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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- kudos:
Just made a pact with an academic colleague that we wouldn’t hold back from telling each other that it’s time to retire and make room for new faculty.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'School Facebook Pages and Privacy Concerns: What Educators Need to Know'
- kudos:Josh is doing important work here—the kind of work that edtech researchers often don’t consider as being in their purview. Glad to see this getting coverage. link to ‘School Facebook Pages and Privacy Concerns: What Educators Need to Know’
why I put email back on my phone
- kudos:Since the beginning of COVID-19, I’ve been dismantling a lot of my productivity and organization systems, trying to put less pressure on myself to get things done and be more mindful in how I spend my time. Several months ago—I cannot remember exactly when—this culminated in taking email off my phone and pivoting away from the excellent Things 3 task management app to a more paper notebook-driven approach to keeping track of what I need to get done.
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The best figure I’ve ever included in a scholarly publication was a screenshot of a joke I made in a tweet and was especially proud of. The screenshot happened to demonstrate a Twitter feature I was trying to explain, which seemed justification enough.
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I am rereading through old FoxTrot comic strips and bookmarking all the tech ones I think I might use in lectures next semester. Wish I’d done this years ago.
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I’m taking the lead on the format and details of a small academic organization’s first online conference. I’d love to hear from folks who have attended successful, truly international online academic conferences about what made them work! All advice welcome!
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I put in an earbud an hour or two ago so I could listen to music while preparing class readings, and I’m only now realizing that I never hit play.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CI’s DiGiacomo views information, media literacy as tool to preserve democracy | UKNow'
- kudos:Glad that my colleagues’ interesting work is getting recognition from our university. link to ‘CI’s DiGiacomo views information, media literacy as tool to preserve democracy | UKNow’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Citizens' social media can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation'
- kudos:I fall victim to this despite being a Mastodon fan. Appreciate the reminder to be more careful with language. link to ‘Citizens’ social media can provide an antidote to propaganda and disinformation’
thank you, Seymour Papert
- kudos:This morning, kiddo was pretending to be a robot, so when I needed her to switch her attention from, say, getting dressed to brushing her teeth, I’d have to pretend to “reprogram” her before she’d cooperate. This got me wondering if she was maybe old enough to try some basic programming activities—something like LEGO Mindstorms. I think that she’s probably still a bit young for that sort of thing, but it made me excited about doing this sort of thing in the future.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Essential Tech Question for Schools: What Are the Teacher's Objectives?'
- kudos:See, I get the impression that it’s increasingly district, school, and legislative priorities that are driving tech choices. I agree that teachers ought to have the agency, but I don’t know that’s the case. link to ‘The Essential Tech Question for Schools: What Are the Teacher’s Objectives?’
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Generally, I discourage my intro to data science students from tackling questions they can’t answer at their level of programming, but sometimes I get so interested in the question that I end up writing the code for them so I can see what they do with it.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are'
- kudos:Really important story here, and glad to see George Veletsianos quoted. I’ve long been an advocate for developing assessments that are impossible to cheat at, but I don’t know if that’s the entire (or even a practical) response to GPT-3. We are continuing to develop technologies whose societal effects we are not prepares for. link to ‘Students Are Using AI to Write Their Papers, Because Of Course They Are’
help us find a new Director for our School of Information Science!
- kudos:Jeff Huber, the longtime Director of the School of Information Science at the University of Kentucky, is stepping down into a regular faculty role at the end of this academic year. I’m serving on the search committee to find a new Director, and I’m happy to share that the official posting for the job is now live. If this sounds up your alley, feel free to apply, and if this isn’t your kind of job, please help share the posting with folks who might be interested.
all I want for tenure is to be added to the Star Wars bulletin board
- kudos:This “Don’t Fly Solo” board has been up in the hallway of our building since before I was hired. I took a picture of it back in December 2017, when I was here on a job interview. It was one of the most prominent signs (no pun intended) that this would be a friendly and fun unit to work in, which was one of the biggest considerations on my mind when I decided to accept the job (though the adventure of changing disciplines and the convenience of living closer to family shouldn’t be discounted).
