Category Archives: SIF Projects

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Time For Some Updates

  November 3, 2014

I have been a member of the SIF family now for a little more than two months, so I guess it’s about time to go through all of my projects for this semester and give you updates on each. 1) Hybrid Pedagogy Promotional Videos This project has been a straightforward one from the beginning. The general idea is to record a series of interviews with faculty members who are experienced with a teaching that blends online and offline (i.e. in-class) activities–in other words, hybrid teaching. For this, we have come up with a set of focused interview questions, and over the course of the first 6 weeks we have conducted various interviews with faculty members. We have been able to compile a great amount of material to work with. We are currently in the post-production phase of this project, or should I say the first stage of this project since we believe that promoting hybrid teaching should also be considered from the students’ perspectives. To that end, we are planning to conduct more interviews with students in the course of the next semester in order to balance the information we have so far received from faculty. I am currently in the process of learning Adobe Premiere Pro so that I am also able to help out with the post-production process. 2) Outreach and Documenting Similar to the project above, this one is also clearly situated in the world of promotion. The basic premise of this project is to promote places … Continue reading

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Integration and Finalization

  October 30, 2014 , , ,

This week has been truly and completely hectic. However this hectic schedule was not because of our work at SIF but due to our midterm examinations. Almost all our examinations and assignment submissions were due this week. Luckily, everything went well and we were able to do a good job. Coming to the work part, we have discussed about the possibilities of integrating online deliberation mapping tool with the Desire 2 Learn system. However, after having a discussion with Chad, we have realized that the integration is not a possible option. D2L is a closed system where additional features cannot be added by third parties. There can only be external communication between the tools and the desire 2 learn system. So, the possibility of Online Deliberation mapping tool getting integrated with Georgia State University’s D2L system is ruled out. Now moving on to the design part of the Online Deliberation mapping tool, we are following a process for taking a product or feature from design through prototyping, which we call as product design sprint. This design sprint follows a simple process of 1)Choosing and understanding the problem 2) Mind mapping 3)Writing Story boards and 4) Critique and Super Vote. The major goal of the Online deliberation mapping tool is to provide asynchronus conversations between professors and students. Since the problem which includes a platform for sharing ideas, developing and promoting ideas has alreay been clearly defined, we could well proceed to the mind mapping. The mind maps is a kind … Continue reading

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Inspiration from TEDxPeachtree: SIF Symposium

  October 30, 2014 , ,

Its here. Midterms. As the academic calendar continues to progress, midterms allow you the awareness of “further than we were, but not yet where we need to be” in classes and projects. The same mindset has been being applied to SIF as I had my first small group checkin yesterday. Myself, Ryan, Sruthi, Roxanne, and Valerie all met with Brennan to check in on project progress and the overall SIF experience so far. Because I had not not even met some of these SIFs before, (I’ll remind you that I was not at the SIF kick off meeting in August since I was still living in DC at the time) I really enjoyed that we got to spend a large portion of our time together simply sharing in detail who we are, what projects were were assigned to, and providing an overview of the details of each project and its current status. What was most enjoyable about this was, when these SIFs spoke about their roles and objectives, you could see their faces light up with excitement. And when you hear about their projects, it is easy to see why. My SIF colleagues are working on really meaningful projects that utilize technology in innovative ways. Ah ha. Just what we’ve been striving for all along. But that is my honest reflection towards these projects. People are excited about the work they are doing because it simultaneously interesting, challenging, and best of all-creating a useful end product. This same theme was … 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

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“Education, Technology, and Society”

  October 26, 2014 , , , , ,

This week I sat in on the two presentations given by Rich Halverson on : Education, Technology, and Society Speaker Series Center for Instructional Innovation.   Much of his presentation was analyzing how technology does and can influence the way we educate and the way we learn.  Although some of the discussion was giving an overview of various approaches to education currently being used, what I found most interesting was his comment on the way kids and young adults communicate and interact with each other and the world. You no longer call you friend to make plans to meet, go to the public library to do research, or have to meet up in person to play a game- everything can be done remotely. You what information on a research topic for school, google it. You want to know where your friend is to see if they want to have lunch? Just see what they last tweeted or put on facebook, see if they have checked in somewhere or send a quick text.  Want to get with your friends and play the newest video game? Just get online and talk via your game console or computer.  Basic human interaction is not the same , yet the way we approach the classroom and education is shockingly stagnant. I believe in much of the traditional concepts utilized ino our public systems, but that is also in part because I do and have succeeded in them.  I am one of the few people I know … Continue reading