Author Archives: Kelly Aronowitz

Kelly’s midterm project

Teaching assignments app

Most teachers (adjuncts) have very little time to be as creative as they would like to be in the classroom, and creativity is part of the main teaching strengths when teaching literature to non-literature majors. This mobile friendly app will be an exchange of technology-based assignments. It will also provide a very user-friendly platform to upload assignments, teaching methodology, etc. as most great ideas happen in the classroom and are later forgotten.

  1. Personas:
    1. Floridian Paper – is a fourth year 31 year old English grad student at NYU, he has been exploited as a teaching assistant for the past three years and is ready to jump into a classroom all for himself. He has a tattoo on his forearm of a very obscure James quote, which reminds him of why he is doing what he is doing. He taught kindergarten in Maine right after college while he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He overthinks the teaching he wants to do, preparing for an undergrad class three months in advance.
    2. Chelsea Piers – Is a 23 year old in her second year in her French Masters at Hunter College. She has been working as a restaurant manager in Queens, which is where she grew up. She is starting to teach next year and is very confused as to what is expected of her. She has been doing a lot of research online to figure out what it is she needs to do, reading sparknotes and finding a few discussion points she can use.
    3. Trillian Potter – is a 42 year old Comp Lit PhD student at the GC. She got married very young and her kids are now in college, so she decided to do what she had always wanted to do. She taught grade school when she was raising her kids, but now wants to go in deeper. She is about to start her second year and has been assigned to teach at BMCC. Her two boys make fun of her fear of technology. She is scared regarding the technology generation gap with her students.
    4. Adam Douglas – is a 29 year old Comp Lit PhD student at the GC. He moved to NY from Colombia where he used to teach college. He is in his third year and has already taught for one year at Baruch. He feels very overwhelmed by the teaching and the studying and feels he is designing things in such a way that he spends most of his time grading. He would like to change that but still give his best to his students.
    5. Use case scenario:

–        Adam Douglas and Trillian Potter meet at the comp lit lounge. They are both teaching “Things fall apart” in the respective colleges. They both disagree with how to enter the discussion, while Adam wants to bring in videos of Nigeria, Trillian wants to do a close text analysis. They see the strengths in each others views but have to rush out before they can actually sit and exchange methodologies. They decide to use the app. As they are both on their way to teach they upload the teaching approaches to the apps o the other can access it and take a peek.

  1. the full version would be have both app and website versions. The app would have several options, a search window in order to find assignments according to a specific reading, author, or by school, or even by grade. the user would have to sign in and provide an .edu email address in order to do so. The app would have a 2.99 dollar cost and would also be subsidized by a few scholarly institutions (such as digital humanities things).
    1. It would also have a button for “quick upload”, this button can be pressed right after class to upload ideas and teaching methods which came up during the said class. It would have very specific blanks to fill in:

i.     Reading – text discussed

ii.     School – students level

iii.     Class size

iv.     Smart classroom yes or no

v.     Form of discussion: in small groups, in pairs, class activity.

vi.     Use of technology yes or no

vii.     Question based assignment yes or no

viii.     Production based assignment yes or no (by this I mean that the students need to ‘produce’ something at the end  of the class in regards to the text)

ix.     Homework based yes or no

x.     Goals:____

xi.     Difficulties:____

xii.     Innovativeness in five words

xiii.     Hashtags

xiv.     Category

  1. This would all be in a user friendly setup that would take less than three minutes to fill out.
  2. The app would have several ways of ‘accessing’. By buying it for 2.99 you have full access. A free version would let you access just two assignments per reading. A free version with exchange feature would allow you to access as many assignments as you upload. (since the uploading process does require the assignments to be real, it would not be a problem)
  3. The website would be a little more complete, with assignments divided by specific categories, more advanced search engines, links, and advertisements.
  4. This would take about 200 hours. I need to know how to develop an app, how to design it, monetize it, upload it. how to keep it up. I need a lot of skills.
  5. The strip down version is just a User-friendly website into which teachers can type in their assignments to look at them at a later date or to exchange them. (I have no idea what tools to use for this) You can ‘befriend’ other teachers who have teaching methodologies you are interested in. the way of uploading the assignments would be based on five questions:
    1. Text
    2. Group size
    3. Technology yes or no
    4. Goal
    5. Description
    6.  I need to learn everything. I don’t even know what I would need to do this. I don’t think a wordpress would work, but who knows? If it is wordpress then tinkering with it more. 200 hours.

