Category Archives: pedagogy

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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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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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Innovation and Education

  October 16, 2014 ,

Innovation, a word describing a new idea, device or process that is an original, something to bring society up to another level. However, when discussing innovation and education I do not think it has to be in terms of something new, something never been used or discussed, because when it comes to innovation in education I am a firm believer in not “recreating the wheel”. What I mean by that, is that societies have been educating themselves and their fellow men and women for centuries- that is a ton of data to draw from, and in the work I do, when you have centuries worth of data you might want to extrapolate some of the points made before you try and invent what you think is an entirely different approach.  By using the idea behind genetic algorithms, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we could try and find the best combination of education methods to create or innovate the superhuman of education history, through centuries of education, across hundreds of societies and cultures. The United States is supposed to be a “superpower” of a nation, yet we are significantly lagging behind many other countries when it comes to education.  This could be attributed to many factors, but I feel it also has to do with our size and our age as a nation.  Although there are other countries that have centuries of education to fall back on, years of trial and error, we are a newer nation that feels that … Continue reading

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“Tell me, won’t ya tell me, won’t ya tell me, won’t you tell me…”

  October 16, 2014 ,

While I have been working diligently on finishing the first safety video and planning out the next installments, I wanted to shift the focus to another interesting project I have been working on – the Tools Wiki.  The Tools Wiki is the brain child of Valerie and will be a clearing house of online resources with GSU examples for students to use and expand.  For example, for assignments that require students to build website, they could use the Tools Wiki to find what other students have used in the past and see examples of their works. We are now in the prototyping phase where Valerie, Wasfi, and I are all making our own versions to experiment with to see how people interact with it and use it.  You can view mine below: As always, I am open to any and all feedback, so if you check it out, tell me know what you like/dislike/expected/etc. Roxanne Greeson Below is a “new to me” band, the Mother Hips from California with their song “Third Floor Story”, I found it to be a great jam song with a catchy chorus and of course a couple of Ooo OoOoo’s thrown in for good measure.

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Deliberate and Develop

  October 16, 2014 , ,

This week at SIF has been a brainstorming week. Everyone in the team has been putting lots of thoughts into the development of the Deliberation Mapping tool.The major discussion has been about the functionality of the Deliberation tool. We are planning to develop the tool in such a way that it is scalable and expandable.The application has so far been developed using Javascript for the client side programming. We have also planned to develop it by using PHP and mysql in the back end. However, considering the complexity of the application, we are now considering to migrate the code to ASP.Net and MS SQL Server. We are now checking for the feasibility of the migration. ASP.NET is used to create web technologies and is an integral part of Microsoft’s .NET framework vision.It allows us to build compelling web applications by making use of Visual Studio. We have also been informed that the Deliberation mapping tool will be integrated into the Desire to Learn system of GSU. So, we need to make sure that there would be no problems during integration and possible upgradation. We are yet to get the information regarding the desire to learn back-end system. There are a couple of meetings scheduled in the next few weeks to discuss about the possible integration and also finalize the design functionality. So, probably by the end of this month we will be finalizing the design and start the development of the application. Siva Kondeti