Hello all! It’s been a long time since my last blog post, but that’s because I’ve been writing documentation instead. Since then, SIF has moved to CETL, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, so you should check us out sometime! We’re there Wednesdays and Fridays from 2pm to 5pm.
CETL is pretty awesome too. We have a couple of cool tech to play around with including VR and AR headsets like the Oculus Rift and Microsoft Hololens. This past weekend at hackGT I got to code for a hololens application to get information from devices via a web app, but I hope to continue working on it so that it could be more useful. My team and I haven’t built anything Unity-side (Hololens uses Unity as a way of managing its content, or you can build from the ground up as a UWP app), but stay tuned for more on that. In case you’re wondering what the Hololens is, check it out here .
However, today I’d like to talk about a very cool interaction that’s happened to me this year at SIF. At my first year at GSU, I took ENG 1103, which is a Critical Writing course here at GSU. I had credits for ENG 1101 and 1102 when I came here. So ENG 1103 focuses on a thing called Digital Literacy, a movement to help define some forms the term literacy takes on as well as the tracking the active social process of literacy in different cultures, countries, or even within an individual. It sounds like a broad topic, but in actuality it’s kind of the “man behind the curtain” of all the reasons we have classes about literacy no matter what discipline you’re in. There is always something you have to do to communicate with others, and that translates into specific practices repeated over and over again.
One of the biggest projects dedicated to the study of Digital Literacy is the DALN, or the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. It’s a project created at Ohio State University, and they have several people outside that manage the project, one of them being my former professor, Dr.Michael Harker here at GSU. Very cool dude (not guy, he’s earned the title of dude). And now, SIF is taken the chance to build a new website for the DALN. We want to make it as socially shareable as possible, as easy as someone to just click a button to share it with, since the stories in the DALN are the stories that reflect our lives. Understanding someone’s literacy narrative is understanding the way they think about certain issues, the way they hold social relationships with the people around them, and the ultimate idea of who they are.
You should check out the DALN, it’s awesome. Simply search a term you are interested in, like video games, and pull up a huge amount of stories from regular people.