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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

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Following up with Nicole’s recent post

  October 20, 2014 ,

I’m writing this blog post as a follow up to Nicole’s “Innovation and Education” post that she published on October 13. What I particularly liked about her approach to tackling the concept of innovation is that it’s not certainly necessary to “reinvent the wheel” but to take into account as many perspectives as possible when attempting to create something new. Following this line of thinking, being innovative can be seen as doing something else with knowledge and processes already available to us. In turn, it stresses the idea that innovation always comes from “somewhere”. In few cases, innovative ideas emerge our of nothing. What I have found quite helpful in applying this logic of “somewhere” is to subscribe to as many online outlets that relate to your interests. In my case this meant subscribing to the various Youtube channels of the conference series known as TED. Below is a list of channel links: TED, TED-Ed, TEDMed, TEDFellowsTalks, TEDxYouth, TEDxTalks. For those of you who are not yet familiar with the organization, TED is a conference platform that works to share ideas worth spreading. This year marks its 20th anniversary with conference presentations that deal with a broad spectrum of topics and issues coming from the fields of technology, entertainment, art, education, business, and medicine. The organization curates most of those presentations on its various YouTube channel, thereby creating an impressive archive of information and knowledge. Tapping into this knowledge can really help generate ideas that we can consider innovative. For example, … Continue reading

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Creativity is a Conversation

  October 20, 2014

Photo credit: Sembazuru A reoccurring key concept reappeared again during last week’s lectures: that creative work is a conversation between yourself and whatever it is you’re creating. Very few of us can hear something or visualize something in our heads and have it materialize in the real world. When you pluck a guitar string the string reacts. There is no way to know precisely how the sting will sound. You should know what note your hitting of course, but there will be slight nuances beyond your control. When you ink a piece of paper, the paper and pen will react in unique ways too. In short, nothing happens in isolation. Everything created contains some element of conversation. Even writing a paper is a conversation between you and the paper you are writing. By opening yourself up to this conversation, and allowing the dialogue to flow, you can become more creatively productive. Make a conscious effort to keep the lines of communication open especially during the early stages of creating and be open to change. Bob Ross was the absolute master of this. For one thing, the guy made his living literally having conversations with the canvas. And in addition to being a supreme bad ass, no seriously he was a retired Master Sergeant for the U.S. Air Force, he dropped  creative wisdom on the reg. Perhaps his most famous line, “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.” sums this post up interestingly. Roll with the punches is another way to say it. The … Continue reading

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Data Visualization in the Modern Browser

  October 20, 2014

Hello all, got some good stuff to talk about this post. My ThreeJS stuff is hitting off the roof now with more and more projects coming in from a lot of different places. So much in fact I can’t process it all. So I have decided to spearhead renewed energy into all this ThreeJS stuff. Originally, my plan was to add to it gradually, but I see that time is of essence to get my point across. Well, enough about me. It’s time for you guys to see what I’m doing. First of all, I have been researching a lot of the potentials of ThreeJs and WebGL in general. WebGL is the standard of graphics in the browser. It’s the flip side of OpenGL, which is a larger library with more potential, especially for phones. Anyways, I’ve been looking at a lot of Google Talks and research stuff, which was all kind of exciting, but I could have done with a paper I could browse in 5 minutes vs a 20 minute video. Anyways, I looked at this thing called ROME made with a lot of people and some Google employees. It’s a movie that interprets a lot of content in just a browser. Pretty amazing interactive music video. Click here to see it. Awesome visualization through shaders in WebGL as well as a little pick up from ThreeJS Cool stuff. Also, I looked at a lot of cool data visualizations using just simple JS to make graphs and charts: Polis is … Continue reading

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Updates from the Hoccleve Archives

  October 20, 2014 ,

There has been a lot of activity over the Hoccleve Archives projects over the last few weeks, mostly relating to a series of computer files known as the HOCCLEX files. These files, which date from the 1980’s, were originally developed by a team of researchers, led by D.C. Greetham, working on a critical edition of Hoccleve’s magnus opus, the Regiment of Princes. They are careful transcriptions of three holograph manuscripts that contain about three dozen poems. Holograph manuscripts are those written by their author, and one of the things that makes Hoccleve so interesting is these three holograph manuscripts, because very few examples of works actually written by their authors survive from this period (most extant manuscripts were produced by scribes, but Hoccleve was a scribe, so he produced his own manuscripts). The HOCCLEX files took the holograph manuscripts and used an early and now mysterious, computer language to mark the transcripts for grammar and spelling. The original idea was that the HOCCLEX files would provide a lexicon of Hoccleve’s usage, so that editors of the Regiment, which survives in many manuscripts, but none by Hoccleve himself, could use the HOCCLEX files to make editorial decisions about spelling variants and similar discrepancies between manuscripts. Unfortunately Greetham’s proposed edition never materialized, though they were used by Charles Blyth in his 1999 edition of the Regiment. Since that time, the HOCCLEX files, and the treasure-trove of information they contain about Hoccleve’s Middle English, have not been easily accessible to scholars. Not only … Continue reading