SIF Fellow Speaks at TEDx

  August 25, 2015

This summer, SIF Fellow Thomas Breideband presented his work on how things grow in the complex ecosystem of social media at TEDx Vicenza in Italy. Over 5000 people watched the event on a live stream, and a half million people were reached by it on Twitter. Thomas’ expertise on social media, developed through research for his dissertation, figures prominently in one of this years’ new SIF projects, the Nation Branding project, which uses facebook and twitter to study the effects of Latin American countries efforts to brand themselves as tourist destinations, a project on which Thomas serves as team lead.  

When Our Eyes are the Media

  August 25, 2015

SIF Fellow Ameer Muhammad recently took a trip to Turkey that completely changed his perspective about the country. His experience with Syrian refugees there is the subject of his new documentary film. Read more about his thoughts on the challenges of educating refugee populations here.

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Reimagining Graduate Education in the Humanities through the SIF Program

  April 20, 2015 , ,

Last Friday, a panel of SIF fellows presented at the CIE Conference on Pedagogy. Due to some issues with time management on our panel, my remarks ended up being abbreviated considerably. So, I thought I’d throw them up here: “Reimagining Graduate Education in the Humanities through the SIF Program” A few weeks ago, I was attending a meeting of the GSU/GPC consolidation implementation committee. These meetings are usually nose-to-the-grindstone affairs, so I was surprised when the topic of innovation in higher education turned into a major part of the discussion. Among the participants in the little mini-debate that broke out on that topic was President Becker who made the comment that technology itself was not innovation. To illustrate this, he pointed to the strides GSU has made in lowering its number of drop outs and in helping students get their degrees in a shorter period of time. This progress was based in part on software that allowed GSU to track and identify students who were falling behind and in need of intervention from advising. But, as Becker pointed out, other universities who had purchased the same software had not seen the results from it that GSU had. As Becker put it, this is because innovation is the “marriage of process and technology.” He credited GSU’s success less with the software – important as that was — than with building a process to use the technology in efficient ways. Now, President Becker knows more about higher ed than I ever will. … Continue reading

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I hope you had the time of your life….a reflection on SIF

  April 20, 2015 , , , ,

As finals week quickly approaches, we are working at full capacity to bring projects to a space of completion.  And while the thought of the end of the semester brings along with the quintessential dialogue of, “…gosh…where did the time go?” Indeed, where did it go? It went into projects, big and small, that have brought new resources and information to the Georgia State community. Each click of the mouse bringing us closer and closer to the creation of a tool or resource which did not previously exist.  Through this post, I’d like to take a moment to look back and summarize the SIF experience. What you all have hopefully learned from me:  1) Maps have power  Maps, even within the current communication age which we are living in, still remain undervalued and misunderstood.  Maps gain our trust just by the mere act of being maps. They have the power to explain the world in ways that words do not. As I was told during a recent interview for my own thesis project, ” If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million.” The ways we are making maps in changing. We should be critical of maps and understand the different viewpoints from which they are created 2) How to make your own maps  Throughout the blog post I have been able to offer a number of step by step guides to supply readers with some starting points to Google Earth  work and tools like Batch Geo. Additionally, over the year … 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