Monthly Archives: March 2014

Jared’s Single Paragraph Projects

Idea #1: Experience Greenwich Village

My first idea is a modification of the original idea I developed earlier this semester. I am interested in developing an augmented reality app that would would provide a guided walking tour of Greenwich Village in the 1920’s. Using programming similar to Roundware, I would map audio information (music, oral histories, radio programming, news stories) onto Washington Square Park to bring the cultural history of Greenwich village to life. This project would target students interested in arts history and cultural tourists.

Idea #2: Hybrid Theatre Curriculum

This project would explore the possibilities of creating a hybrid curriculum for an Introduction to theatre class. Rather than the course work being primarily focused on a lecture based model, this curriculum would explore the use of online discussion, interactive instructional modules, and games to enhance the learning experience. These online activities would substitute for the traditional textbook and better prepare students for in-class discussion. Such a model would extend the students’ exposure to various forms of theatrical performance around the world and throughout history that cannot be understood only by reading.

Idea #3: Platform for Works-in-Progress

I recently heard a podcast “Reshaping the Book” in which Bob Stein stressed the important contribution that social reading and writing can contribute to scholarship. While I am still leary of mass collaboration, I think that peer input can be incredibly helpful in the development of our work. I know form my own experience that I often find myself in a situation where I cannot find a solution to a particular problem; or, I am no longer able to recognize certain flaws in my logic. Stein introduced the Beta version of “SocialBook” as a way to build community through social reading and collaborative writing. Inspired by SocialBook and CommentPress, this project would build a digital platform for theatre scholars to share and respond to research projects-in-progress. It would begin with current GC theatre students and could then easily branch out through the network of GC Theatre alumni.

Alek’s 1-Paragraph Project Descriptions

Idea #1: Directory website for Secondary Math Teachers in New York City

Over the years working as an educator I have come to realize that there is no centralized location on the Internet or otherwise where educators can go to find all the resources they need to teach secondary math in New York City. The teachers that I am currently teaching as well as my colleagues all seem to have a common struggle and complaint when it comes to easily finding resources to aid them in their teaching. I propose creating a centralized website, a database, which can serve as a guide for all New York City educators that are teaching secondary math. The guide would provide links to different resources such as: ideas for lesson plans, free games and interactive activities, ideas for field trips in the NYC area that would directly relate to the curriculum with the explanation on how it relates and feedback from other educators on set locations. Furthermore it would also provide links to professional development opportunities for teachers, along with updated policy documents that directly effect and relate to education in NYC. The website would be fluid with the ability to grow and possibly expand.

Idea #2: Interactive Textbook (IBook)

I have worked with underprivileged high-school students in a high-need school for over five years. During that time it has always been a struggle to keep these students excited about math. They consistently seem to have a hard time relating to the material or having any interest in the material as it is provided through their textbook.  In order to overcome this to prepare them for their annual standardized test I have consistently had to get creative in my approach to teach them the material. This is why I propose to create an interactive I-Book to diversify the types of materials and activities my students would use on a day-to-day basis to prepare them for the annual standardized test as well as make them proficient in the material from the curriculum. Features of the IBook would include: the ability to add personalized notes to the existing material and highlight anything in the IBook. Ibook would include interactive activities, practice quizzes and tests, that would provide instant feedback for the students, links to relevant instructional videos and other material that is relevant to the curriculum

Idea #3:  Math-Test-Prep App

It has been my observation over the years that many of my high-school students spend a large amount of time on their daily commuting to and from school. This is time that has been lost to study in favor of smart-phone activities like Facebook or Youtube. I propose creating an app, which would give them an easy alternative to these time consuming activities, yet still be easy enough to use while on a bus or subway. This app would provide a rigorous regiment of exercises that would prepare them for standardize test. A feature of the app would be a push alert system reminding the user/student of what activity they need to complete for the day, the time remaining until their exam and a gauge of their progress with the material.

Pamela’s 1-Paragraph Project Descriptions

Beacause I will have limited internet access this week, I am posting these a little early. Here are my three project descriptions and in the spirit of “getting real” they are fairly short and reasonably modest in scope (I hope).

Idea #1: Mapping for Humanists
One of the most attractive types of project for humanists interested in experimenting with digital tools is mapping. The software is readily available (the Graduate Center and other CUNY schools provide institutional access to ArcGIS and there is an open source version as well) and the end product is has clear use as a research or teaching tool. There is a workshop in the CUNY system on the workings of ArcGIS but it assumes that the mapper will be working from existing data files, like census information. However, most humanists are working from information that does not already exist in appropriate file formats, if it available electronically at all. I propose to present a mapping workshop for graduate students in the humanities who have little or no experience with GIS software. The workshop would cover how to identify the kind of information that is map-able, how to get that information into a format that GIS software can use, and turning that information into a basic map.

