Category Archives: digital pedagogy

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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

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Hole in History

  December 7, 2014 , , , , , ,

As you all may know, I am a part of a team of awesome SIFs who are working on an educational, innovative project. The project is aimed towards recreating an interactive virtual 3D model of the intersection of Decatur St. and Ivy St. (now Peachtree Center Ave.) in what it would have been like in the 1930s. Working on this project for the last semester has shed light in the fact that the project has taken a lot more time and energy than expected, while also hitting several bumps on the road. To me, that’s no problem as I know that all great masterpieces (not implying that our project will live up to the word “masterpiece”) take hard work, time, and dedication. Currently we have been at a standstill with the project because of one fact: there is a lack of pictures of the street during the 1930s. In order to resolve our problem, My job for the project was to search the internet inside and out for any pictures of buildings, preferably head-on shots, that would aid in recreating the building in a virtual 3D model as accurately as possible. Another SIF was setting up the 3D world in the game engine called Unity. As the search continued and the results were very disheartening and minimal, we decided to look to outside sources for help. One of our project supervisors heard that Emory was attempting to recreate the city of Atlanta into virtual 3D model in a similar project. … Continue reading

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Digital Champions

  November 12, 2014 ,

I am currently working on the first video of the 2 this semester that is on the Digital Champions. These professors have outstanding teaching strategies where they incorporate technology into their curriculum. They teach Hybrid courses where some instruction is in the classroom while other instruction is over the net or using technology. The first professor (myself and Ryan Cagle) was Dr. Gladis Francis. She has this very exciting way of you social media, such as twitter. Her students have to summarize the essence of a chapter in French on twitter. This limits them to only 140 characters. According to one her students we interviewed, that can be more challenging than someone may assume but she emphasized that she learned so much more French in Dr. Francis’s classroom. Hopefully I will be able to post it within the next week or so. Ameer

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eTextbooks

  November 5, 2014 ,

I recently read a 2014 article about eTextbooks; the focus of the narrative study, published in College Teaching and written by Jenny Bossaller and Jenna Kammer, both at the University of Missouri, centered on faculty experience with eTextbooks, particularly those developed by college textbook publishers, and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and arrangement. Bossaller and Kammer’s purpose in the article was “to inform instructors and administrators of the positive aspects (such as convenience, portability, and currency) and negative aspects (such as privacy, cost, and outsourcing) of teaching with etexts” (69).  Their methodology included a literature review about etext use in higher education and narrative interviews with eight faculty who had used etexts produced in conjunction with vendors (and in some cases, faculty who had also produced their own eTextbook). The authors list from another study (Cheverie, Peterson, and Cummings, 2012), “six major policy areas for etexts in higher education: affordability, broadband (network connectivity), information policy (encompassing access versus ownership, Digital Rights Management [DRM], and preservation), accessibility, privacy and security, and identity management (capable of single sign-on)”, but focus in their paper on affordability, privacy, and access, and add to this list outsourcing etext production, which they define as an important policy decision made by the faculty and university (69). The information in the study surprised me in several ways: 1.  I had not read much about nor thought much about the policy implications of the fact that college textbook companies have expanded their roles these days and are … Continue reading

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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