 

 

Wiki-Spanish

Wikipedia is the largest Encyclopedia and yet there is a huge disadvantage and imbalance between the wikipedias in different languages. Wiki in Spanish is very poor, it has very few cited works and is quite unserious, although students keep using it as a primary source of information. Thru awareness, workshops and events with universities in Mexico, we will promote a change in the Spanish Wikipedia.

  1. Personas:
    1. Luis – Is a full professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He teaches in the Latin-American Literature department teaching research. He is also part of the Library. One of his biggest problems with his students is that they don’t believe research is necessary, or useful, in the way that he thinks of it, and that they use Wikipedia as a primary source when he knows it is not useful in that way.
    2. Dany – works in the communication department at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He is the coordinator of the largest undergrad group and also teaches radio. He is a bit anachronological since he just acquired a smart phone a year ago, but he knows how important technology is for his students.
    3. Triny – is a second year communications undergrad at the Universidad iberoamericana. She failed a class last semester because most of her research was done online and she still does not see why her teacher didn’t think it was appropriate.
    4. Jesus – is a third year undergrad in Media design at the Universidad Iberoamericana. His writing skills are terrible, but he is an ace where technology is involved.
    5. Luis gives his students the assignment of looking up an article in Wikipedia which is not well researched and asks them to edit it by going to the library and researching in books. Jesus gives them a workshop on how to do the editing beforehand. Dany sees how cool this is and wants to implement a whole wiki editing program.
    6. Full version: wiki editing workshops as a requirement in all programs at the Universidad Iberoamericana. It would later spread to other universities, public and private. There would be massive wiki editing events all over the country and would later spread to the rest of Latin America. Wiki in Spanish would be as good as it is in English.
    7. 50 hours. I need to get a handle on more wiki editing skills. Contact people, organize workshops. Implore.
    8. Stripped sown version: organize a few workshops at the said university (my alma mater) with professors and then with students. Organize at día ibero (the public day of the university) a few editing sessions with specific focus (feminist session, music session, etc). Assess and re-do. Propose more workshops and more editing assignments to professors.
    9. 50 hours. Bit more wiki skills

blindfulness

why is it I keep losing track of the posts?

It took me a few minutes to find the exact description for this week’s assignment… and then I have an extra ten minutes looking for MIchael’s post on personas, including the search window on the top right and nothing…

I know that if you know how to look for things within the site they are all there, but at the same time, they aren’t, or I am still unsure of how to look for things.

have a lovely day

 

K.

Kelly’s 1-paragraph project ideas

pardon the tardiness… orals has hijacked my brain.

Kelly’s 1 – paragraph Project ideas

 

  1.     Erotic niche Create an erotic database from feeds. It will be a user-generated database where people go to in order to find “good erotic literary material”. The way it would work since it will be UGC is that whenever someone wants to ‘add’ a certain text and comment it, they get a certification, or star system (a bit like vine), or an approval after several ‘let’s see’ posts just to clarify that they are good critic-readers-reviewers (and don’t think ‘Fifty Shades’ is it!). The website would be subsidized by websites which sell the said books. It would not be restricted by languages.
  2.   Wiki-Spanish Tap into the wiki community in Mexico and promote real time projects with higher education institutions in order to put Spanish Wiki up to speed with the English one. Promote workshops in order to teach teachers how to edit so they can teach students how to do it as well.
  3.    Literature for all  My goal in teaching world-literature-requirement classes for non English majors is to make them fall in love with literature. I use not very traditional tech based methods which seem to work. I would create an app for teachers who want to tap into non traditional pedagogical methodology. It would be an exchange system so that teachers who upload assignments don’t feel they are being ripped off. So you give one, you take one. The assignments would be starred and it would create an ‘honor system’ in which you give credit to whom credit is due.

 

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.

one last thing

this semester I started using Blogs @ Baruch for my class.

Each student needs to write one post regarding the reading and must write two comments.

THey also write by hand in a notebook which I call the Reading Journal. It is very itneresting that although they could be writing the same things in both medias, they don’t. The written by hand pages don’t ‘dare’ to do out of the box… they write very squarish things.

On the other hand in the blog posts the students ‘dare’ to say they dislike the reading, or how they find it. I have also seen that they respond to each other, they help each other out like when we were reading poetry and one student complained how hard it was and how she didn’t understand anything, another student commented on how she could approach it in another way, what she could do to find it easier…

ok, that’s it. too much commenting.

K.

so, how?

