors who introduce errors into my articles. Hard to say which is worse.

Free tip to people reporting/writing on Gab: Don’t talk about “Trump’s account” as though it’s actually used by the man instead of populated by Gab to give the impression the platform has his endorsement. Plays into their hands.

One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

Looks like it’s “I’m going to need some banana bread and chocolate chips to make it through the rest of this response to reviewers letter” o’clock.

No paper could sell me on Vygotsky (and sociocultural theories of learning generally) as much as being a parent has.

Thinking today about how much I owe professionally to the generosity of mentors. Not only am I “standing on the shoulders of giants” as a researcher, I only got up there because other giants lifted me that high.

Thinking today about all the faculty performance I could do with the time it takes to do data entry for my faculty performance review.

One of the biggest perks of teaching in an ICT program is the ease with which scenes from the fantastic 1992 hacker/heist movie Sneakers can be worked into one’s lectures.

The stress I feel when assigning final grades is compelling evidence that I would never make it as a judge.

TIL that if you find out your content management students aren’t accessing the LMS course in the way that you told them to (some only check “to do” page, not main course page), you can at least turn it into a review of course material!

Will they take my PhD away if I admit that I never talked about my dissertation in terms of “chapters” and that I don’t understand fully what that means?

One underrated affordance of writing a journal manuscript in Google Docs is being able to have two identical copies of the manuscript open simultaneously. Really helps for checking consistency across paper or comparing two sections.

Answering an email from a colleague is requiring me to look through undergraduate courses offered in other colleges on my campus, and now I want to take a bunch of them!

Peak Fall 2020: Sending an apology to my students in case the person I ejected from a family Zoom gathering as soon as I realized it wasn’t a sibling (but before I could fully process the face) was one of them looking for help on a Sunday night.

Having my students post a weekly report on what they did that relates to each course objective. When it works, it’s the best kind of assessment—it assumes that there’s learning always happening and that we just need to notice it.

One of the biggest things that the pandemic is teaching me is how much of good pedagogy is just treating your students like human beings (and how much of bad pedagogy is not doing so). Knew this before, but this semester is really driving it home.

Sick family member, so I moved my blended class to 100% asynchronous online this week. Almost definitely not COVID, but it’s a slower week in class, and this seems like the kind of semester to be overly cautious.

Rewriting a syllabus + recurrence of a particular, ongoing personal anxiety + general pandemic stuff = some high levels of pre-semester stress today.

Lots of talk right now about students dissatisfied with online teaching. While those voices shouldn’t be ignored, I’ve also already had three students (of thirty) in my fall hybrid class specifically ask to take it fully online.

One of my earliest publications has been added to a research anthology without my knowledge or consent, since publisher owns copyright. Not necessarily opposed to end result, but still miffed about lack of control.

One of my favorite things about university libraries and ILL is that they’re officially there for research, but no one will stop you from reading the books just because you want to.

Is my brain mush right now because grading is hard? Or is grading hard right now because my brain is mush?

One of the best things I did as a brand new faculty member was to decide on a standard files and folders scheme. Still thanking myself for it.

This afternoon, a career in academia looks like working from the kitchen table, playing a French 80s radio station, and fuming at Reviewer B’s complaints about my using the journal’s template like I was asked to.

Trying to collect tweets from a very-new account, but advanced search with “from:” doesn’t seem to work. Has anyone ever had this happen before?

35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

I have been a fan of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a while, but I’m just now discovering how useful it can be for internet research 😍😍😍

Sometimes I don’t realize how excited I am about a study until I write the conference proposal for it… which then just makes me more nervous about getting accepted.

The only bad thing about having volunteered to maintain the Global Mormon Studies website is that every time I update the program for the 2020 conference, I am increasingly disappointed that I didn’t have anything to submit myself.

Preparing a talk on social media and ethics for tomorrow night, and I believe I’ve found a way to sneak in a reference to one of my favorite bands.

Currently completing my annual review, which has me thinking how much of my career I owe to more senior academics who have been kind and generous to me when they didn’t have to be. Hope I can follow that example myself.