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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Heading into finals, campus sent out a message about AI detection tools maybe not being trustworthy, which is great. However, this is in the context of these tools being wrapped into plagiarism detection software we already have access to, so they should say the same about it, too.
media coverage of recent article on Latter-day Saint online presence
- kudos:I recently wrote about a new article of mine in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought where I trace the history of the official domain names of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This past week, I was lucky enough for the fine folks at the Salt Lake Tribune to take interest in the article. Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote a summary of my findings in this (unfortunately paywalled) article, which appeared on Sunday.
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This has been a long semester, and it’s not over yet, but I did get notice of promotion and tenure yesterday, so that is making this last stretch more manageable.
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I don’t know if anything makes me angrier about my profession than when a student apologizes that there’s been a death in their family at a busy time of the semester. What have we as professors done to make students feel like they have to apologize for and justify their grief?
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Starting to get notices about my Twitter API access being suspended. So long, Twitter research: You were an important part of my career, and I’ll miss you.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring | WIRED'
- kudos:Some good commentary here. Musk loves certain buzzwords and flashy stunts, but they’re often in tension with the other decisions he makes. link to ‘Twitter’s Open Source Algorithm Is a Red Herring | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The poop emoji: a legal history - The Verge'
- kudos:Fascinating read—and one that reminds me that academic journal software doesn’t always render emoji either, which is a problem for social media research. link to ‘The poop emoji: a legal history - The Verge’
new publication: technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition
- kudos:I’m very excited to share that I’ve just had an article published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a historically and culturally important journal in Mormonism. My article is entitled “The correct [domain] name of the Church: Technology, naming, and legitimacy in the Latter-day Saint tradition.” The title is a riff on Russell Nelson’s use of the phrase “The Correct Name of the Church” when leading a renewed emphasis on the full name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints early in his ministry as President of the same church.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
- kudos:I’ve enjoyed reading Alice Marwick’s work in the past, and I really enjoyed her appearance on the EFF’s podcast here. link to ‘Podcast Episode: So You Think You’re A Critical Thinker | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
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One of these mornings where I hope 2022 Spencer put together good slides, because I have class in 20 minutes and haven’t had the time to review them until now.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
- kudos:I’m sure that I’ve read this before, and I expected to really enjoy a reread, so it was kind of a disappointment to, well, be so disappointed by it. The book is interesting for its interrogation of whether new technologies are less rich than old ones—an argument that has clear relevance today, as perhaps illustrated by Bradbury’s alleged reluctance to allow for an ebook version in the early 21st century. I’m not opposed to this kind of argument, but I think it’s easy for this kind of claim to get tied up in hand-wringing about civilizational decline and old/high culture being better than new/pop culture—and I feel like Bradbury ultimately has more to say about the latter than about the former.
a small victory for not policing students
- kudos:I’ve never been a fan of policing student behavior in my classes. I don’t take attendance, I’m pretty generous when it comes to late work and making up assignments, and I try to make participation in class something that’s organic rather than something structured and forced. In recent years, this hasn’t necessarily gone well. For example, the undergrad class I’m currently teaching has lousy attendance, and I struggle to get anyone except the 3-4 same voices to contribute to class discussions.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | WIRED'
- kudos:RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire… link to ‘Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | WIRED’
high school class rankings and the value-laden non-objectivity of quantitative measures
- kudos:At the beginning of my senior year of high school, Tyler and I were neck and neck in class rankings—if memory serves, he was slightly ahead. This never got in the way of our friendship. We had spent too much time playing the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars Roleplaying Game together, and a few years earlier, we’d even spent one memorable night with our mutual friend Chris hiking repeatedly back and forth between Tyler’s house and mine so that we could find the right hardware for hooking up someone’s GameCube to my family’s venerable TV so that we could play TimeSplitters 2.
rediscovering some comments on computational thinking
- kudos:I keep a journal using the Day One app for macOS/iOS, and while I have some lingering concerns about platformizing (and even digitizing) my journaling, there are also some pretty neat aspects to using an app like this. First, it’s very easy to copy text from other electronic sources into the app, and that really helps me capture things that made an impression on me from day to day. Second, it’s also easy to search for, read, and even be reminded of old entries.
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Over the past week, I’ve been called “Stephen” in two separate professional contexts by two people who ought to know my name. Starting to wonder if there’s something they know that I don’t.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly'
- kudos:Lots of helpful stuff in here. link to ‘ChatGPT Is So Bad at Essays That Professors Can Spot It Instantly’
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Outlook’s semi-new “reactions” are killing me; if it’s not accessible from another email client, it shouldn’t be a feature. Email is one of the few shared web protocols we’ve got, so let’s not ruin it through platformization.
🔗 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’
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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.
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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.
🔗 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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’
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’