Tag Archives: digital pedagogy

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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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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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Getting more from images in the classroom

  October 2, 2014 ,

As I mentioned last week, one of my main tasks as a SIF fellow is to help generate video segments, essentially small documentaries, for GSU’s hybrid U.S. History survey course. Over the last week, I have been learning Adobe Premier Pro, so that I can transform a-roll footage of historians talking with each other about important historic events and phenomena into more engaging film. One of the questions I have been mulling over as I have been leaning the mechanics of video editing is how to maximize the pedagogical value of the films we are making. There is a kind of tension, hopefully a creative one over the long term, between the teacher in me (I have taught non-hybrid versions of the course several times), who thinks above all in terms of exposing students to important material, and to the complexity of historical circumstance, and the novice film-maker who is under the understandable mandate of producing a video that students will actually watch. All of the complexities of the discussion, which is a kind of wonderful dialectical back and forth between two historians trying to make sense of a complicated era, are lost if the audience for the film isn’t listening while watching. So, Ameer and I have been grappling with this question of how to use video as an engagement point, not a distraction, to produce videos that are as meaty as the lectures they are intended to replace, but hopefully will hold the attention of students in a … Continue reading

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Gamification Part 2: How can it be used to promote education?

  September 22, 2014

Hey Everyone! This week has flown by! We’re definitely making some headway at CURVE with one of our interactive environment projects–which I plan on posting more details about in my post next week. It’s pretty exciting and involves a tremendous amount of data that’s available–like maps showing the widths of sidewalks, streets, and building facades–as well as some interior measurements on the old Eighty-One Theatre. It’s grave lies beneath our very own Classroom South. For this week I just wanted to wax poetic on some potential applications on gamification in education and how to use it to promote projects. It’s definitely easier to talk about gamification in the context of video games–the whole point to a video game is creating a gamified experience, and anything else is there to support that function–whether it’s sound, visuals, narrative, or novel controls. Jonathan Blow is an independent video game developer who started with a game, Braid, that was wildly successful for an independent release. His immediate critical and public acclaim allowed him to start speaking publicly about the video game industry and its inherent problems–some ethical. Here’s a video below–I welcome you to watch the entire presentation, but he only begins discussing the process of gamification starting around 50:00. The point Blow makes about modern game design–especially for social games, like Farmville–is that people are being ‘tricked’ into playing simplistic games. The term ‘tricked’ has a negative connotation, but it’s applicable. In the case of gamifying a process of data mining that people … Continue reading

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Interactive Media + The Classroom

  September 22, 2014

We all know the advancement technology has made in the educational field–we all are a part of it!–and the potential it has to revolutionize the traditional method of “learning”. Interactive media is category of mediums set to give some power over to the students. Interactive media consists of a plethora of different ideas and concepts. It can be something as simple as creating a Powerpoint with audio/comments asking questions and reinforcing main ideas and handing it over to a student to go through it with the class; or, it could be something more complex such as a 3D animation of the human body’s internal organs and the affect diseases have on it. This new technology-based style of teaching has expanded over the years. KhanAcademy is one such example of it. They create free, instructional videos for multiple subjects, and they have now grown to the point where they are the primary focal point of classrooms in some schools. Not only can interactive media such as video lectures/teachings help educate and tutor students here, but it also brings education to places that do not have open access to proper schools or teachers. There are many villages in Africa that have charity-sponsored computers and schools, but often times the teachers there are not very educated themselves. In some of these villages, KhanAcademy replaces traditional teaching and allows children and adults to learn about whatever they want–for free. Even here in the United States, there are some classrooms that primarily use KhanAcademy’s instructional … Continue reading