Tool/technology Possibilities

It’s been great to read everyone’s project ideas. Many of your ideas made me think of a couple of resources that could be useful for you:

Miriam Posner, coordinator of the Digital Humanities program at UCLA, wrote a great blog post last year called How Did They Make That? which features several different kinds of digital humanities projects and breaks down the technologies and steps required for each. It’s a good post for getting your head around what’s required for some of the DH projects out there online.

Bamboo DiRT is an enormous resource that’s essentially a database of digital tools for research and teaching. It’s organized by category (e.g. data collection, image editing, etc.) and each category features an annotated list of tools, both free and paid programs/apps. It’s also a great place to browse while you’re germinating project ideas.

Hamad Sindhi – Project Ideas

So I’m not a very creative person, and I’ve been trying to jot down as many ideas as possible, but so far have only been able to produce 1 and a half ideas, and here they are:

1. The half idea: I like the way memes play a part in the social life of the Internet. I was impressed with Patrick Davison’s ‘The Language of Internet Memes’ in The Social Media Reader, as well as our conversations about memes in the Core I class – their folk character, their ephemerality but also how they can provide a window into the cultural conversations of the time. I think it may be a good idea to show students how to create these cultural objects, how to trace their distribution in a social network and how to analyze the conversations people initiate because of the ideas embedded in those memes. This does not have to be a ‘creation’ activity only. Before students start creating their own memes, we could learn how to analyze the significance of past memes that garnered much attention (ex: #muslimrage, the ‘this is what I actually do’ meme, etc.). Students will learn about the context of such memes (why and how did they start?), and learn how to analyze their impact on the communication, spread, and death of ideas.

2. Creating an intro level Sociology inter-textbook: For an intro level class in Sociology, almost all professors use a large and expensive textbook that is usually never bought or read by the students (at least in my experience at BMCC, where students come from financially unstable backgrounds). I’ve been thinking of ways to provide students with the relevant chapters as cheaply as possible without violating copyright laws, but it still does not seem to be enough. Even if they have access to the material, it is often written in a language that is not at their reading level and/or does not engage them enough. Thinking through how to get the students to engage with any material before class, and connecting it with the principle of intertextuality at the core of the Internet as well as the principles of collaboration, citation and source-recognition at the core of Wikipedia, has led me to this idea: the students will use the Internet’s many ‘texts’ (written, pictures, videos, audio, games) to create their own chapters on a very large online cork board-type space (pinterest?). As the professor, I would provide lots of structure, like taking the main concepts found in one textbook chapter and setting them up on the board in a logical manner, and guiding the students to figure out what is a good source and what is an unreliable source of information. The students will then post (under their assigned concept) any relevant texts that provide the definition of the concept, examples of the concept, people associated with the concept, etc, with a brief explanation of what the post is and how it relates to the concept. Students will also be required to comment upon and question the postings of other students and thereby engage in a dialogue about their interpretation of the concepts. To make this as close to a traditional textbook as possible, the questions on any quizzes or tests will relate directly back to the boards they create. In short, I envision this as a space for students to create their own chapters, still working with the concepts that any traditional textbook would contain, but making it their own by posting texts that make sense of the ideas to them and engaging with other students about the validity of their sources and the level of understanding they have about the concepts. Class time would be used to go over the board the students have created during the week and fill in any gaps or correct any inaccurate information.

Hamad Sindhi – bio

Hello everyone! I’m a third-year Sociology student. The question that drives my academic work is: how do we belong in this time of neoliberalism and globalization, and how does that belonging get strengthened for some and disrupted for others? I’ve focused this question down to questions of citizenship and embodiment during environmental disasters. I am particularly interested in observing the relationships between people and objects when preparing for and dealing with disasters, because I believe that studying such interactions can tell us something about how disasters are important in the social construction of belonging. Along with my research interests, I am also devoted to pedagogy and to being a public sociologist. I have taught ‘Introduction to Sociology’ and ‘Media Theory’ (at BMCC and City College, respectively), and have also started a personal academic blog to help me start and explore ideas that may become research projects in the future: www.socobjects.org, which is still in a nascent stage with only one post so far. And here’s my twitter handle: @hamsindh.

Jennifer’s bio

I am a third year student in the Urban Education PhD Program. I am in the somewhat curious position of auditing Core 2, having just completed the class last spring, so I would like to offer my experience with project development (hint: a lot of failure) instead of just being a creepy lurker. Another ITPer and I chose to collaborate, and we submitted a proposal for a series of salon-style meetups/workshops. We imagined that scholars, technologists, and artists (some GC-based, some not) would muse on tech tools through presentations and hands-on activities. By emphasizing the sensual and social — such as through incorporating musical and theatrical performance, visual art, and food — we wanted to challenge the disembodied assumptions that accompany much of our thinking, teaching, and learning about the digital. While we ultimately shelved this particular project idea, the process of collaborating was enormously valuable, and we are now working together on a project in tandem with the CUNY Academic Commons development team (which I’d be happy to explain in class).

When I’m not sitting in on classes, I’m the social media fellow for my program. You can follow us on Twitter @UrbanEdCUNY. I am also part of the editorial collective for Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education, our program’s online, open-source, peer-reviewed journal. This year, I’m a co-organizer (with Michael Mandiberg) in a series of seminars on Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education through the GC’s Center for the Humanities. Finally, I work at the Stanton/Heiskell Center, which helps public school teachers incorporate digital tools in their teaching.

