What is Innovation: A Tech Journey with a Humanities Grad Student | Category

Student Work Collection

Date January 14, 2016

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The last thing I did for the Student Innovation Fellowship on-site was co-host a couple of faculty workshops with Brennan Collins designed to get faculty interested in creating digital portfolios specifically designed to collect outstanding student work in a central location.

Since then, some of my tech-minded gears have really been turning. What would the university atmosphere be like if all instructors collected student work to be showcased on their personal portfolios?

If you visit the link above to Brennan Collins’s portfolio, you will see a very simple page that is a basic list of the student work. Brennan has collected this work over several semesters, and we are using it as a jumping off point for the first projects we may showcase on Edge Magazine. If you scroll through, you will see videos, PDFs with visuals, Prezis, and other media that students have used to present for Brennan’s course. This leaves open possibilities for Brennan to provide examples of his work above and beyond the usual documentation instructors provide such as assignment sheets or student evaluations (say, if Brennan were looking for another job, for example).

This kind of portfolio, it is important to point out, is different than a digital teaching portfolio. With a simple Google search, I found several examples of basic teaching portfolios on the open web. Below is a screenshot from an elementary school teachers’ home page.

As you can see, Stephanie Ladner has several sections, including her teaching philosophy, and a project she sponsors. But she does not collect student work. Of course, at this level, that would likely be a violation, given that she works with children who cannot give their permission for public display of their work. I am however, using Miss Ladner’s portfolio as an illustration.

Now imagine if all the instructors at GSU had simple portfolios like Brennan’s. Not only could instructors use this kind of portfolio for future career prospects, but they could use student examples to mentor new colleagues, to display what kind of student work comes out of their department, or to contribute to school-wide projects like Edge. And these are just three ideas I am coming up with on my own. With more heads involved, I’m confident there would be so many wonderful uses for excellent student projects like the ones Brennan’s page features.

In order to promote the idea of digital portfolios showcasing, Brennan and I have hosted two workshops on the idea, and they have gone rather well. The instructors we have worked with are interested, and willing to spread the word. If the idea catches on and other instructors are also willing to collect outstanding student work, GSU could set the standard for this kind of sharing. With student permission, of course.

Magazine Issues

Date December 8, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

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I have been writing a bit about Edge Magazine here on my blog, as it is my major SIF project this year. Despite the fact that I have been an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy for over 3 years, starting a new editing process is quite the puzzle.

There is a lot to think about as we get the journal off the ground. Most of what our team is wading through involves one big question: What?

What is our edge?

The biggest question for any publication is this. What is our edge? Who are our audience(s)? Who are we speaking to and why? After several meetings discussing what Edge is for, what it accomplishes, and what it focuses on, we have decided that Edge will be a culture and arts focused multimedia magazine that uses Atlanta as its unifying theme. It will be different than Discovery in that its articles will be shorter, more causal, mostly multimedia driven, with new articles released often. It will be different than The Signal in that it is not a Newspaper that reports, but rather a magazine that has featured undergraduate work.

What is the argument we are making with these articles overall which will set the stage and aesthetic for the magazine?

As Edge begins to develop and take on shape, the hope here is that our argument will become clear to our readers. Of course, our first argument is “Undergraduate work at GSU matters.” And our second argument is “Undergraduate work here at GSU is really cool, innovative, and edgy.” These arguments will be obvious as the first articles go live next Fall. Ultimately though, the answer to this question is a wait-and-see process depending largely on the submissions we get, and the voice the collective students create as we show the world what we can do here at Georgia State.

What is going to make people want to return to read about more work that students are doing at GSU?

This question is also a wait-and-see question as we develop the aesthetic of the magazine. At the moment, if you click the link at the top of this entry, you will see that the magazine is a skeleton with some test posts and a repeat of the same class project that we have been playing with. But as we begin to work on our first submissions (we already have one lined up!), the look and feel of the magazine will begin to take on a polished shape. We do know that the magazine will feature videos, audio recordings, galleries of stills, links out to student work that exists live on the web, and combinations of all these things. It will have the ability to take student work that is exciting and interesting already, and make it more visually appealing for outside readers.

This means, that the student work featured here did not stop at the professor’s desk, but will be published for the world to see, which adds a whole new layer of meaning to student projects on, and off, campus. For a faculty audience, getting to see what students are working on in their courses should be a good reason to keep coming back. And for students, looking at some of the great projects other students have worked on should also be enticing. For readers outside day-to-day life in the University, reading Edge should be a great way to see what students are up to at GSU, and to know that their tax dollars, donations, and moral support are making some waves here in Atlanta.

Much of the above may seem somewhat ambitious, but without lofty ambitions, we don’t move up. Much of the shaping of Edge will be a waiting game, and much of it will shape itself through the process of building. It’s an exciting time to be a student at Georgia State University, and the hope is that Edge will be a beacon that readers can follow in order to discover what wonderful ideas, skills, and initiative students bring forward.

Edge Website Prototype

Date October 29, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

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In moving ahead in the process of getting Edge magazine off the ground, Nathan Sharratt and I took some time to develop a prototype using sites.gsu.

After much consideration, and thanks to Nathan’s artist’s eye, we decided to try out the theme called Hueman – a cute portmanteau smashing together color and people. The theme has a lot of affordances with menu bars, sidebars can be moved (for example), and with scrolling posts. It favors media and can be formatted in several ways that may end up working out really well for what Edge becomes.

