Author Archives: Valerie Robin

About Valerie Robin

I am a PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition in the Georgia State English department. I study material theory and digital writing, which often includes me going on and on about time, location, and labor. I also love to cook for others.
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First Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the School Year

  September 17, 2015 , ,

Today I attended the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup (DigPed Meetup) of the 2015-2016 school year. Hosted, by The Atlanta Connected Learning collegial network of university faculty and staff in the Atlanta area, ATLCL hosts DigPed meetups one time a month which aims to create a social face-to-face forum where various members of facutly, staff, and graduate student instructors can share, and discover what is happening cross-university and cross-disciplinarily in the greater Atlanta area. Each meeting is made up of two presentations, and discussions that occur during and after these presentations. Today, Jeff Greene and Pete Rorabaugh at Kennesaw State University gave a talk titled “Reframing a Degree for a New Media Ecosphere” in which they detail their reframing of the writing BA in their newly restructured KSU department after the merger. Jeff and Pete are teaching two courses, New Media I & II in which they teach a variety of composing skill that focus on content creation, interactivity and ownership. This kind of work is exciting, and necessary when we consider how quickly writing environments shift and change in today’s world where the digital is often emphasized. The second speaker was McKenna Rose at Emory, whose presentation was titled “Envisioning the Pechakucha: Strategies for Invention and Revision in the Literature Classroom.” McKenna explained her Pechakucha 20X20 assignment and showed a few examples of some of the work expected of her students. McKenna explained some of her techniques and processes as she asked her students to create and present their projects. What … Continue reading

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Randy Swearer – The Provost with a Message

  April 20, 2015 , , ,

Dr. Randy Swearer came to Georgia State University to give a 2-part talk titled “Understanding Emerging Trends in Higher Education” last week. Swearer has been provost of Philadelphia University since 2009 – and I find this to be an exceptional detail. It is exceptional because this is the first time I have heard someone with this kind of institutional power speak about a radical change in the system of higher education. Let me give you a summary: Swearer talks about the need to unbundle the university system. This means, in general, that we need to be less focused on disciplinarity, and more focused on a more flattened hierarchical system that relies on training for skills, rather than training for tests. It is student-centered, and it is a place where faculty can focus on a variety of ways to deliver content, rather then the way we have been doing it for the last 150 years. What is more, Swearer has a model that he believes might work. In the picture above, Swearer is showing an overview of his Part 1 talk before he goes into detail about his proposed system. Here, he proposes to disintegrate the existing model, opening up new ways for students to move through the system – minus arbitrary grading, lecture-only classrooms, and other models that critical pedagogues argue against. Once the talks were over, everyone I attended with that works in the Exchange had some very interesting conversation about Swearer’s proposed model. For me – the outcome … Continue reading

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Defining Innovation with Fun and Creepiness

  February 14, 2015

This week I’ve been working at outlining a paper exploring the definition of innovation, and how I am applying that to the DALN booth at the upcoming CCCC’s conference in Tampa Florida. What that means, is that I’ve spent even more time than usual researching this illusive word – chasing it down like the Hobbit to my Ring-Wraith. I’ve read that Everett Rogers defines innovation as ““an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or another unit of adoption” (2003), which gets at the idea that ‘innovation’ has very much to do with audience perception. Erin Frost, in a journal called Computers and Composition writes about student innovation as “the key to the development and vitality of technology” as users. Yet Frost never actually defines ‘innovation’ for her audience. This is not unusual. This same week, I a friend on Facebook shared out an article that was so entertaining, I cried a little laughing at it: The Creepiest Things You Can Do on Faceboook The author leads us through a photo narrative about how she ‘messes’ with some friends for her own amusement. Some might call this ‘hacking’ Facebook = using an application for something other than its intended use. To me, this is innovation. Interestingly though, Ashley Feinberg, the author of the article above, does not define her work as innovative, but it is. It MUST be. I say this because she is finding a new way to get people to laugh. She is finding a new way … Continue reading

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Innovating by Hand

  December 7, 2014 ,

All of the text above was imported in, which is why I couldn’t hyperlink Touchnote. This is the only bit I’ve typed, save the title. As you can see, the pen has several issues, not least that it buzzes quite loudly. For some reason, the receiver picked up my ‘smooth’ lines as dashed and dotted above (perhaps it was my large sleeve), and this blog entry took me 3-4 times longer than a regular entry usually does. Perhaps I can tell I’m innovating when it takes a long time, but feels like play… maybe. Valerie  

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The Tableau Experience

  November 20, 2014 , , ,

Today I attended “The Tableau Experience.” I’ve been struggling with what to call it: a conference, a convention… It had only one speaker, and a Q&A – and a wet-bar.  So… I’m settling with ‘experience’ as they do. What it really was though, was an advertisement. Don’t get me wrong – I like using Tableau to recreate charts for the Tobacco Ebook I’m working on, and this ‘experience’ was worth it for several reasons: 1. The speaker demoed several ways to share data that I haven’t seen in action since I’ve only been using it to create charts for data sets that are already created for me.   2. There were a lot of people there from many different kinds of institutions.  I met others from universities like me – Georgia Tech, Gwinnett College, and so on. But I spent most of the time schmoozing with a lady from Home Depot, and then talked briefly to a man from a company called Norfolk. Everyone was using Tableau for something different – I’m pretty sure I was the only one making an Ebook. 3. I was able to ask about that pesky issue Ryan Cagle and I have been having in trying to get the distance between pane tick marks and labels to be exactly the same in all our charts so they’re uniform within the Ebook. Sorry, Ryan – there is no way to do this. The guy I asked said your idea was the smartest. Overall, I’m glad I went to … Continue reading