Josh’s Project ideas

Really interesting ideas that people have, and I’ll try to respond to specific posts– time permitting– soon. Below are my project ideas… so far. I might be able to work on more than one of these in the future as well. We’ll see!

  1. The first project idea that occurs to me is neither earth-shattering nor particularly interesting per se. It will, however, serve a useful purpose for students at BMCC where I work, immediately upon implementation. I want to revise, revamp, renovate, re-tool, reorganize, restore, rebuild, repair, remake, and/or otherwise improve the wiki page that I have created for the ESL Lab, which I oversee at BMCC. I created the page on a wiki platform site called Wet Paint, which has since been bought, and the site’s been renamed; it’s now called Wiki Foundry. Anyway, the ESL Lab wiki functions more like a website than a wiki, in that it’s not particularly collaborative (other than some of the faculty who contribute/write/edit), the reason being that the site is meant to be a repository of information, links, materials and interactive exercises/activities for English language learners at BMCC rather than a student-created/collaborative wiki. I would like to partner with English and Developmental Skills faculty at the college to create some new content for the site, and also introduce more interactive elements and/or games. We actually get a lot of traffic to the site already, CUNY wide, particularly from students looking for information about how to prepare and practice for taking the CATW Writing exam which allows them to pass out of remediation into credited English classes. I think we will get a lot more hits, though, if the wiki is improved. It is possible that the Wiki Foundry interface is too constrictive to substantially improve the site, but if it is possible to stay at the same web address I’d prefer it, as it is already an existing destination for a lot of people (at CUNY at least).
  2. On a related note, I would like to create, and hopefully improve upon, a site comparable to John Jay College’s E-Resource Center with unique content, and affiliated with BMCC. The John Jay site is wonderfully useful in many ways, but consists of mainly Flash animation slideshows, which make for a slow experience and handcuffs the visitor to the site, as she waits for the timed slides to present at their own pace. I am interested in creating something perhaps both CUNY-specific and more general, providing interactive composition/grammar/reading comprehension activities helpful (hopefully) to any college student. I know that the John Jay site was grant funded [the E-Resource home page notes: Funded by the U.S. Department of Education (Title V) and the New York State Education Department (Perkins III)]. I feel like if I could get hold of some grant money, faculty will be interested in collaborating. This project could/would be built from scratch.
  3. I have no idea how, but I would like to learn how to create an app, again to assist students to improve their English writing/grammar skills, perhaps for ELLs (English Language Learners), perhaps for native writers/speakers of English. This could be a game-based app or not… I know so little about what this potential app would look like, or what it would entail to build it, that I will stop here, so we can discuss this in class.

 

 

 

Joshua Belknap: Biograph

I am an English doctoral student at the CUNY Grad Center. I am interested in rhetoric and composition, ELL (English Language Learner) writers, the history of education, and the relationships between technology, pedagogy and writing. At BMCC (CUNY), I am the coordinator of the ESL (English as a Second Language) Lab, where I oversee a staff of writing tutors, as well as an adjunct writing instructor in the English Department (when I have time to teach).

Project ideas

Sorry to all of you for receiving two previous emails with this post (this being the third).  This one has one added idea, so there 🙂

Hi all,

Here are some ideas I have about possible projects.  I have no clue how feasible these projects actually are.

1.  I’ve been playing a game on my phone called QuizUp.  It has different categories with several topics in each (e.g., Arts –> architecture, musicals, paintings, etc.).  You can connect through Facebook and play against your friends or you can play against strangers.  As you win matches, you go up in levels.  I think something like this could be used in my Intro to Psychology course, or any course that is term-heavy.  Students could play against each other and maybe even gain points for making it past a certain level.

2.  Sorry for the lit review… I read a study in which professors created a Facebook page for the class.  Level of disclosure was manipulated (high, medium, and low).  The researchers were investigating whether amount of self-disclosure by professors had any effect on students’ motivation and students’ perception of the professor and class climate.  They found that, indeed, high self-disclosure led to greater motivation and greater positive perceptions of the professor and class climate.  Some students, however, felt that teacher use of Facebook was inappropriate.  :/

This study got me thinking about the possibility of creating a Facebook-style page for courses. Students and professors could post course-relevant articles, pictures, links, etc.  Not that sure about this idea, though. I must admit. I’m not sure there’s much new here, is what I mean.

3.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book Planned Obsolescence got me thinking about how great it would be to receive feedback on projects as I was hammering them out.  It’s what I get to do in lab with my advisor and lab mates, but what if that process could be opened up to others within the field?  By the way, I ran this idea by two of my lab mates and they were in no uncertain terms against it.  Their fears of being “scooped” were too great to entertain the benefits of having extra eyes and brains on their unfinished work.  I tried to explain that there would be evidence of their ideas being theirs, in case someone tried to pass it off as their own, but they had stopped listening.  I envision this being a website that would facilitate the process of feedback.

This idea is the riskiest, and I imagine the one that would be the hardest to get off the ground. It’s also the one I believe in the most.

4.  I’ve also been thinking about the use of clickers in the classroom and wondering if there may not be a more accessible way of doing the same thing.  What if smartphones could be used to interact with the instructor’s lecture?  Kind of like how I can get my iphone to communicate with my appleTV.  This sounds complicated to me, but since we’re dreaming things up…

That’s it for now.

Jared R. Pike- Bio

Jared R. Pike is a Ph.D. student at The Graduate Center, CUNY whose work focuses on the cultural power dynamics in theatrical performance. Current research interests include: the role of space in performances of history, digital media in the performance of history in museums, and the cultural power dynamics in German theatre during the period of unification.