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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Art Vandenberg and the World Community Grid

  November 17, 2014 ,

Today I went to the talk given in CURVE by Art Vandenberg. When I decided to attend, I didn’t know what the World Community Grid was, and now I know – and I think you should know too. First, Art started off telling us a bit about himself. Here he is on the right: Art was funny, and personable, and the perfect person to be telling us about World Community Grid. What IS the World Community Grid, you ask? It’s pretty much the most complex, yet most simple thing you can do to help save the world. Essentially, if you join the world community grid (make sure you join the GSU team!), whenever you’re not using your computer, and it’s on (this also works on android phones, but they have to be plugged in), the world community grid can use your computing power to increase their ability to solve data problems like producing clean water, or mapping cancer markers. It’s really that simple. And what’s cooler, is that all of our library computers (CURVE too) are already running world community. When the library is closed, there is a lot of world saving going on in there. I left the link up there at the top of this entry – check it out. And if you have additional questions, go ahead an leave them below in the comments and I’ll see what I can do to find you an answer. –Valerie

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SIF: positivity, morale and accomplishments

  November 9, 2014 ,

This week, the SIF overlords contacted me and asked me to collect and catalog SIF accomplishments so far. As someone whose default setting is >excited with bouncy option – I am excited that I get to do this job. And while it may seem a little early to start talking about accomplishments, I know that I’ve already learned enough to fill a whole brain noodle – and I’m hoping that others feel the same way. So I created a Google Forms survey to send out to everyone – and Joe, and Brennan already beta-tested it! That was so fast! I’ve used Google  Forms before, but only as someone filling out the form. This time I got to make, not one, but TWO forms! I made one today for the beta test for the Tools Wiki, which I will send to a few of you in the next week or so, and one for SIF Accomplishments. The forms are really easy to make, and have a variety of options for users to answer – like multiple choice, scale, text, and so on. My favorite part though is that they have lots of themes to choose from that make the forms look a little more fun. By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already filled out my form, and some of you may have already met with me. My hope is that by all of us thinking about the most positive and helpful aspects of SIFdom, we will be able … Continue reading

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Tableau Training

  November 3, 2014 ,

Since the beginning of SIF, I’ve been on the Tobacco Ebook project. I have learned iBooks Author layout and design techniques, which has completely reoriented my thinking about how design works, and increased my attention to detail by… a lot. This week, I got moved from layout and table building within iBooks Author to recreating charts in a program called Tableau. Tableau can create really clean-looking, beautiful line graphs, bar graphs, and many other types of graphs and charts, like pie charts :). But it’s not easy. First, the data in the spreadsheets the book writers provided us with must be formatted in a way that Tableau ‘likes,’ which is a feat all on its own. If the data isn’t formatted properly, nothing works. Then, the chart has so many formatting options, its enough to make any beginner’s head spin. Here are two screen shots of graphs I’ve been working with that I can’t seem to get to combine – one line graph and one bar graph: The good news is that once I figure out how to make the graphs function the way I like, they are actually pretty easy to make and turn out well. Thankfully, Will knows how to do most of it and is helping me figure out the trickier aspects. Phew! Valerie

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National Day on Writing Success!

  October 26, 2014 , ,

In case you didn’t hear, this past Tuesday was the National Day on Writing. And thanks to a bunch of people in the English Department, the Linguistics department, and some other organizations (I think there was a sorority involved somewhere), it went off really well. I’ve talked before about the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, and the project I’ve been working on to find an easy, low amount of hardware way to record using iPad. I blogged a little about it a few weeks ago, and it turns out that the simplest result was the best result. Here is a picture of the ultimate set up we decided to go with: As you can see, it is very minimal in its hardware involvement. We ended up investing in the adapter I mentioned in an earlier entry, which I linked above. The adapter is called the iPad Camera Connector and runs about $30. The snowball you can see in the picture plugs right into the adapter and then it just works. It took me a while to figure out that it needs no other software or authorization on the part of the iPad user – it simply plugs in and works with all the already installed iPad software. We were at our National Day on Writing table from 10AM until just before 2PM and managed to collect 20 narratives ranging from ‘the first books I read’ to ‘When I learned to read music’ – each one was interesting and wonderful. Here … Continue reading

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Rhet/Comp, Durkheim, Hybrid Pedagogy, and Me

  October 20, 2014 , , , ,

In the last 7 or so weeks as a SIF, I have learned more than I ever imagined I would. A few weeks ago, I decided to write an article featuring the SIF program. In a stroke of benevolence, Brennan gave me permission to spend some of my hours developing the article. So I set to work – basing the article on a footnote I harvested from Emile Durkheim’s sociologically ground breaking book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life written in 1912: “A tool is material accumulated capital.” When I read that note, I knew I was going to use it for something – but I wasn’t sure what – until I began to read Writing Teachers Writing Software by rhetoric and composition scholar Paul LeBlanc. The article I wrote went live this morning at 3am on Hybrid Pedagogy. Here is the link: Addressing the Elephant: The Importance of Infrastructure