Idea #2: The CUNY Graduate Center Theatre Project
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, in association with the Theatre Department at the Graduate Center, maintains a database of around 10,000 image of theatre for educational use. The database is a great resource for theatre students but even within the department not everyone knows about it, and few actively use it. The site was recently changed over to Omeka, making it a lot more functional, which provides a good opportunity to revisit what it can do and be for GC theatre students. My proposal would be to survey student use of the database, and also investigate what the Segal Center and the professor overseeing the collection would optimally like to see from it. Ideally this would lead to one or more strategies to increase student use and/or improve usability that I could implement.

Idea #3: Technology in Introductory Level Theatre Courses at CUNY
In her article on mediated performance in theatre studies Sarah Bay-Cheng highlights the need to consider how recorded performances are used to teach theatre. [Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media.” Theatre topics 17.1 (2007): 37-50. Project Muse. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.] I would go further to suggest that beyond recordings of performances, there are other technological tools that have made their way into the theatre studies classroom that have not received much scrutiny in terms of the way that they work pedagogically. To address this, my project would begin with a survey of instructors of introductory level theatre classes in the CUNY system (these would be the 1000-level courses or equivalent that fulfill the Creative Expression requirement of the core curriculum) to find out what technologies are in use and how they are being used. This would be followed by 2-3 more in-depth case studies which would entail discussion with the instructor and classroom visits. The resulting paper would record the general habits of CUNY instructors of introductory level theatre courses with regard to technology use, and evaluate the effectiveness of a select number of tools as defined by a yet-to-be-determined rubric.

question – assignment this week

hello world, and fellow colleagues.

I have been traveling and I have orals in two weeks and I am coming down with the flu, and so on and so forth… plus the cold freezes my brain cells.

so, I am a bit off as to the assignment for this week. As I remember it is one or two liners for our projects, correct? I looked at the assignments page but it was not there.

help?

thanks

K.

Collaboration/Corroboration: Questions of Power in the Collaborative Future

When I started reading Collaborative Futures I wanted to agree with their notion that greater collaboration is better for society. However, the further I read the more uneasy I began to feel. The authors of this collaboratively written work provide a nuanced examination of the benefits and potential pitfalls of collaboration. I fully support the notion that groups working collaboratively are better at problem solving and innovating more creative solutions to problems. This seems to work best in small scale collaborations where trust can be established, direct communication is possible, and the goals and organization of the project are clearly understood. My uneasiness comes in when the discussion shifts to large scale open collaborations. While such collaborations could be beneficial to society, they seem to be based on an altruistic notion of humanity that, from my perspective, does not exist.

Collaborative Futures tries to separate social and cultural production from the economic market economy. Yet, the authors also elicit a Bourdieuian analysis of their project when they invoke the term “cultural capital.” The invocation of Bourdieu negates the notion of altruism since, according to Bourdieu, all human action is interested action. Individuals will always act, consciously or not, in what they believe to be their best interests. This goes beyond the notion of economic incentive however to include the accrual of other types of capital. In this sense, the Free Culture movement establishes its own economy based on social and symbolic capital rather than monetary capital.

If we see large scale collaborations as establishing their own economies, then we have to acknowledge that they are also sites of power struggle. Does the open structure of large scale open collaboration open the possibility that a small well organized group could infiltrate and wield the power of the larger collective towards their own ends? Does the very nature of collaboration drive towards a state of “group think” in which dissension is silenced by the tyranny of the majority?

The authors begin to problemitize this situation in their discussion of Stephen Colbert’s actions on Wikipedia. Noticing the potential for a “group think” mentality on Wikipedia, Stephen Colbert coined the term “Wikiality” to describe to describe a phenomenon where a group of people can alter perception of truth through collaboration and corroboration on Wikipedia. He and his views adjusted the wiki page on elephants “claiming that the elephant population in Africa had tripled in the past 6 months (Collaborative Futures 53). Wikipedia responded by locking the article and deleting Colbert’s account.

