Tag Archives: SIF projects

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I hope you had the time of your life….a reflection on SIF

  April 20, 2015 , , , ,

As finals week quickly approaches, we are working at full capacity to bring projects to a space of completion.  And while the thought of the end of the semester brings along with the quintessential dialogue of, “…gosh…where did the time go?” Indeed, where did it go? It went into projects, big and small, that have brought new resources and information to the Georgia State community. Each click of the mouse bringing us closer and closer to the creation of a tool or resource which did not previously exist.  Through this post, I’d like to take a moment to look back and summarize the SIF experience. What you all have hopefully learned from me:  1) Maps have power  Maps, even within the current communication age which we are living in, still remain undervalued and misunderstood.  Maps gain our trust just by the mere act of being maps. They have the power to explain the world in ways that words do not. As I was told during a recent interview for my own thesis project, ” If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth a million.” The ways we are making maps in changing. We should be critical of maps and understand the different viewpoints from which they are created 2) How to make your own maps  Throughout the blog post I have been able to offer a number of step by step guides to supply readers with some starting points to Google Earth  work and tools like Batch Geo. Additionally, over the year … Continue reading

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Deliberation map is born!

  March 1, 2015 , ,

Project: Online Deliberation Mapping Tool Development As planned, version 1.0 of deliberation map was completed. It includes following features: 1. There can be only one seed for the deliberation map. When the map starts, it will look like this. 2. Any body can post and reply, without logging in. So, it is open to public. When deliberation map is running on a server, whosoever gets access to the URL of the deliberation map, can add posts to it. As a consequence, two users, probably from two different computers, can view and edit the map at the same time. Changes made by one user will be reflected to all others when the map is refreshed at the viewer’s end. 3. Currently map refreshes at a particular client computer when a new post is added by a user at the client computer, it is NOT refreshed at all other clients viewing the map. 4. The view is in a tree like fashion. Reply to a post is in the next level. Within a level posts will be in chronological order with earliest on the left and the latest on the right. 5. When a post is added, the map rearranges and scales dynamically to adjust the display to show all the posts on the map. The nodes, representing the post, decreases in size automatically to fit into the display. For example, the map changes to look as follows:   Technical Details The deliberation map has been implemented using ASP.NET technology. It has been … Continue reading

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The SIF and graduate education

  February 16, 2015

Today in the exchange, I overheard Ryan mention to Justin that he often thinks about ways to “market” the SIF, a program which has, as best I can tell, very little in the way of reputation even at GSU. This is not surprising since the program is less than a year old and much of the work that we do is in an ancillary role and/or is long-term work that hasn’t yet shown up in the classroom. My work for the hybrid American history survey is a good example of this. It is trickling into the classroom, but any students who encounter it will have no reason to associate it with the SIF program and my conversations with professors in the department leads me to think that for most part, few are aware of the SIF involvement in the development of content for the course. Assuming that the SIF funding is renewed (and I would that it is as we have been a ton of good work for the university), time should take care of some of this. Hopefully in years to come more faculty will know about the chance to intersect with our labor and expertise, more students will seek positions in the program, and the general profile of the SIF will increase within the GSU community. Which is not to say that Ryan’s suggestion that some marketing and brand development would not be worthwhile. I have been also been thinking about the public profile of the SIF of … Continue reading

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Digital Champions

  November 12, 2014 ,

I am currently working on the first video of the 2 this semester that is on the Digital Champions. These professors have outstanding teaching strategies where they incorporate technology into their curriculum. They teach Hybrid courses where some instruction is in the classroom while other instruction is over the net or using technology. The first professor (myself and Ryan Cagle) was Dr. Gladis Francis. She has this very exciting way of you social media, such as twitter. Her students have to summarize the essence of a chapter in French on twitter. This limits them to only 140 characters. According to one her students we interviewed, that can be more challenging than someone may assume but she emphasized that she learned so much more French in Dr. Francis’s classroom. Hopefully I will be able to post it within the next week or so. Ameer

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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