Category Archives: Planning

Status: Doctor

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Yesterday I became a doctor.

I went and celebrated with a few friends who are also highly educated, and I admit, it felt a bit like this:

And so this is my final official blog as a Student Innovation Fellow, but I do plan to continue keeping a blog chronicling my journey through a tech world as a Humanities student at https://valerievisual.wordpress.com/ – which admittedly needs a revamp, and a cleanup before I start to use it again. That is not, however, the focus of this entry.

The point of this entry is to detail the status of my life as a doctor at this point in my journey.

Yesterday, my committee signed my paperwork.

My dissertation is titled: The Value of Scholarly Writing: A Temporal-Material Rhetorical Analysis of Google Documents

It analyzes how interactive writing software (IWS) like Google Documents serve to forefront functions of interactivity between writers, and by doing so, reshape and create Western values surrounding the academic writing process that are uniquely post-industrial. The whole thing aligns rather well with the work we do as Student Innovation Fellows, and a lot of my work as a SIF informed some of my theory and analysis.

My work as a Computers and Composition scholar has been validated over and over again in my SIF work. I have worked with cloud computing for nearly two years, theorizing how it alters users perception of time and space, and right when I am feeling like I might be saying nothing new, a SIF colleague who I respect very highly made the following statement, “Whenever I’m working on a Google Doc, I always want to save, and you don’t have to in the cloud. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to that.” I realized that if this colleague is still not used to the save features of cloud software, then I must be saying something fresh.

And again, when I learned how much fun it is to make simple data into visualizations, as I did for Marni Davis, and when I turned Oscar Rieken’s resume into an infographic, a whole new world of seeing opened up to me. I look at information much differently now, thanks to my projects. This factored in to the way I analyzed the features of Google Documents within my dissertation pages.

Working as a SIF also gave me the opportunity to leave the usual spaces of Humanities PhD life and peek inside the Information Technology world. The links between coding and composition have astounded me. As I began to teach  myself HTML and CSS, I began to understand the grammar and syntax behind coding reflect that of natural languages. Not only that, but I am beginning to see the barriers online that fall down as I learn to code, similar to the barriers that fall as we enter discourses. For example, without knowing anything about the language of law, anyone would be completely lost in a court, even if everyone is speaking English.

A problem does remain that the market is stretched thin, and finding a job is difficult for any PhD student. I find comfort in knowing that even the best and brightest students often don’t land jobs their first year on the academic market (a market that is so complicated and unlike any business market, it is difficult to explain it to anyone not involved in the process). What I do have is the experience I have gained during the Student Innovation Fellowship. Unfortunately, I lack the know-how to market these skills in a way that makes sense.

As I explore my options, I am learning about jobs that I had never heard of, skills I didn’t know existed, and a whole new world of technology that is related to my current research. No matter what I end up doing next, I am certain that it will be as interesting as the work I have done as a Student Innovation Fellow – and if I’m lucky – it’ll be even more so.

Student Work Collection

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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.

example dig-port

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

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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

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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.

Edge-Banner-prototype

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.

front-page-scroll-tester

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.

Mission-statement-page

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.

Profile Test

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

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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 Journal Banner

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/

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.

Birch_Ave_Mural

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.

SIF Orientation – Fall 2015

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Last week marked the beginning of the second year of the Student Innovation Fellowship at Georgia State University. Many of the first years returned for another promising year, and we got a few new exciting additions too.

Below is a group shot of everyone who showed up for orientation and introduced themselves:

SIF Group 2015-2016

SIF Group 2015-2016

In the photo above you can see a variety of students from graduate students to undergrads with skills ranging from excellent writing and organization, to mapping and design, and coding. Here, we are posing in the CURVE in front of the 12 screen interact wall that we often use for workshops and presentations.

This year, we will be more tightly focused on bigger projects that we intend to ‘finish’ as much as possible. For example, where I was on approximately 6 projects last year, I am on 1 this year. And it’s very exciting. I will be managing the Magazine and Images Archive in charge of building a new Undergraduate research based journal/magazine hybrid. The possibilities are quite exciting, and I will be blogging about this project quite a bit in the future.

Stay tuned.

Digital Portfolio Workshop

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Yesterday, I delivered a 1 hour workshop on building a digital portfolio. 11 people showed up, but three of them were Will, Taylor and Heidi, so I’m not sure 11 is cheating or not. I WAS excited to see them there – don’t get me wrong.

The Interact Wall in CURVE in action

The Interact Wall in CURVE in action

Overall, the workshop was well received, though it felt a lot more like a class than a workshop. I spent the first 30 minutes talking through points which covered online presence, types of hosting, available apps, and potential content. I was really hoping people would have their own attempts at digital portfolios to share — but I think that might be a different kind of workshop all together.

