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.
You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account.
- kudos:
Remembering the time some trollish critics of research I’m doing with a colleague grabbed the audio from a YouTube video of our conference presentation and remixed it into a song they posted to SoundCloud. It’s supposed to be mocking, but I find it funny.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:12:37 on 'publish DezNat and authority study'
- kudos:Amy Chapman and I currently have an in-press paper on the far-right inspired DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter, and we’ve also been at work on a second paper covering all our analysis we couldn’t fit in the first paper. In particular, we’re interested in how the DezNat movement conceptualizes (and claims) religious authority. I spent time this morning getting back into the flow of this paper and reading up on Weber, whose tripartite model of authority ought to be helpful here.
quoted in EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools' social media lawsuit
- kudos:Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of talking with Arianna Prothero at EducationWeek about Seattle Public Schools’ suing Snap, Alphabet, Meta, and ByteDance, and she ended up quoting me—and colleagues like Jeff Carpenter and Josh Rosenberg—in her article. I appreciate that all three of us were quoted in the article, because Jeff and Josh both made points that I didn’t articulate as well in my conversation with Arianna. For example, Jeff’s comments summed up a lot of the complexities that have gone through my head:
📝 writeblog: spent 1:27:17 on 'publish ClassDojo and conflation of ed tech platforms study'
- kudos:Got my data sorting done today! And this despite a considerable setback: I realized that there was a less clunky, more efficient way to categorize the open-response entries, so I started from scratch once I realized that. Fascinating to see how many different technologies students mention when prompted to pick tech similar to ClassDojo.
- kudos:
I’ve seen jokes about the supposed irony of having to fill out a CAPTCHA to use ChatGPT, but it’s actually pretty consistent: The purpose of CAPTCHA is also to mine the fruits of human labor to train ML/AI that can replace human labor.
- kudos:
Survey respondent mistyped “Infinite Campus” as “Infinite Camus,” and now I’m looking for a French existentialism punchline.
📝 writeblog: spent 1:56:15 on 'publish teachers on far-right social media study'
- kudos:About two years ago, in the wake of the Capitol riot, I started collecting data from far-right social media platforms, focusing on groups that fit with my existing research background. I’ve been working with Dan Krutka on analyzing a teachers’ group—we’re so dang close to having a full manuscript. Today we spent some time getting back in the flow of the paper so that we can get this out for review sometime this semester.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text'
- kudos:See, as worried as I am about ChatGPT use in education, this actually worries me more, because it’s basically plagiarism detection, which I’m opposed to. link to ‘A CompSci Student Built an App That Can Detect ChatGPT-Generated Text’
📝 writeblog: spent 0:35:36 on 'publish Dojo and platforms study'
- kudos:Spent some more time this morning going through survey data and matching software mentioned in survey data with actual software categories.
- kudos:
Looking for help from people working in or familiar with ed and ed tech: Do you know anything about an LMS, student information system, or other software called “Reef”? It’s showing up in survey data, but I can’t find anything on it.
📝 writeblog: spent 0:51:56 on 'publish Dojo and platforms study'
- kudos:A few years ago, Sarah Barriage, Daniela DiGiacomo, and I surveyed some undergraduate students on their previous experience with ClassDojo. One thing that startled us about the data is how often students treated other edtech apps and platforms (e.g., Canvas, Kahoot, Zoom) as equivalent to Dojo, when we saw Dojo as a different kind of edtech. I’ve been meaning to write that up for years, and I’m finally getting off my butt and doing it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge'
- kudos:Personally, I’m not very optimistic about ChatGPT, and I think OpenAI should have better considered disruptions to fields like education before releasing the tool. That said, I don’t think a ban is the solution here. link to ‘New York City schools ban access to ChatGPT over fears of cheating and misinformation - The Verge’
- kudos:
Nothing says unwarranted optimism quite like the big pile of books I brought home from campus in case I had time to work on “that manuscript” over the break. Lugging them back to campus tomorrow morning.
three grumpy observations from a Twitter researcher on requests for 'quote toots'
- kudos:Over the past several weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of conversations about Mastodon’s lack of a feature equivalent to Twitter’s “quote tweets.” To be honest, I don’t really care about the lack of a “quote toot” feature, and I’ve done my best to steer clear of these conversations (though I did note while writing this post that it caught the eye of Mastodon’s founder in a big way). I gather that these conversations been around for a while, but I get the sense from my own feeds that there’s been a notable recent uptick.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap - Neal A. Maxwell Institute'
- kudos:Such an interesting book. I’m going to have to get a copy to read one day. link to ‘Maxwell Institute Podcast #157: Latter-day Saints in the French Imagination, with Corry Cropper, Daryl Lee, and Heather Belnap - Neal A. Maxwell Institute’
- kudos:
Dreamt this morning that I was applying for PhD programs. It wasn’t until dream-me began reviewing my research record that I remembered that I already have a PhD and am actually applying for tenure right now.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Schools and EdTech Need to Study Up On Student Privacy: 2022 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation'
- kudos:Edtech professionals aren’t paying nearly enough attention to this sort of thing. link to ‘Schools and EdTech Need to Study Up On Student Privacy: 2022 in Review | Electronic Frontier Foundation’
- kudos:
I am skeptical about heavy emphasis on STEM as educational policy, but watching my kid learn to program with her new robot today was a real treat.
