User:Aaronshaw

Hello! I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University. I also helped co-found the CDSC and am one of the faculty members in the group. Among various other affiliations, I am a faculty member in the Media, Technology & Society (MTS) Ph.D. Program and the Technology & Social Behavior Ph.D. Program. I have a few too many profiles in various parts of the Web, all of which I struggle to keep up to date. A good place to find current information is usually my website. If you'd like to get in touch, please send me an email (and don't be shy about re-sending if I don't reply).

Office hours signups

Looking to meet with me? Please consult my office hours page for drop-in hours or appointments.

Recent archived classes (most hosted on this wiki)

• COMMST-395 / History 300—History and Theories of Information (Winter, 2024) (undergraduate)
• MTS 525—History and Theories of Information (Winter, 2024) (graduate)
• MTS 501—Introduction to Graduate Research (Fall, 2023)
• COMMST-378/MTS 525—Online Communities & Crowds (Winter, 2022)
• MTS 525/COMMST 395—Statistics and Statistical Programming (Fall 2020)
• MTS 503—The Practice of Scholarship (Spring, 2019)

Resources

• Asking me for a reference or letter of recommendation? Please read this first.
• Course policies. The policies that govern my classes at Northwestern. I will try to update these and usually link to them from my course syllabus.
• Assessment rubrics/policies. The assessment rubrics and policies I use in my classes. These are stated as generally as possible to enable me to use them across many kinds of courses and assignments.
• Better Wikipedia citations. I teach about Wikipedia pretty often and, maybe as a result, students (correctly!) assume that I am comfortable with them citing Wikipedia as a reference. However, too many attempts to cite Wikipedia are of poor quality for various reasons. After seeing the problem and telling people about it a few times, I decided to write up a solution here so that it can be a more public resource.
• An archive of my COVID policies that applied to several courses I taught during the pandemic. I don't expect to use these again anytime soon, but have maintained them here.
• Materials (topics, questions, prompts) from a panel on content governance and moderation that I hosted at the Decentralized Social Media Workshop in early 2024. These are mostly here in case I need to find them later, but maybe someone else will find them useful too?

Links I liked and you might too

• Ph.D. application tips
• Someone else's suggestions about how to email your professor without being annoying AF.
• kid stuff