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“Education, Technology, and Society”

  October 26, 2014 , , , , ,

This week I sat in on the two presentations given by Rich Halverson on : Education, Technology, and Society Speaker Series Center for Instructional Innovation.   Much of his presentation was analyzing how technology does and can influence the way we educate and the way we learn.  Although some of the discussion was giving an overview of various approaches to education currently being used, what I found most interesting was his comment on the way kids and young adults communicate and interact with each other and the world. You no longer call you friend to make plans to meet, go to the public library to do research, or have to meet up in person to play a game- everything can be done remotely. You what information on a research topic for school, google it. You want to know where your friend is to see if they want to have lunch? Just see what they last tweeted or put on facebook, see if they have checked in somewhere or send a quick text.  Want to get with your friends and play the newest video game? Just get online and talk via your game console or computer.  Basic human interaction is not the same , yet the way we approach the classroom and education is shockingly stagnant. I believe in much of the traditional concepts utilized ino our public systems, but that is also in part because I do and have succeeded in them.  I am one of the few people I know … Continue reading

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BatchGeo: a simple tool for visualizing point data

  October 26, 2014 , ,

I would like to begin a series of “Maps for the Classroom: How To” blog posts that will share with readers different tips, trips, and tools that educators can use with little to no training to visualize spatial data. The first tool I would like to highlight is called BatchGeo. In CURVE this week, we had a student who came in and wanted to learn more about how to bring a spreadsheet of addresses into the ArcGIS environment. Well, as is not unusual for ArcMap, we ran into challenges when the geocode address tool kept giving us an error message. But never fear! BatchGeo is here! BatchGeo is a website that generates point based maps from Excel spreadsheets.  Let me provide a little overview of the workflow this site: First thing to do is organize your spreadsheet in a way that allows BatchGeo to “talk” to the information.  I suggest making column headers such as “Address” ,”City” ,”State” and “Zip Code”. You can also add additional information (some examples may be the name of the location or contact information for a business you’re representing)-this information will be displayed whenever you click on that location on your soon to be created map. When you’ve finished organizing all your information-all you have to do is copy and paste your spreadsheet into the box at the top of BatchGeo’s webpage.  Then hit the “Validate & Set Options” button.    BatchGeo typically is able to automatically detect which column is which, but to make … Continue reading

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Improvements in the CURVE experience

  October 23, 2014

As CURVE begins to gain “regulars” , “newbie” traffic, and large intellectual groups I continue to see the growth and resources that the CURVE space is able to provide for not just GSU students but the community. The visuals in the space are incredible and it is a daunting task coming up with ways to optimize all the resources that the CURVE space provides. As the weeks go by and seminars, classes, and research groups have come in and out of CURVE, its become a bit more clear the type of students and researchers that CURVE is meant to attract. These ambitious intellectuals are seeking knowledge on their own personal interest or to improve their abilities in the subject matter at hand. As a SIF member of two innovative projects as well as computer science major, the amount of knowledge that is out there simply by meeting the right people and gaining meaningful relationships has impacted me in being proactive to seek these opportunities much more especially when it is to gain that connection for a job or internship or simply for personal knowledge. One specific  The entrepreneur workshop seemed very useful in not only the sense of helping guide entrepreneurs and giving them the tools to succeed on their own but also to provide them opportunities to network. Specifically a guest speaker was brought to the workshop. The speaker named MK was a GSU alumni who has been the successful business  owner of 3 companies and was now working … Continue reading

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More about Timelines and their Uses

  October 23, 2014 , ,

Timelines can be useful in teaching in a variety of ways. The most obvious is having students create a timeline on a particular topic that can be represented chronologically or progressively.  The choices the student makes of what to include on the timeline and what to say about the events not only help the student learn the material, but also to analyze the available information for what is most salient about the topic. The teacher can also use timelines to present material to students in a way to better illustrate the kind of connections events have within a span of time.  A timeline might open class discussions about how and in what ways an event affected other events that followed; or visualizing events on a timeline could reveal that previous assumptions of associations weren’t really so. Further, a class can contribute to a timeline tied to a teacher’s web site (or D2L), and multiple classes can contribute entries from semester to semester, creating an on-going wiki of sorts.  In this way, the entries by previous students serve to teach subsequent students and provide models of a successful entry.  (Eventually, depending on the topic, the wiki timeline would need to be taken down and started blank again for a new round of classes.)  George Pullman in the English department (and the co-director of CII) uses this approach in his Greek Rhetoric class—his timeline is meant to gather a “chronology of events thought to be significant to the development of Rhetoric,” and … Continue reading

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Where is the big picture?

  October 23, 2014 ,

I have been working as a SIF for about 2 months, I am excited about the projects that I am working on. Here is a status update regards what is happening to our main project and how things are shaping up. Project 1 Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development This is our primary project. We had a design sprint meeting for the project, the participants were Heidi, Will, Justin, Nathan and the usual suspects Ram, Siva, Rushitha and Sruthi. The design sprint involves the following stages : – Understanding the problem Creating user stories Diverging of ideas Understanding the problem involves mapping the problem and the issues thereof. Here we discussed asynchronous spaces wherein there is lack of feel of shared experience, flow of conversations, development of ideas and their inter-dependencies. Most often in online spaces, the big picture is difficult to find and making the user not see the wood for the trees. This understanding of the problem at hand helped us define our goals for a space for asynchronous generative conversations. Participation is motivated by shared purpose, so the tool has to support formation and deliberation for a shared goal or purpose like solving or defining a problem, making a decision and to develop shared understanding. All these goals were defined from a pedagogical perspective. Possible solutions regarding the tool were discussed. User stories from the perspectives of instructor, early contributors, mediators and late contributors were discussed. With these broad use case scenarios, we proceeded to the next step. Diverging … Continue reading