Tag Archives: innovation

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The Creeping Up Problem of Innovation

  February 14, 2015

Hey guys!   We’re in the middle of February, but its still the new year! So…yeah…Happy New Year… To business! Lots of stuff happening around CURVE. I’ve been dropping in on a few consultations to see what’s going on around the University and it seems that a lot of business majors are coming in talking about big data analytics, which is cool since we have loads of people in that department. Other than that though, there seems to be a good amount of people in there working on school projects and whatnot, myself included. I’m working on a math project right now dealing with audio algorithms and music, so looking forward to that in another blog post. Anyways, the topic I want to talk about in this blog post is about…well getting ideas for projects in the first place. Yes, yes…most of us at CURVE get ecstatic about working on another project when we have 5 already under our belt, but it pays to keep an open mind. I found this  website by Harvard University dealing with annotating, digital literacy, and multimedia. The website has a lot of different ways to enhance things like pedagogy, collaboration, and note-taking in the modern-day classroom by doing studies on these specific subjects. They also provide a whole bunch of links to some very cool projects like VATIC which is an awesome video annotation tool. I suggested it to Mandy who was going to give a presentation to the CDC for studying the Beltline, but, in … Continue reading

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Innovating by Hand

  December 7, 2014 ,

All of the text above was imported in, which is why I couldn’t hyperlink Touchnote. This is the only bit I’ve typed, save the title. As you can see, the pen has several issues, not least that it buzzes quite loudly. For some reason, the receiver picked up my ‘smooth’ lines as dashed and dotted above (perhaps it was my large sleeve), and this blog entry took me 3-4 times longer than a regular entry usually does. Perhaps I can tell I’m innovating when it takes a long time, but feels like play… maybe. Valerie  

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Art Vandenberg and the World Community Grid

  November 17, 2014 ,

Today I went to the talk given in CURVE by Art Vandenberg. When I decided to attend, I didn’t know what the World Community Grid was, and now I know – and I think you should know too. First, Art started off telling us a bit about himself. Here he is on the right: Art was funny, and personable, and the perfect person to be telling us about World Community Grid. What IS the World Community Grid, you ask? It’s pretty much the most complex, yet most simple thing you can do to help save the world. Essentially, if you join the world community grid (make sure you join the GSU team!), whenever you’re not using your computer, and it’s on (this also works on android phones, but they have to be plugged in), the world community grid can use your computing power to increase their ability to solve data problems like producing clean water, or mapping cancer markers. It’s really that simple. And what’s cooler, is that all of our library computers (CURVE too) are already running world community. When the library is closed, there is a lot of world saving going on in there. I left the link up there at the top of this entry – check it out. And if you have additional questions, go ahead an leave them below in the comments and I’ll see what I can do to find you an answer. –Valerie

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SIF: positivity, morale and accomplishments

  November 9, 2014 ,

This week, the SIF overlords contacted me and asked me to collect and catalog SIF accomplishments so far. As someone whose default setting is >excited with bouncy option – I am excited that I get to do this job. And while it may seem a little early to start talking about accomplishments, I know that I’ve already learned enough to fill a whole brain noodle – and I’m hoping that others feel the same way. So I created a Google Forms survey to send out to everyone – and Joe, and Brennan already beta-tested it! That was so fast! I’ve used Google  Forms before, but only as someone filling out the form. This time I got to make, not one, but TWO forms! I made one today for the beta test for the Tools Wiki, which I will send to a few of you in the next week or so, and one for SIF Accomplishments. The forms are really easy to make, and have a variety of options for users to answer – like multiple choice, scale, text, and so on. My favorite part though is that they have lots of themes to choose from that make the forms look a little more fun. By the time you read this, you’ll probably have already filled out my form, and some of you may have already met with me. My hope is that by all of us thinking about the most positive and helpful aspects of SIFdom, we will be able … 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