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 retrospect, I felt like if the CDC wanted to a deeper analysis of the Beltline, then they would be better suited to use Nvivo.
Anyhow, the Harvard website has research done for almost every type of media. Maps, 3D, images, video, text…it’s all there.
There is a problem however: any project mentioned under the Harvard website was made a long time ago and never returned to later.
I thought it was just laziness or something else that stops a project, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
Take Audacity for example. Audacity is one of the most widely used audio editing software on the Internet. It was built for people to use everywhere and for free. Audacity was so popular that students and teachers alike wished for better features and a more responsive interface. But it never got any of that. According to OpenHub, a website dedicated to tracking open-source software, Audacity only has about 6 contributors to it. Yes, yes…Audacity is free and not exactly a huge dev team getting paid millions to make the program, but usefulness and user popularity should’be protected it from utter abandonment right? (You could argue the Sourceforge incidents, but that is somewhat removed from the problem)
My point is that you’re seeing this problem occurring again and again all over the place. Innovative ideas, human-computer unities, and social congruency all gone within a few months.
Heck, you can say the same thing to social media. Sure, Facebook had a movement from the youth of America to the Moms of America, and while it is still active, most child to teenage youth say Facebook is on its way down. (And since Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and what have you aren’t really strong alternatives, it leads me to believe that the next guy creating a social network within the same realm as Facebook in the past will get a loooooottt of money ;{ )
Well, I think we need to address this problem, because if we don’t, we may see ourselves heading down the same paths of countless other innovators before us.
Thanks for Reading!