- kudos:
I’m normally a big “break is break” advocate, but family illness meant being behind on work, which meant taking over my father-in-law’s WFH setup today to finish a syllabus and course shell I needed to prep so other instructors could work off them.
end-of-semester thoughts on hating grading
- kudos:When I was still an undergraduate student at BYU, I took a job as a student instructor for FREN 102, the second half of a two-course sequence in first-year French. I had a lot of weird experiences as an undergraduate student teaching and grading other undergraduate students, but the one that I remember this morning is the time that I held a student’s scholarship in my hand. I don’t remember the student’s name or much about her, except a vague recollection of her face and a couple of conversations with her.
- kudos:
This semester, my efforts to trust students feel like they’re backfiring. I ungrade, but they don’t take work seriously. I never use plagiarism checkers, but I still have to deal with a last minute case. Not saying I’ll stop effort, but still sucks.
- kudos:
Family has been sick for the last week, and it’s been a struggle to keep up with grading even after cancelling nearly all my other commitments. Thought I was in the clear this morning, only for the first final project I opened to turn into suspected plagiarism. 😩
- kudos:
I got my job largely because I can work with Twitter data, and my tenure application is built on the premise that I do good Twitter research. I probably shouldn’t take as much pleasure as I do from watching the platform fall apart right now, but I was ready to move on anyway.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Brief – Hidden Harms: Student Activity Monitoring After Roe v. Wade - Center for Democracy and Technology'
- kudos:I see a worrying future for edtech ahead, and I’m not sure the academic discipline is adequately prepared for it. [link to ‘Brief – Hidden Harms: Student Activity Monitoring After Roe v. Wade - Center for Democracy and Technology’](https://cdt.org/insights/brief-hidden-harms-student-activity-monitoring-after-roe-v-wade/?utm_source=rss
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facial Recognition Researcher Left a Trans Database Exposed for Years After Using Images Without Permission'
- kudos:I hated this project when I read about it in The Verge 5 years ago. I hate it even more now. link to ‘Facial Recognition Researcher Left a Trans Database Exposed for Years After Using Images Without Permission’
unexpected research ethics implications of Twitter's 'general amnesty' for suspended accounts
- kudos:For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.
quoted in EducationWeek about 'Gas' social media app
- kudos:A few weeks ago, thanks to a recommendation from my colleague and friend Josh Rosenberg, I was contacted by Alyson Klein at EducationWeek to talk about the “Gas” social media app that’s become popular among high schoolers lately. Klein’s article was published last night, and I was happy to see that I’d been quoted in the article. To be honest, I wasn’t familiar with the app before Klein reached out, but it only took a few minutes of research for me to figure out that I didn’t like it very much.
new publication: LGBTQ+ communities and far right social media
- kudos:I’m pleased to share that a study I contributed to—Gayservatives on Gab: LGBTQ+ Communities and Far Right Social Media—is now available (open-access!) through the Social Media + Society journal. Dr. Evan Brody is the lead author on the study, and we were lucky enough to have support from PhD student Mehroz Sajjad. Here’s the abstract for the study: In the United States, LGBTQ+ individuals are often imagined as inherently politically progressive, but this assumption overlooks the experiences of self-identified LGBTQ+ conservatives.
- kudos:
As my tenure application continues to make its way through that process, I’ve thought a lot about how grateful I am that my unit is the right size pond for this fish.
- kudos:
In a training last week, we discussed the trend of journals’ checking manuscripts with plagiarism software. People shared examples where editors couldn’t accept perfectly good reasons for authors to reuse material unless a certain software score was also reached.
- kudos:
The Black Friday email I got from ClassDojo today is representative of everything wrong with the ed tech industry.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facebook Pulls Its New ‘AI For Science’ Because It’s Broken and Terrible'
- kudos:Very interesting read. link to ‘Facebook Pulls Its New ‘AI For Science’ Because It’s Broken and Terrible’
new publication: an autoethnography on French, data science, and paradigm change
- kudos:I’m pleased to share the publication of a new chapter of an edited volume. The chapter in question is “I’m a French teacher, not a data scientist”: Culture and languages across my professions, and it’s part of a volume called Cultures and languages across the curriculum in higher education. According to the CLAC Consortium, Culture and Languages Across the Curriculum (CLAC) is a: a curricular framework that provides opportunities to develop and apply language and intercultural competence within all academic disciplines through the use of multilingual resources and the inclusion of multiple cultural perspectives.
new presentation: reactionary Mormons and religious authority online
- kudos:Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the 2022 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to present research with Amy Chapman on how the reactionary DezNat movement on Mormon Twitter conceptualizes and claims—but ultimately problematizes—religious authority in the online sphere. We presented in one of the sessions sponsored by the Mormon Social Science Association and were lucky enough to have some good conversations and receive some helpful feedback.
- kudos:
Yesterday’s conference presentation went well, but despite a nagging suspicion that I’d prepared too many slides, I didn’t take the time to trim and wound up skipping a chunk of the talk. Alas.
- kudos:
Doing a research presentation at a conference today. The slides are essentially a fancy HTML doc (thanks to remarkjs), and I’m proud that I figured out how to get Font Awesome SVGs to display in-line with text.