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'How to Protect Yourself If Your School Uses Surveillance Tech | WIRED'
- kudos:I hate that there’s a need for articles like this, but I’m glad WIRED is putting them together. link to ‘How to Protect Yourself If Your School Uses Surveillance Tech | WIRED’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: 07 Oct 2022 “Don’t install spy on a privacy lab,” and other lessons for university provosts – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:There is so much of both horrible and hopeful in this story. The way we’re normalizing surveillance is really worrying, and I’m glad some people are fighting back. link to ‘Pluralistic: 07 Oct 2022 “Don’t install spy on a privacy lab,” and other lessons for university provosts – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure'
- kudos:This looks great! link to ‘Welcome to Smalltown, a Civic Space Online - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’
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I think one of the most important things in learning to do research is understanding that it’s a process of argumentation more than a process of discovery.
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I tell myself I won’t work nights and weekends, but every semester, there comes a point where this principled stance gets me so behind that I have to work nights and weekends to catch up.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'When School Superintendents Market Surveillance Cameras'
- kudos:Lot of worrying stuff in here. Edtech needs to take surveillance tech more seriously, because the two are increasingly simultaneous. link to ‘When School Superintendents Market Surveillance Cameras’
ClassDojo and educational 'accomplishment'
- kudos:As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in.
Lance Eaton on the invasive surveillance of LMSs
- kudos:This week, I’m hurriedly putting together some revisions for a book chapter on data ethics that I’ve been working on for an open access volume on ethics in educational technology. I’m excited about the volume, and I’ve really loved writing the chapter, so it’s kind of fun to be doing these revisions, even if I waited for the last minute to do them. One reviewer suggestion that I’m particularly grateful for is to elaborate on a sentence I wrote arguing that “learning management systems allow us to monitor students in invasive ways that would be unimaginable in a face-to-face context.
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I’ve been skeptical of writing manuscripts in Markdown or LaTeX for ages, but today I found myself asking where the “code editor” was in Word, so maybe it’s time to give it a try.
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Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
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Dunno why Canvas took blockquoting out of their WYSIWYG editor, but joke’s on them, because I know where the code editor is and what the right HTML tags are.
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I’m currently on a search committee for the new director of our School of Information Science, and it’s kind of neat that academics get to hire their own bosses. My students’ minds were blown yesterday when I explaned this.
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There was a brief period of publisher generosity early in COVID times where I snagged so many PDFs of books my uni library usually doesn’t have access to. Still making my way through them.
new report on Google Classroom and ClassDojo
- kudos:I have been writing a lot about ClassDojo recently, spurred by a combination of my professional concerns about the app and by my frustration that my kid’s school is now using it. Last week, I was pleased to see a new report from the United Kingdom-based Digital Futures Commission about not only ClassDojo but also Google Classroom. I’m sure my kid will have to use this latter software as well, so it’s good to be aware.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED'
- kudos:Maybe it’s because of my area of research, but I think the headline here is misleading. Being a teacher on TikTok is one thing, and I’m not opposed to that. Putting your students on TikTok is entirely different, and I struggle to see that being ethically justified. Josh’s research is absolutely the right reference point here. link to ‘The Tricky Ethics of Being a Teacher on TikTok | WIRED’
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I just got paid by a journal after they accepted one of my papers, and as happy as I am about this, it is so far out of my normal academic experience that I feel disoriented.
to be loved is to be 'liked'
- kudos:Thanks to the magic of the internet, I often listen to Francophone radio stations while working (most often French and Swiss—Radio-Canada doesn’t support streaming outside its own apps and sites). This is a great way to keep up with my French, and because there seems to be a minigenre of Francophone songs critiquing social media (Stromae’s Carmen comes to mind, but there’s at least one other whose name I can’t remember right now), it sometimes ends up being professionally relevant as well.
- kudos:
I’m very glad that figuring out my office phone is not a prerequisite for tenure, or else my application would be in real trouble right now.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED'
- kudos:Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility. link to ‘Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED’
ClassDojo and the creation of artificial demand
- kudos:Yesterday, I complained about Apple putting artificial limitations on what its hardware and software can do in terms of music syncing in order to make more money out of its consumers (and, probably, keep music companies happy). As I was writing that, I was thinking about similarities with the business model of a lot of mobile apps—let people download the app for free, but keep bonus features (or even the best features) behind a paywall.