Blog

Deliberate and Develop

This week at SIF has been a brainstorming week. Everyone in the team has been putting lots of thoughts into the development of the Deliberation Mapping tool.The major discussion has been about the functionality of the Deliberation tool. We are planning to develop the...

DALN 2 – Researching to Innovate

As part of the project I'm working on for the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, I have been researching free apps for the iPad 2 that might help innovate the current recording process of the DALN. Let me explain in more detail: Representatives from the DALN go...

The Weeks Just Keep on Getting Busier!

Hey guys! This was another pretty productive week! Andrew and I ran two workshops in how to use Agisoft PhotoScan. The first workshop had no turnout unfortunately--but our second one this past Friday had a few very interested and excited people come along. I explained...

Giving Artists New Tools Through Science And Technology

Building connections between seemingly disparate areas is one of the joys of being an artist. It's also one of the biggest challenges. Conceptually, artists are trained (or train themselves) to look at topics from multiple angles and to build relationships that...

Amazon vs. the Authors

Amazon's stranglehold over the ebook market has led to strong-arm practices. Initially, the online seller's attempts to control (i.e., limit) sales of the publisher Hachette was seen as a problem for Hachette (and its writers) alone. Gradually, however, other authors...

Update on the US History Survey

Late last week, I observed a session, devoted to the topic of secession, of the hybrid U.S. history survey. It made me more than a little nostalgic for the classroom, in all its gritty and chaotic glory. And, it reminded me of the madness that is the one-semester U.S....

Learning the basics of mapping and further updates

This week has been another one of those informational weeks. I was recently recruited to be a part of the Atlanta transit project. This project is geared towards focusing on Atlanta's public transportation history, particularly MARTA's planned transit lines as well as...

Gettin things rollin…

Cool, so we built our first "pre-viz" versions of the wiki, but it didn't look like anything we wanted it to look like because the default wiki sandbox doesn't have a css editing plugin. I tried other sandboxes, ways of editing a page, and even just straightforward...

Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?

When we think about communities and ethnicities, most of us would agree that we're striving for diverse communities which value community. But new studies on communities and diversity are showing something different; that people tend to clump together based on race....

What a Long and Great Week!

Hello All! As you can probably tell--I've spent a great deal of time this week hacking my Edublogs Wordpress CSS. It involved opening up the source code in Firefox's debugger and figuring out all the various tags, <DIV>'s I could change around--it was...

3D Printing and the Art/Kitsch Divide

That the debate over the art/kitsch divide has been theorized since at leat the 1930s shows that the supposed divide is arbitrary and the argument then breaks down into relativism. Like industrial culture production, the argument itself is of itself. To exist, it must...

You can lead a horse to water

Taking risks in education is, well, risky. As I have mentioned in several previous posts, one of my SIF assignments is to work on the hybrid U.S. history sections being offered at GSU this fall. The course is innovative in a number of ways: it takes full advantage of...