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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📝 writeblog: spent 2:02:11 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
- kudos:Spent some time putting together a rough outline and some tables today. It still blows my mind what software students equate with ClassDojo.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:47:30 on 'publish scraping library online presence study'
- kudos:Spent some time manually reviewing websites today to prepare for later web scraping. I’ll have to figure out how to work with some Wix sites, which are structured oddly behind the scenes.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:45:11 on 'publish beliefs about Canvas study'
- kudos:Had a good meeting this morning to put together a survey instrument for the study. I think we’re close!
📝 writeblog: spent 0:16:51 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
- kudos:Spent a few minutes idly working on a web scraper for this.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:36:18 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
- kudos:Kept on writing! Had some productive conversations about tables and worked on an AECT proposal related to the project.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The End of Grading | WIRED'
- kudos:Somewhat meandering read, but I think there are interesting implications for both teaching and research. link to ‘The End of Grading | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter's new data access rules will make research harder : NPR'
- kudos:Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status. link to ‘Twitter’s new data access rules will make research harder : NPR’
📝 writeblog: spent 0:34:08 on 'publish LDS Freedom Forum study'
- kudos:It’s been over a year since Levi Sands, Amy Chapman, and I started talking about doing a topic model analysis of the LDS Freedom Forum, an online space for far-right Mormonism. I’ve usually been the one slowing us down, but today, I finally checked off a task that’s been on my lost for a month and a half. I’m really excited about the project, I just need to stop dragging my feet.
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One of my academic pet peeves is when people use the word rigor as a validating synonym for something else, like “quantitative” or “giving out lots of Cs.” Rigor is important, but narrow definitions aren’t useful.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:55:21 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
- kudos:Instead of grading (😬), I spent some time grabbing links and then starting to build a web scraper, though that’s enough of a pain that I might ask a friend to borrow his CrowdTangle access.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:27:22 on 'publish Red Pill influences on DezNat study'
- kudos:Went through page proofs today! Excited that the paper is so close to publication.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:12:41 on 'publish digital religion as international religion study'
- kudos:I’m helping organize the Global Mormon Studies 2023 online conference, so I’ve been trying to figure out what (if anything) I would submit for myself. I’ve been wanting to do something about the online (and, thereby, intentionally international) Toronto Community of Christ congregation, but I’ve had trouble figuring out what exactly that would be. Today, an idea clicked. I was going through their YouTube and Facebook videos for some early data collection when I realized just how different the two platform experiences are.
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Pleased to see that page proofs I’m reviewing have preserved the emojis in quoted tweets. It’s frustrating for this social media researcher how many journal publication platforms do not support them.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Wants To Help You Figure Out If Text Was Written By OpenAI; But What Happens When It’s Wrong? | Techdirt'
- kudos:Just because some worries about ChatGPT are, indeed, moral panics doesn’t mean that there aren’t legtimate criticisms of the technology—including from an educational perspective. I happen to agree with Masnick that schools ultimately need to roll with the punches here, but given how much we already expect of our schools and teachers, it’s reasonable to resent being punched in the first place. Masnick’s point about the error rate for detecting AI-generated text is an important one, though: I don’t think plagiarism-detecting surveillance is at all the right response.
📝 writeblog: spent 3:01:14 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
- kudos:Spent some time polishing the front end and some other finished bits of the paper.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:33:17 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
- kudos:Met with Sarah and Daniela today to review the data and discuss where to go from here. I have some new tasks, and we have some new ideas—looking forward to seeing where things go!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge'
- kudos:I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating. link to ‘Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Florida Teachers Are Emptying Classroom Libraries to Avoid Going to Jail'
- kudos:What a dumb world we live in. link to ‘Florida Teachers Are Emptying Classroom Libraries to Avoid Going to Jail’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members'
- kudos:Well, this is horrifying. Another example of a news article I wish weren’t relevant to my research. link to ‘Inside a US Neo-Nazi Homeschool Network With Thousands of Members’
Cory Doctorow on behaviorism
- kudos:After bouncing off of it a year or so ago, I recently decided to restart Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway (which led NPR reporter Jason Sheehan to describe Doctorow as “Super-weird in the best possible way”). The audiobook is excellent, and since I started a couple of days ago, it’s displaced my podcast listening and given me another chance to wrestle with Doctorow’s ideas here. There is way too much going on (and I’m not far enough into the book) for me to engage with the underlying message of the novel (or even to be sure of what it is yet), but one passage stood out to me so much this morning that I have to write it down now.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:55:26 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
- kudos:Wrapped up categorizing apps/software into distinct categories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, students identified more LMSs (or SISs) and content/assessment software than behavior management or communication apps (the two main things ClassDojo does).
