Tag Archives: Atlanta

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Unpacking Memories

  September 17, 2015 ,

I grew up in the Morningside-Lenox Park neighborhood, here in Atlanta. I walked home from Inman and Grady, nearly every day of the combined seven years I attended the schools, through the heart of Virginia Highlands. When I started my undergrad work at Georgia State, my group of friends stayed fairly local as well, with those who weren’t from Atlanta originally slowly becoming settled in the city in various neighborhoods. A constant in all of this, either as landmark I recognized while driving, a meeting place for food, or simply hangout after a late night on campus, was Manuel’s Tavern. Be it a friend’s improve group holding an event there, or just ending up there because it was central to nearly everyone in a group, the bar was a staple of my social life until I graduated in 2004 and moved to the hinterlands of Buford, Ga (or so it felt to me). But, even then, as I did my Masters and now PhD at GSU, Manuel’s held a cozy, wood paneled place in my heart. Fear and panic gripped my heart when I heard the news that the land surrounding the Tavern and the Tavern itself were being bought out by a developer to “renovate” and “upscale” the area along North Avenue. I had already seen what was being done to the area on Piedmont at Rock Springs and Cheshire Bridge Rd., and felt a small bit of what had made the area special was being lost to a … Continue reading

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First Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the School Year

  September 17, 2015 , ,

Today I attended the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup (DigPed Meetup) of the 2015-2016 school year. Hosted, by The Atlanta Connected Learning collegial network of university faculty and staff in the Atlanta area, ATLCL hosts DigPed meetups one time a month which aims to create a social face-to-face forum where various members of facutly, staff, and graduate student instructors can share, and discover what is happening cross-university and cross-disciplinarily in the greater Atlanta area. Each meeting is made up of two presentations, and discussions that occur during and after these presentations. Today, Jeff Greene and Pete Rorabaugh at Kennesaw State University gave a talk titled “Reframing a Degree for a New Media Ecosphere” in which they detail their reframing of the writing BA in their newly restructured KSU department after the merger. Jeff and Pete are teaching two courses, New Media I & II in which they teach a variety of composing skill that focus on content creation, interactivity and ownership. This kind of work is exciting, and necessary when we consider how quickly writing environments shift and change in today’s world where the digital is often emphasized. The second speaker was McKenna Rose at Emory, whose presentation was titled “Envisioning the Pechakucha: Strategies for Invention and Revision in the Literature Classroom.” McKenna explained her Pechakucha 20X20 assignment and showed a few examples of some of the work expected of her students. McKenna explained some of her techniques and processes as she asked her students to create and present their projects. What … Continue reading

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Expanding 3d Atlanta through Geospatial research

  September 17, 2015 ,

As the new school year kicks off so too does the ambition and drive to continue our projects as SIF moving with that same force. A now year long standing process, the 3D Atlanta project has really begun to take form, with now a prototype that wows people. As the details and content is added to the interactive 3d game engine, Unity, and the technical side of the project proceeds at a slower pace due to its tedious and time consuming nature, the research group is moving ahead. As a part of the research team on this project, the purpose and mission has been to scour the internet or any other resources available to find any useful images or interesting facts of the surrounding area during the time (1930s). This has been a large task and as each researcher had previously taken off on their own journey for wholesome historical content, we began to note how chaotic and unruly all these files, images, articles, and data can be hard to manage. Through this struggle, I began to use a very well known tool, Google Maps. Through This I have been able to create layers of each time period and since the interactive environment is based on geographic accuracy to the time period, I began to place the images, if possible in the exact location where the image was taken, or the place of which the article was written about. Since this method the team has begun to realize how useful … Continue reading

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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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Social Change Project (DLS)

  April 12, 2015 , ,

The Social Change Project is a project that recovers old files and interviews and re-formats them in order to organize and preserve them. This is a brand new Digital Library Services (DLS) project that I have been working on, and it is honestly quite interesting. This process starts off by taking the PDF file of an interview, for example, and converting it to a word document. After that, you create a new document and type up a brand new header for that interview. Once that is done, you then begin the process of re-formatting the interview. This can be a bit of a tedious process, but it allows you to get an in depth look at the content of the interview. Currently, I am working on re-formatting an old interview of a historical Georgia lawyer, Millard C. Farmer. These series of interviews detail his life and some of his most famous court cases. Farmer graduated from the University of Georgia back when racism was still rampant in Georgia. He talks about how his father made the controversial decision to give a job to a black man that was on death row (apparently you can take a man out of prison for work until he is convicted). Farmer spent much of his young childhood working with this man at his father’s company, and he couldn’t stand the fact that this man was going to eventually be killed by court for a case in which there was no serious evidence that he was … Continue reading