Tag Archives: Introduction

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.

First Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the School Year

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Today I attended the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup (DigPed Meetup) of the 2015-2016 school year. Hosted, by The Atlanta Connected Learning collegial network of university faculty and staff in the Atlanta area, ATLCL hosts DigPed meetups one time a month which aims to create a social face-to-face forum where various members of facutly, staff, and graduate student instructors can share, and discover what is happening cross-university and cross-disciplinarily in the greater Atlanta area.

Each meeting is made up of two presentations, and discussions that occur during and after these presentations.

Today, Jeff Greene and Pete Rorabaugh at Kennesaw State University gave a talk titled “Reframing a Degree for a New Media Ecosphere” in which they detail their reframing of the writing BA in their newly restructured KSU department after the merger.

IMG_20150902_093246636_HDRJeff and Pete are teaching two courses, New Media I & II in which they teach a variety of composing skill that focus on content creation, interactivity and ownership. This kind of work is exciting, and necessary when we consider how quickly writing environments shift and change in today’s world where the digital is often emphasized.

The second speaker was McKenna Rose at Emory, whose presentation was titled “Envisioning the Pechakucha: Strategies for Invention and Revision in the Literature Classroom.” McKenna explained her Pechakucha 20X20 assignment and showed a few examples of some of the work expected of her students.

IMG_20150902_101049413_HDRMcKenna explained some of her techniques and processes as she asked her students to create and present their projects. What I love about presentations like McKenna’s is the robust discussion about teaching strategies and ideas about what else could be done with this format – coming straight from the audience.

IMG_20150902_101146524_HDRDigPed is always a wonderful experience, and the audience is engaged and ready for discussion. If you haven’t yet been to a DigPed Meetup, and you’re in the Atlanta area, I strongly recommend you visit the atlcl.org website and find out when the next one is occurring.

 

 

 

 

Getting Started

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Yesterday I met Monique McGee, my now co-editor of the main SIF (Student Innovation Fellowship) blog. We sat down to talk about the direction our blogs, and the main blog, would take over the course of this SIF induction. In case I haven’t yet mentioned, we are the first SIFs ever. Not Monique and I alone – there are about 18 (guestimation on my part) of us. And we’ll all be getting started, bumping around in the night, together.

A few things I learned from our very first meeting, which also included our new colleague Ramsundar Sundarkumar, called simply Ram (I’ll link his blog as soon as I can), include the following:

1. It’s going to be fun to be a SIF. There is a sense of humor in the office that is subtle, dry, and referential to a lot of the pop culture I already love.

2. Anything could happen this year. ANYthing – could happen this year.

We are all on this journey to explore innovation – we all have different skills – we all want to learn as much as possible.

If I had a seat-belt here in my kitchen where I am currently standing and writing, I would strap myself in.

SIF Introduction

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When I began my studies in Rhetoric and Composition in the English department, I had no idea that I would become interested in technology. Three years later, I have been awarded a Student Innovation Fellowship, or SIF, through the Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) department of Georgia State University. I’m excited and a little nervous to be joining a team of student innovators who all possess different skills, backgrounds, and ways of implementing knowledges.

Over the course of the next year, and beyond, I will be running this blog to let those interested in on what is happening for me as I make my journey through my Humanities degree as a SIFellow. I bring a little bit of knowledge about a lot of software to the table, and I bring a lot of knowledge about creative deployment of technology in a classroom setting. My hope is that I will experience a unique sort of bartering over the next year as I get to know my colleagues and trade my know-how with theirs.

And since all blogs need a theme – I’ve given mine an inquiry theme. In April, 2014, I wrote an article for an open-access pedagogical journal called Hybrid Pedagogy called “Taking the ‘No’ Out of Innovation.”  As I formed the article, I found that no one out there in tech-talk land really has a strong idea of how to concretely define ‘innovation.’ As I find myself an “Innovation Fellow,” I feel it should be my pursuit as a Digital Humanist of sorts to attempt to nail down what this word means. What does it mean for me, personally? What might it mean for my colleagues here in the SIF Program? And what does it mean for the University system at large?

So join me in my journey to attempt to answer this question, and form new ones. I expect to have a bunch of successes, and a lot of fun failures. Please don’t hesitate to comment, or email me with any questions, problems or concerns you may have as you read.

– Valerie Robin