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The desire to “enhance” or “improve” learning is a noble one, but I’m increasingly convinced it gets too much attention—and distracts us from as (or more) important questions about education and technology.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:44:56 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
- kudos:Met with Dan today for writing work. I finished a section on how the admins’ openness to far-right ideas allowed racist and conspiratorial thinking to enter what was purportedly a teachers’ social media group.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:46:49 on 'publish beliefs about Canvas study'
- kudos:I recently started a new project with colleague Meghan Dowell where we’re hoping to learn about students’ and instructors’ understanding of how Canvas works (taking some inspiration from a 2017 article by Nick Proferes). I spent time going through Canvas documentation and meeting with Meghan about our survey instrument.
- kudos:
In the Canvas LMS main interface, it describes analytics reports as based on “near real-time data.” In documentation, it specifies that “near real-time” is “may be delayed by 40 hours.”
- kudos:
Canvas: “You can draw conclusions about student participation with our analytics!” Also Canvas: “Mobile page view data aren’t exact, and our analytics only update every 24 hours, so don’t draw too many conclusions, lol.”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Instagram Has a White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Problem'
- kudos:I wish this weren’t as relevant as it is to my work on Mormon Twitter, but here we are. link to ‘Instagram Has a White Nationalist ‘Groyper’ Problem’
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Reading through the data available through Canvas analytics, I’m reminded of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein’s argument (in their excellent book “Data Feminism”) that structured, “clean” data is most necessary for “strangers in the dataset.”
- kudos:
My tenure dossier has passed all the college-level steps, and I just finished reading the kind letter my dean wrote. Now off to the Provost’s office for months of waiting!
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees'
- kudos:Headline overstates things a bit, and I’m on team “change the assessments,” but it’s still worth asking if AI developers are appropriately anticipating the disruptions these tools are causing. link to ‘ChatGPT Is Passing the Tests Required for Medical Licenses and Business Degrees’
📝 writeblog: spent 1:04:29 on 'publish DezNat and authority study'
- kudos:Spent some time this afternoon finishing up a conceptual framework section which makes a case for using Weberian language for describing how this movement thinks about authority.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:40:52 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
- kudos:I met with Dan and spent time writing up our findings on how the admins of this teachers’ group were swimming in far-right discourses in their overall activity on the platform. No real surprise that they allowed those influences into a teachers’ group.
quoted again about Gas app in EducationWeek
- kudos:This week, Discord announced that it has acquired the Gas social media app popular among secondary students. Presumably in response, Alyson Klein ran an explainer today at EducationWeek on the subject of the app. In doing this, she re-ran a quote that I provided to her for a December article that she also wrote: “It feels a little exploitative to me,” said Spencer Greenhalgh, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s school of information sciences.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Discord acquires Gas, the popular app for teens to compliment each other - The Verge'
- kudos:A couple of months ago, I spoke to Education Week about the Gas app. I thought it had an exploitative business model then, and its being acquired does nothing to calm that fear. link to ‘Discord acquires Gas, the popular app for teens to compliment each other - The Verge’
📝 writeblog: spent 1:01:43 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
- kudos:My co-authors recently got back to me with comments on my “coding” of respondents’ open-ended answers. Based on that, I made some tweaks and then started grouping “codes” into categories. It turns out there are fuzzy boundaries between many types of edtech, which probably exacerbates the underlying phenomenon we’re getting at.
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It’s been a long day at the end of a long week, but it ended with an “are you working on anything interesting so I can write about it?” message from a reporter and a kind compliment from a grad school friend, so all in all, not too bad.