One of our hopes is to feature student designed banner images containing their interpretations of our project name, ‘Edge.’ Below, you can see a banner that Nathan created in just a few moments. The name of the magazine is prominent, with a cute tagline I invented on the fly. The prominent design can be replaced easily with a student designed banner.

What’s more, we plan to archive all featured student images in an archive so they are searchable by students and future employers that may wish to see what students have produced. Further, we can replace and move around any of the menus you see in the image above. We can alter the colors, and re-arrange the sidebars.

There is only a small portion of the sidebars visible in the image above, but if you look below, you will see lower down on the same page, which features both left and right sidebars (one with a blue header, and one with a green header), and the post scroller.

Nearly every aspect of these sidebars can be altered, including content, color, and position. But what is exciting to me, is the scroller in the middle, which is currently featuring a video. Nathan pulled a video from an art installation he did and put it up on the Edge site, just to see how it would look. The scroller displays a thumbnail, and can be played right in-site. It also features text area below, and can be made to pop-out. We can insert still images, audio, video, and so on. But we did find that if there is no featured image, this area remains ‘blank,’ which you will see if you go to the website in the next week or so: sites.gsu.edu/edge.

One of the pages I have worked on from the beginning is the missions statement page. It turns out that writing a missions statement is very tricky. Word choice matters VERY much because our audience will be quite diverse, and I need to make sure our mission statement points only to potentially positive missions. Below is the top part of the missions statement.

You can see the image that I have chosen as a placement image. Ideally, I will feature something that takes place on GSU campus, but I haven’t yet come up with the right idea that will portray ‘mission statement for our magazine.’ Below the image, you can see the beginning of the mission statement. And to the left, you can see that on this page, we experimented with a single sidebar, and chose what goes on it. For now, we are using the term ‘baskets’ instead of categories, because we use that word a lot in meetings, and I thought it would make some of us giggle.

Featuring particular posts profiles on Edge has also been a popular topic in meetings, so Nathan and I decided to create a test profile, which can be navigated to from the front page (if you look above to the second image). Below, you can see that Nathan created his own profile as a test piece.

The page is a static page and can be archived, categorized, and featured on the front page, as needed. As you can see, we have moved the menu options around in the sidebar, which demonstrates all the menu options available in the theme without having to hack it.

Overall, we’re pretty excited to see our first project prototypes go up on the site. We plan to build one of each medium that the theme allows, and try to do a few cross-media pieces to, to show what the website might be like when it officially launches next Fall.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more developments on Edge and feel free to leave comments below with suggestions, problems, or thoughts.

Edge Magazine in Development

Date October 13, 2015

Posted by Valerie Robin

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Maybe you’ve heard the buzz, and maybe you haven’t:

Edge Magazine is coming to Georgia State University next Fall.

What is Edge Magazine?

Edge is an undergraduate project and research magazine/journal hybrid. It will be a fully online publication that encourages interesting multimedia presentations of excellent undergraduate work done in and out of class.

Why Edge?

You may have heard that GSU already has an undergraduate research journal called Discovery.

Discovery features only Honors student work and is a much more traditional approach to research that Edge intends to be. We hope to be a more interactive take on the undergraduate research journal.

Edge is not Discovery. Edge is its own entity – it’s own experiment. Edge is Edge.

What’s up with the name?

We chose the name Edge for several reasons:

In an attempt to make sure we are, in fact, a little ‘edgy’ in terms of what a journal could be, Edge seemed like the logical choice for a name.
We want to be on the cutting edge of what a research journal can be.
Sometimes, when we come to the edge of something, a cliff, an idea, a sidewalk, it seems that nothing further can be done. We want to be that ‘further’. We want to do what research journals have not yet done. We want to go there. Over that edge.

Taken from http://fiqixirsi.com/most-beautiful-landscape-photos-of-norway/

Who is our audience?

Edge will be outward facing, so that anyone with an internet connection may experience it. It will not be kept behind a paywall. It will not be limited to GSU students’ eyes only. If you contribute to Edge, your parents, your friends, your uncle Jack in Sarasota will have access to your work.

This means our audience will be anyone who is interested in experiencing the amazing work that is coming out of Georgia State University today. These are people who are interested in knowing what is happening at GSU. They are people who are interested in experiment, innovation, and ideas.

What is the vision?

There is no link to Edge as I write this entry today. This is because we are still in vision mode. I have drawn up plans for the amount of labor we will eventually need, and plans for the editorial process.

We are in the stage where we get to build the ideal. And that ideal is currently to create a multimedia journal/magazine hybrid that is accessible and fun for the audience to read, while maintaining a cutting-edge format where authors may attempt to showcase their research and project work in ways that research journals haven’t ever before.

You might see multi-layered work with lots of hyperlinks and videos. Or you might see text with audio spliced in and an image or two. Or you may see something unexpected that I can’t envision enough to explain yet.

What’s next?

We are excited about the possibilities of this project and are attempting to set the groundwork for an exciting launch during the next school year. In the meantime, we need to construct an infrastructure capable of maintaining a website that is actually on the edge of content that comes from a research university and showcases the work that undergraduates are capable of.

At the moment, we’re cobbling together ideas from a bunch of brains that are as capable as they are brilliant, in order to launch the skeleton of a website which will be both malleable and fluid in its ability to be molded to fit the content we receive.

We are preparing with images, banners, video capability, lots of other great art, and some really wonderful content that will hopefully be interesting and surprising.

Here is one of the images I captured for the image archive to enhance content with provoking images.

As we come up with a logo, a basic site, and more solid visions, I will be updating you here, hopefully with more images. Stay tuned.