Category Archives: SIF Projects

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Oculus Rift — The Nausea Machine

  November 12, 2014 , ,

Hey Guys! Our Oculus Rift SDK2 kits are in! I spent a great deal of time with it over the weekend so I’d like to give a quick overview of what I’ve discovered: 1) It’s pretty difficult to setup. It took about 5 hours of fiddling with settings and looking online through forums to get this thing working properly–that being said–I was using my laptop and the SDK2 is not particularly fond of laptops with dual gpus like my own. Rather than use my Nvidia GPU, it will default to the integrated Intel GPU. This is a problem on their end. Regardless–I found a weird workaround to get this thing going! The downside is that I can’t mirror the goggle’s vision to my desktop–so you can’t see what someone is playing unfortunately until their dual GPU issue is fixed. Beyond that–learning the settings to adjust pupil distance, etc. is not particularly intuitive either, which is problematic because of the nausea that occurs if the settings aren’t tweaked properly. 2) Nausea, Nausea, and more Nausea. No matter how I tweak the goggle’s settings–some demos or games will consistently make me ill every time after about 5 minutes. Half-Life 2 is one of those games. Although it is stunning to explore–I get ill quite quickly and have to put the goggles down. I will continue to feel ill for about 15-20 minutes afterwards. It’s hard to pass it up though–nothing is quite as unnerving as walking up to a person in the … Continue reading

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eBooks in Higher Education, especially in Libraries

  November 12, 2014 ,

The history of the codex includes myriad and often convoluted ways of producing and distributing the book to readers.  Current day production and distribution of eBooks is no different in its dizzying variety.  To narrow things down, here I will present a snippet of the information available on how eBooks get to readers within the higher education system.  In particular, I want to mention some ways in which university libraries acquire and distribute eBooks. First of all, universities and colleges are increasing acquiring more eBooks than print books; among all U.S. academic libraries, as of 2012, more than half of their added materials were eBooks.  This is especially true for community colleges, which makes sense given it would be more convenient for their commuter student population to access materials remotely.  But, for all libraries, eBooks make sense; physical books take up a lot of space, which translates into the need for more real estate.  A perpetual problem for libraries continues to be the need for space for their collections. See the table below from the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Almanac of Higher Education, 2014,” extracted from U.S. Department of Education figures, FY 2012 (http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/article/Percentage-of-E-Books-at/147835/). Table of Percentage of E-Books at Academic Libraries, by Institution Type, FY 2012 click chart to enlarge University or college libraries depend on a variety of means to provide eBooks to users and there are several different kinds of middle-people distributors who provide content to be consumed by readers via different methods.  First, and perhaps most … Continue reading

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Collaborative work in the humanities

  November 9, 2014 ,

This weekend, the South Atlantic Modern Language Association is coming to Buckhead, and the Hoccleve Archive team will be there. The last couple of weeks have been spent getting ready for what, for us at least, is the first public roll-out of our work. For me, this has meant a lot of time doing graphic design work, getting our poster and power-point ready for display. One of the things I have learned in the process is that the Hoccleve project is larger & more institutionally diffuse than I previously knew. I learned earlier this semester that the University of Texas was involved, as the host institution of our digital repository and the home of the general editor of the Hoccleve Archives project, Elon Lang. Robin Wharton has established a hub for the project here at GSU, and as best I can tell, GSU is currently the most active institution involved in the project, largely due to the considerable investment the SIF project has made in it. But while working with Robin on the poster, I learned the that project also has branches at two Canadian Universities, the University of Manitoba and Concordia University. At Manitoba, a professor in the English department is seeking funding from what I gather is the Canadian equivalent of the NEH to help digitize the Hoccleve Archives large collection of microfilmed manuscripts and to acquire microfilmed copies of the few manuscripts we do not yet have. At Concordia, another professor is using Hoccleve Archive materials to … Continue reading

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Consumption vs. Production in the Hybrid 2110

  November 3, 2014 , ,

With a lot of help from Ameer, I am finally reaching the point where I can make videos more or less on my own. As I have been making them, I have been thinking about how educationally useful the experience of making the videos is. The countless decisions about what edit out, how to write captions that add to the content of the talking heads, and how to select images that enrich the storyline are really useful exercises in critical thought. The making of the video is more stimulating and engaging than the experience of watching them. Maybe this is simply a reflection of my still-modest chops as a filmmaker, but I think fundamentally it has to do with the difference between consumption and production – or, to use Halverson’s terms, between the kinds of content based technologies educational institutions have often been drawn towards and the learning technologies that have proliferated on the internet. So, I have been thinking about how to use the hybrid 2110 and its video component in ways that try to capture something of the experience of making the films. I know of at least one person at GSU, a VL named Nicole Tilford over in Religious Studies, who has been teaching students in upper division classes to make video as an assignment. You can see some of the results of her student’s work here. However, Nicole has been doing this with upper division courses, which has several significant advantages for projects of this nature. … Continue reading

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Another Post on Gamification!

  November 3, 2014 , ,

Hey All! I’ve been working like crazy on comprehensive exams this week and thought I would share some of the latest dialogue on Gamification I’ve researched and written. I think it’s a highly relevant topic to a lot of contemporary research that has any public leaning–like our reconstruction of Decatur St project we’re still investigating and researching. Enjoy! How Gamification has Transformed Web-Based Interaction: Black Hat vs. White Hat The terms white hat and black hat originate from the hacker community. White hat hacking refers to those who break cyber security barriers for non-malicious reasons; testing internal security for vulnerabilities(Knight 2009)(Douglas 2010: 503), and sometimes extended into civil activism like leaking documents into the press. Black hat hacking refers to the violation of computer security systems for maliciousness or personal gain(Moore 2005: 258). The dichotomy is in the intention behind one’s action. The terms were applied by Yu-Kai Chou (2014) in his theories of gamification to mirror the intention behind its application. White hat elements of design promote engagement by letting the user express creativity, feel success through mastering the gamified application, and promote a higher sense of meaning—it fosters positive emotions. Black hat elements are those that demand user action from unpredictability of rules, fear of loss, or from the need for things given arbitrary value. The motivations to engage are still evident with black hat elements, but the end user experience elicits negative emotions. Although Chou draws this distinction of good and bad motivating game design elements—black hat … Continue reading