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Progress at CURVE

  September 28, 2014 , ,

As my second week of working at CURVE ends, I begin to reflect on my time spent there, the progress made, and its overall usefulness in the name of research. Working at CURVE has truly made my lasts jobs seem so mundane and unbearable. Honestly to me working at CURVE no longer feels like a job, let me explain. The room is a high-tech visual and research oasis. As a computer science major, I am continuously at awe with all that the space can do for students at GSU, especially those dedicated research students. The workstations each have either a pc or a mac of incredible quality. The PCs have 12 core processors and 128 GB of RAM (making them extremely fast and capable of loading things with a lot of data), while the macs 1 TB of hard drive making them able to store a significant amount of data and files. These workstations are all set up with high resolution samsung screens making the visuals great and are arranged for groups with multiple seats all around the station. The interact wall is immense. The wall of screens seems to stretch over more than half of the space.  This screen has recently been used to display medical models of the human body to allow a class of students with  medical related majors to clearly examine all that they can. The 4k screen adds to this high-tech lineup of equipment allowing for an area for viewing detailed images. Although the room … Continue reading

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ePoesis, and John Ashbery’s Ire

  September 25, 2014 ,

The ancient Greek work Poïesis (ποίησις) “is etymologically derived from the ancient term ποιέω, which means “to make” ” (Wikipedia), pointing to the fundamentally creative aspect of poetry. Words exist, like bricks. By a making, a poet creates a poem, like a builder creates a building. Ordering words, then, is poetry. Poets order words by placing certain words in a certain order, but also by creating structures: lines, stanzas, indentations, and so forth. Even the most basic poetic form presents challenges to electronic texts. For instance, since multiple spaces and tabs are not recognized by basic html, how would one easily replicate the following, with the varied indents present in various lines: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Metrical Feet. Lesson for a Boy” (image from this blog) Or, how about the very common use, in poetic texts, of line numbers: (From Project Gutenberg.) Each is, of course, possible in html… but not easily. Rendering a poem in WordPress (like this blog), for instance, is not easy at all, something I discovered personally while trying to add some poems to Free Poems on Demand. Here is one answer to for poetical WordPress users. In terms of Big Time, Famous Poets, when John Ashbery,  “looked at the first four electronic editions of his poetry he observed that they looked nothing like the original print editions and after he complained, his publisher, Ecco, promptly withdrew all four electronic books from circulation.” This story at poetryfoundation.org (quoting heavily from an article in today’s New York Times), however, describes how Ashbery … Continue reading

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Update on the SIF Outreach Project

  September 25, 2014 ,

After meeting with my group this past Thursday, we came up with some ideas to help more students and faculty become more aware of the different kinds of technology platforms available to them here at GSU. One idea was creating an app or adding to the current GSU app for that matter, in which we can have plot point of the different technology locations available to us on campus. When the plot point is clicked, it would show the location, address, pictures of the space, a telephone number to contact the space and person in charge, and possibly a short video showing the usage of the space as a whole. As today’s world is swallowed into technology, having this app will be quite helpful especially on the go. Mentioned above was the idea of having videos of each space and we discussed the time frame per video and where it can be shown, in places like the Recreation center or Langdale, basically any place on campus with a TV. Also, we can put up flyer in individual classrooms, the library, the Recreation Center, Student Center, and other heavy populated places on campus to direct the students and faculty to the specific platforms to be able to watch these promotional videos for these places. The SIF Outreach Project is looking to aim to target one space at a time and the first one on our list is the Digital Aquarium in the Student Center, so we shall see how things go! … Continue reading

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Instructional Videos and Why to Learn How to Create Them

  September 25, 2014 ,

Whenever I need to figure out how to do something, I tend first to look up a short instruction video on YouTube—say, fixing a vacuum cleaner or learning how to use a particular feature of a software.  In three or four minutes, I’m moved through a video instruction that shows the interface of the software as a voice moves me through the clicks or I watch a film of someone pulling apart a vacuum to reveal how the dang weird-o-belt gets reattached.  It’s a good way to learn stuff, especially when you don’t want to read the entire manual. No wonder that lots of teachers have been using various software programs to create short videos to teach students or help them review material on their own.  Of course, more folks could take up this approach—refine it and re-imagine it to solve further pedagogical problems. In this post, I want to mention a new program I’ve just learned about, Camtasia, and an app I’ve used, Explain Everything, that is now available for Windows, as well as Mac (about $5).  (There are many other products; but these two are the ones I’ve worked with.)  So far I’m a novice at creating these videos, but I am a fervent convert in their utility, and even elegance, in providing students with learning benefits. I’ve created some very rudimentary Explain Everything videos using an iPad, and have recently taken two workshops in which I learned the basics of Camtasia.  Both these programs allow a teacher … Continue reading

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Gamification Part 2: How can it be used to promote education?

  September 22, 2014

Hey Everyone! This week has flown by! We’re definitely making some headway at CURVE with one of our interactive environment projects–which I plan on posting more details about in my post next week. It’s pretty exciting and involves a tremendous amount of data that’s available–like maps showing the widths of sidewalks, streets, and building facades–as well as some interior measurements on the old Eighty-One Theatre. It’s grave lies beneath our very own Classroom South. For this week I just wanted to wax poetic on some potential applications on gamification in education and how to use it to promote projects. It’s definitely easier to talk about gamification in the context of video games–the whole point to a video game is creating a gamified experience, and anything else is there to support that function–whether it’s sound, visuals, narrative, or novel controls. Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer who started with a game, Braid, that was wildly successful for an independent release. His immediate critical and public acclaim allowed him to start speaking publicly about the video game industry and its inherent problems–some ethical. Here’s a video below–I welcome you to watch the entire presentation, but he only begins discussing the process of gamification starting around 50:00. The point Blow makes about modern game design–especially for social games, like Farmville–is that people are being ‘tricked’ into playing simplistic games. The term ‘tricked’ has a negative connotation, but it’s applicable. In the case of gamifying a process of data mining that people … Continue reading