The “Getting Real” text was fascinating. It was, indeed, a quick read. Many of the things he mentions are quite obvious, like the “just do it” constant meme invading his pages… others are not so obvious… you would think that wanting to do more, to install more, to be more specific would be better, but according to him and to software development more is not better.

I was thinking of academic careers and how more and less are intertwined. As scholars we are supposed to know more about less and less until we are so über specialized it could be almost impossible to find someone who actually understands what you do.

Obviously the book refers to not want to do too much, if you want to do so much you do it, as he says ‘half assedly’… but isn’t that what we do? what we are expected to do? We are PhD students, we are scholars, we are teachers too, many of us are writers, I am a translator…

I remember when i was about to graduate from my B.A. in Latin American Lit I suddenly realized I wasn’t going to get any jobs because who needs what I studied? so I did a course in translation and interpretation and moved forward. I have the sense that humanities are so little needed that unless you expand your expertise you will go unemployed…

the text is referring to apps, to projects, but I believe we ourselves are projects, aren’t we?

I am just venting a bit of my humanities based frustration out there…

There is also his recommendation of doing it QUICK. Really? when has anything academic been done quickly?

on the other hand, I really liked his advise and I am ready to do it, but… do what? we have thrown ideas out there and we kind of discussed them last class, but they are still ‘out there’. I loved how he says that ideas are worthless unless you actually DO them. So, shall we?

Lastly I loved the links, the tools… oftentimes I feel like in school we are taught things which are not so useful… sigh. Can anyone notice my disenchantment in the academic universe?

I also added to the list of tools on the Kitchen Sink wiki… can any of you add or comment on what you have used?

last but not least: PASSION! So important, but what do you do when you run out?

 

(as an aside or a P.S. it would be helpful if Maura or Mike broke the ‘readings’ links so that a new tab opens up when clicking on it so you can keep both windows open… look at me and my techie lingo!)

x-x-x-x-x update!

Hello all

my wiki post is back up! the a-person who deleted it said  he had done so because of grammatical issues, stating he hoped I would fix them. To which I replied: if you saw the problem why didn’t you fix it instead of deleting? (btw, my grammar is good, he just didn’t like my syntax, which is also quite good)

As if his grammar is good! This wiki-nemesis of mine will suffer the consequences of being bad at community building!

 

who am I? – Kelly, sometimes

I am Kelly, most of the time. Sometimes I am Kelly A.K., when I publish something I have written ( I have two published books in Spanish, links to follow). I am Kelly Aro when I do television (or did, I was in a science program in a PBS-like channel back home and yes, I am googleable, and yes, I did dress up as supergirl for one of the shows… no student of mine will ever see those videos). I am Kelly Aronowitz in my PhD in Comparative Literature (third year, working towards my first set of orals). I am Prof K. or Prof Aronowitz to my students at Baruch College where I teach a requirement literature course.

My area of research is erotic literature. i explore the second half if the 20th C onwards, although I do look and read back a lot.

 

I am just plain Kelly to my friend and family even though it is not a very typical Mexican name. Did I mention I am Mexican? yeah, I could have fooled you, or most anybody. I usually bet my nationality and win, always.

I am also a translator and do live interpretation on all sorts of subjects.

You can find me in most social medias as awokenbeauty

links to my books:

 

Borrowing, buying or creating?

Hello all,

I guess here is where we start the thread on this week’s reading. Is that correct?
I really enjoyed the meta-reading, going back and forth between the original text and the links. It makes so much sense to read this way. This is how I read nowadays anyways and this is how I teach my students to read too.
If you find a term, a word or something that you don’t know or pikes your interest, why not just go ahead and look it up?

I liked the W and H and have been thoroughly thinking about my proposals. Where do we post those? (I am a little lost in terms of where to post things).

Borrowing, buying or creating? I would like to discuss this more later.

I am very grateful to be in a class in which the professors are insisting we DO something. I don’t know if this happens to many of you, but sometimes, quite often actually, in the PhD writing papers does not feel like doing something. That is why I knit. (or one of the reasons at least). Knitting is tangible. I make something with my hands and then I use it to keep me warm or look nice, or I gift it to someone else for them to use, etc. But it is real… intellectual work often feels like it is not real.

I have felt this way since my undergrad, I found my oxygen in radio and giving theatre games workships and other things. Late ron I moved on to more intangible things like a masters in critical theory. A PhD in Comp Lit is still very intangible and oftentimes I wish I was doing something more tangible and physical…

lastly, I just wanted to post this to think about tecmology…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9CEqlUJGCE

#readings, #posts #provocation