I see two potentially disturbing power dynamics in this situation that raise questions:

  1. Who has the power to determine the ethics of the collaboration? Wikipedia removed Colbert’s claims, and his viewers’ corroboration of those claims, claiming site vandalism. While Colbert’s claims were blatantly false (it is satire after all), and were easily detected and removed as false claims. But what happens in murkier territory? The talk page for the Oberammergau Passion Play records a debate among wikipedia editors about whether or not to include the claims of anti-semitism in the play. Ultimately a version of the anti-semetic argument remain in the article (at least as of 3/2/2014), but is it possible that this significant element in the history of the play could be erased in service of an editor’s, or group of editors’, personal/political opinion that this aspect is no longer important? Who makes these decisions? On what basis?
  2. The issue of “Wikiality” itself raises interesting questions in terms of collaboration and corroboration. “Wikiality” as Colbert uses it is a form of group think in which a group of people can will facts into existence through repetition. In editing the wikipage for The Lost Colony play, I ran into trouble when i tried to check and add citations for existing information on the page. It was impossible to tell what information on the internet served as sources for the wiki and which were merely citing the wiki as the authority. In this instance the collaboration becomes the corroboration making claims appear to be facts. How do we avoid the dangers of this self-feedback loop?

Collaboration: Friend or Foe… Well it depends

A detailed and nuanced argument presented by Collaborative Futures illuminates the complex nature of collaboration as a process. And while I do, at heart, share these, and other, authors’ utopian idea of collaboration as an answer, or at least a step toward, a salvation of many social issues, I remain unsure about what do we really mean by collaboration and whether its positive effects are sustainable and always beneficial. Collaboration can take many forms and shapes, but it always requires a group of people. Any group of people, in turn, is susceptible to group processes such as group-think, othering, and diffusion of responsibility, to name a few. These can lead to dismissal of alternative opinions, uncritical evaluation of one’s own work, and privileging one’s point of view, particularly when collaborative groups form on the basis of “shared political perspective rather than interdependence through need,” which CAE conversely argues to be preferred. Two collaborative groups, regardless of how democratizing their respective infrastructures are, might be at conflict.

In fact, I wonder whether we would be as excited about collaborations if they did not have “our” best interests at heart. Would a collaboration among a group of corporate executives geared toward limiting  a supply of a particular resource to rise up the prices be considered a collaboration? Would a group of young professionals working under the collaboration criteria provided by Collaborative Futures but on a for-profit project be considered a collaboration? Or would we call it business? Is collaboration a business? Can or should it be?

To use an archaic definition of business as meaningful activity, any collaboration, I hope, is a business . But in today’s discourse it appears that word collaboration is being used as a juxtaposition to words like business, neoliberalism, and capitalism, to name a few. But is it really? Or is it all just rhetoric?

 

Blackboard is not Gorges

I have to admit that even though I had repeatedly heard complaints about Blackboard, I did not know what these complaints were really about.  As an undergrad, Blackboard was easy enough to navigate and allowed me access to course documents, which I often misplaced in piles of other papers.  As an instructor, Blackboard lets me communicate with the entire class at once in the form of emails or announcements and lets me share documents pretty effortlessly.  Aside from the site being down on occasion (but not so frequently to be a real nuisance), I did not see what the problem with Blackboard was. What I didn’t realize was that Blackboard is an expensive piece of software that is being bankrolled by CUNY money that could be better spent on other technologies.

I’m currently teaching at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.  The classrooms do not have anything but a chalkboard in them (they don’t even have chalk!).  I would like to show students video clips but in order to do so,  I need to sign out a COW (Computer on Wheels).  The problem is that there are few COWs to go around.  Knowing that the money spent on expensive software, which could be replaced with free and cheap software, could be used on projectors and computers for each classroom is infuriating.  So, yeah, now I get the Blackboard hate.  What I don’t understand is why administrators would continue wasting this money.  Is it ignorance?  Is it just the safety of sticking with the known?

Gold & Otte

One of my possible project ideas is to use some form of social networking site in which students and I could share musings on course topics, as well as any other more informal posts.  Part of what appeals to me about it is the possible re-formation of hierarchical relations — professors are people too, and the more students see that, the higher the likelihood for honest interaction (???).  However, I have to admit that there is something about this blurring of boundaries that is quite scary.  In the Academic Commons, members are much closer to being colleagues — even when interactions are between professors and graduate students — than in a social network encompassing undergrads and their professor.  Perhaps tapping into the same collaborative spirit that helped the Commons thrive would neutralize the possible pitfalls of social networking with students.  What I mean is that maybe instead of it seeming “inappropriate,” it could be seen as a project that we are all creating as a cohesive group.  To be continued…