We had a variety of people with different levels of knowledge in the group though – which I was really hoping for. Two people from career services showed up and provided some helpful tips, and a student from the art department had some really great questions about presenting an art-forward portfolio as opposed to the professional job-forward portfolio I have designed for myself.

If I do this again, which I might since many of you expressed interest, but couldn’t make the date/time, I would probably find other examples of portfolios online – both successful and unsuccessful and we would have a discussion about what works and what doesn’t. At this point, I’m unsure whether I focused too much on design, or not enough. I tend to forget that even though most of us spend an astonishing amount of time online, we often don’t soak up how the design works. Design, at this moment in Web 2.0 history, is minimalist with lots of white space, only little splashes of color, and lacking anything too flashy. This kind of design may be becoming naturalized for many users so that not only is the interface of the operating system invisible, but the very design of the site is also invisible. In fact, this is what we’re going for when we design (most of the time), so that means the design aesthetic is successful. But this then becomes problematic for people that don’t work in tech to break into this seemingly opaque world of design.

My overall aim was to make building a digital portfolio seem like a relatively easy, approachable task for people new to the idea. I was quite surprised to find that no one in the audience had a portfolio of their own – not even an attempt at one. So I decided to talk to that point and highlight the ease of the WYSYWG and the fact that my content was quite limited in terms of the way I showcase myself in a general way that could appeal to many kinds of potential employers.

If you have a desire to see this workshop and couldn’t make it – please leave me a comment below and we’ll see if I can’t get another one scheduled.

End of Semester

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End of Semester

If you read my last blog entry, you know that we were planning a party/meeting to finish off the very first semester of our wonderful SIF program. It went off really well – there was so much food, we could have fed the people across the hall too!

Look at this amazing spread!!

Look at this amazing spread!!

As people trickled in, we waited to have the ‘meeting’ portion, and everyone ate in rounds. Whoever made that bean dip — you’re my hero.

Eventually, I asked Roxanne to put an interactive video made using Captivate 7 which featured our own Will Kerr building a box fort. Having sufficiently embarrassed Will, we opened the floor for people to ask any questions about the upcoming semester, and to show off projects they have been working on.

Our audience is not only captivated by presentations, they are also a very good looking bunch of smart people.

Our audience is not only captivated by presentations, they are also a very good looking bunch of smart people.

Robert Bryant blew us all away with his project wherein he has been creating digital models of 3D objects using Agisoft. He set up his computer and showed us how to interact with digital objects by waving your hand in front of a little device that reminded me a lot of the way the Wii system works.

Behold the Digital Ball

Behold the Digital Ball

We also got to watch several videos made by Thomas, Babacar, Ameer, Ryan and others that showcased the work they’ve been doing to promote Hybrid Pedagogy courses here at GSU. And we got to see another interactive video Roxanne and Ameer made for the science department which shows a hilarious young man named Kory making mistakes while using the Vacufuge Plus machine.

In all, the meeting was fun and informative. Even though I’ve been working to collect everyone’s accomplishments and achievements, I haven’t gotten to see all these projects yet in action.

Success.

Party in a Pinch

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I sold my soul to Google a while ago.

I think it’s for this reason that the tasks I perform using Google products almost never feel terrifically ‘innovative,’ but as I wade through a dissertation wherein I analyze Google, I’m beginning to think that the way I use Google IS innovative – even to me.

As the end of the first ever semester of the first ever cohort of Student Innovation Fellows (SIFs) comes to a close, I wasn’t about to let it go down without a party. And also holidays. So I mean really – party.

Lucky for me – Justin was willing to let me plan the party – as long as I understood that the budget is exactly $0. Done. Easy.

I executed all my party planning via Google = I created an invitation (okay, so I used Publisher which I eventually converted into a PDF after Justin said, “I had no idea Publisher was still a thing”), which I linked to a Google spreadsheet and a Google form.

Here is a link to my invitation:

Partay!!

As you can see – we’re going the potluck route – and let’s be real: these SIFs are not only smart and savvy – they can cook. Hallelujah.

We have an editable Google Spreadsheet so people can contribute to said potluck – and I am quite excited about this upcoming gathering. I’m a grad student. Food is pretty much all I care about.

AND – because I wasn’t sure where people would be at with the idea of a cute little gift exchange, I used a Google Form to ask whether or not people would like to have a gift exchange.

I have loads of response forms and data to indicate that this will go off without a hitch. And all it took was a few clicks, and some key strokes. That’s… innovation.

Absolutely no paper was exchanged or harmed in the planning of this party. The budget remained at exactly $0 – and we’re still having a party.

Thank you Google. Treat my soul well, please. 

 

SIF: positivity, morale and accomplishments

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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 to deliver an accurate picture of our accomplishments to the powers that be, as well as grow as a community of innovators.

And remember – if you’re having a bad SIF day, Zoe brings candy to the Exchange, Justin makes weird noises sometimes, and there’s always coffee in the common area.