Category Archives: SIF Projects

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“Will we be lost without paper maps in the digital age?”

  October 5, 2014 , ,

This week, the ArcGIS Online Outreach team started discussing its newest project -“Atlanta Mass Transit: Past, Present, Future.” This project is going to be using the Planning Atlanta collection to access past planning documents for Atlanta’s conversations surrounding transportation. With these documents we plan to make an ESRI Story Map that shows the plans through the decades. Given that the streetcar has raised the level of dialogue around transportation, we hope to contribute to the discussion through this publicly available, online map. While not all mapping is done on web based platforms, almost all map creation has been digital since the 1990’s. Not only has the way cartographers make maps changed, but technology has changed the way we view maps. What was previously printed off, hung on walls, and folded up to put in glove boxes is now contained on screens of varying sizes. Some digital maps are static, but they are becoming increasingly animated, interactive, and even 3D. So is the paper map becoming obsolete? According to Paul Hurst and Paul Clough from the the Royal School of Military Survey, argue that paper maps are still holding strong in the 21st century. In their article Will we be lost without paper maps in the digital age?  in the Journal of Information Science, they discuss their study which examines the the preferred mode of map consumption of experts and non-experts. An expert is someone who is a professional who has expansive experience in paper and digital map creation while a non-expert represents … Continue reading

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A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

  September 28, 2014 , ,

This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience. I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first. However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that … Continue reading

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Progress at CURVE

  September 28, 2014 , ,

As my second week of working at CURVE ends, I begin to reflect on my time spent there, the progress made, and its overall usefulness in the name of research. Working at CURVE has truly made my lasts jobs seem so mundane and unbearable. Honestly to me working at CURVE no longer feels like a job, let me explain. The room is a high-tech visual and research oasis. As a computer science major, I am continuously at awe with all that the space can do for students at GSU, especially those dedicated research students. The workstations each have either a pc or a mac of incredible quality. The PCs have 12 core processors and 128 GB of RAM (making them extremely fast and capable of loading things with a lot of data), while the macs 1 TB of hard drive making them able to store a significant amount of data and files. These workstations are all set up with high resolution samsung screens making the visuals great and are arranged for groups with multiple seats all around the station. The interact wall is immense. The wall of screens seems to stretch over more than half of the space.  This screen has recently been used to display medical models of the human body to allow a class of students with  medical related majors to clearly examine all that they can. The 4k screen adds to this high-tech lineup of equipment allowing for an area for viewing detailed images. Although the room … Continue reading

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Update on the SIF Outreach Project

  September 25, 2014 ,

After meeting with my group this past Thursday, we came up with some ideas to help more students and faculty become more aware of the different kinds of technology platforms available to them here at GSU. One idea was creating an app or adding to the current GSU app for that matter, in which we can have plot point of the different technology locations available to us on campus. When the plot point is clicked, it would show the location, address, pictures of the space, a telephone number to contact the space and person in charge, and possibly a short video showing the usage of the space as a whole. As today’s world is swallowed into technology, having this app will be quite helpful especially on the go. Mentioned above was the idea of having videos of each space and we discussed the time frame per video and where it can be shown, in places like the Recreation center or Langdale, basically any place on campus with a TV. Also, we can put up flyer in individual classrooms, the library, the Recreation Center, Student Center, and other heavy populated places on campus to direct the students and faculty to the specific platforms to be able to watch these promotional videos for these places. The SIF Outreach Project is looking to aim to target one space at a time and the first one on our list is the Digital Aquarium in the Student Center, so we shall see how things go! … Continue reading

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It’s all about content . . . or is it?

  September 18, 2014 ,

Over the last week I’ve been really busy with one of my projects in particular, which is to produce a series of short videos, featuring both faculty members as well as students, that are designed to shed light on so-called hybrid approaches to teaching and learning. What does that mean? In essence, a hybrid approach to teaching and learning combines on-ground, in-class activities with online activities and discussions. Especially in the last couple of years, more and more attention has been given to this particular educational design, presumably because the explosive developments in digital information technologies and social media applications have had the effect that most of us spend more time online now than in the past. Naturally, academia doesn’t want and also shouldn’t fall behind those developments. That being said, however, there are a number of challenges that need to be considered when blending offline with online education, as put forth by Jesse Stommel, Founder and Director of Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology: “[The] challenge is not to merely replace (or offer substitutes for) face-to-face instruction, but to find new and innovative ways to engage students in the practice of learning. Hybrid pedagogy does not just describe an easy mixing of on-ground and online learning, but is about bringing the sorts of learning that happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.” (“Hybridity pt. 2: What is Hybrid Pedagogy?”) So, … Continue reading