Jared’s Project Idea

In thinking about possible project ideas for this course, there is one particular project that stands out in my mind, which I have been mulling over for some time now. I would like to create an app that would combine concepts of interactive technology and pedagogy with concepts from performance studies. Drawing on similar technology used in Bluebrain’s interactive music composition “Listen to the Light” in Central Park in 2011, I would develop an a soundscape for the city drawn from recorded sound archives, such as speeches, radio programing, and oral histories. As the user explores the city spatially, the app would allow the user to explore the history and diversity of New York City. In addition to linking the audio to the geolocation information, the app would also display information about the sound clip being played and relevant historical information.  

I believe this project has the potential to enhance learning and teaching about New York City’s social and cultural history. While the app could offer traditional curated walking tours, putting the information in sequence for the user, the benefit of the geolocation technology is that it allows the individual to craft their own experience. The individual becomes a flaneur, like a character in a Joyce novel, who spends the day exploring the city on multiple levels. The app could perhaps be pushed further, to create a stronger pedagogical experience, by adding a gaming element. In this scenario the user travels the city searching the historical recordings for items in a digital scavenger hunt.

This project also offers several opportunities for collaboration with various institutions in the city: The New York Public Library, The New York Historical Society, The Museum of the City of New York, as well smaller museums who have interesting collections that could be incorporated into the project. Additionally, the project seems to be ideal not only for recent digital pedagogy initiatives, but also for the recent push for Public Humanities programs.

In terms of scope, the project offers opportunities to start small and then expand. I would be possible to establish the framework while working in a small geographic area, such as a single neighborhood or Washington Square Park, and then expand out bit by bit.

Project Idea

As a Philosophy major, I am interested in developing a digital tool that facilitates reading and learning philosophy.  I’ve been thinking about an interactive world map that will shift through the different major eras of philosophical thought (Ancient, Modern, etc).  Each era will have specific highlighted regions that you could mouse-over to reveal a pop up window that lists the philosophers prominent in that region, during that time.  Each philosopher would then link out to another pop up window that gives a brief bio of the author, his/her work, and his/her major contributions; list of his/her prominent authored works (with links to text when available); and a short list of related authors (with links to their pop up).  This would allow a quick and easily navigable history of philosophy in order to establish context (both historically and geographically) which is essential to understanding much of philosophical text.

 

Adam Wagner Bio

Since I am new to the class, having not taken Core I, I suppose I ought to do one of these.  My name is Adam Wagner.  I am in my second semester in the MALS program in the Digital Humanities track.  I have a BA in Philosophy from UNF in Jacksonville, FL where I moved here from.  My research interests include media culture studies, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.  I have no formal teaching experience, but my goal is to continue my higher education culminating in a PhD in Philosophy and enter in to academia.  I am very excited about this course and would love to soak it all in and learn as much as I can from all of you.  Thanks, and I look forward to the rest of the semester.

-Adam

Christina’s Project Ideas

Here’s a couple of ideas that I’ve been playing around with:

1. Over the past two semesters I’ve been working with undergraduate students with autism at the College of Staten Island through a program called Project REACH. The program is designed to assist and support students as they transition from a fully-supportive high school environment to a more independent and socially complex college environment. Through my Second Year Research Project I was able to identify specific areas in which students were struggling. Not surprisingly, many of these problem areas surround social interactions with peers and teachers using computer-mediated communication such as structuring emails towards varying audiences, navigating Blackboard, and setting up privacy settings on Facebook. I recently submitted a small grant proposal to assist with implementation of a 4-week series of summer transitional workshops to target incoming freshmen on the spectrum. The summer program would consist of 2 rounds of focus groups (1 in the beginning, 1 in the end for assessment and evaluation), 4 weeks of formal classroom-based instruction meeting twice a week, and on-going opportunities for students to practice the skillsets they are learning. Overall, this is my first choice for the project.

2. Another nagging problem that I’ve come across in my teaching career has been the lack of resources for novice psychology instructors, especially within the CUNY system. This year the Graduate Center was awarded the “host school” position for the Graduate Student Teaching Association. We’ll be serving as a major resource for graduate students as they begin their teaching careers. Many of the CUNY campuses have support systems in place for graduate student instructors (CSI, GC, etc.), but students are unaware of these resources. I’d like to greatly improve the GSTA website by adding in extensive course content – teaching activities, articles on teaching, sample syllabi, instructions for developing teaching philosophies, etc. This site could be a resource for CUNY instructors, in addition to the surrounding world outside of CUNY.

Christina’s Brief Bio

Hi All,

I’m a third year student in the Psychology Program on the Developmental track. I’ve been involved in a few research projects surrounding social networking sites, specifically looking at how students learn about, join, and navigate sites like Facebook. I’ve also been involved with projects designed to facilitate learning through the use of online and offline gaming environments.

This is my fourth time teaching a Human Development class at Hunter for 160(ish) students. Although technology is never consistently available in my classroom, I’m particularly interested in helping students to use their out-of-class time more effectively. I enjoyed the theory from last semester, but I’m excited to learn and directly implement some of the tools that we’ll be covering this semester.

Ian’s Project Ideas

Here are a few project ideas I’ve been considering lately:

1. For the Core 1 term paper, I considered how digital technologies could be utilized in teaching introductory linguistics courses. I reflected on our readings and discussions of education and learning, and decided that some existing technologies could be used in combination to assist students in analyzing language they use or encounter in their homes and communities. The issue is that most linguistic analyses utilize “cooked data”: clean categorical representations of the real continuous messy data. Cooked data is typically used to do analyses in intro classes because eliciting and cooking the data yourself is difficult and time-consuming. The basic idea I’m considering is creating a cooking suite (called “The Linguists Kitchen”?), where existing speech analysis and transcription tools are brought together in a very user-friendly way. While this will not automate the cooking process, it may at least provide an opportunity for students to try analyzing language that they actually interact with, which may make studying linguistics a more meaningful experience.

2. As an experimental linguist, I often think about the logistics of finding and recruiting participants for experiments. I’ve been thinking about the possibility of creating some sort of database where individuals interested in participating in research can sign up and list (or not list) various traits they possess that experimenters may be interested in (I’m thinking of traits related to language knowledge and usage). While something like this may be extremely useful to researchers, it seems like it would raise a number of ethical issues concerning confidentiality, security of personal information, etc. Perhaps an equally useful alternative would be to create a CUNY-wide database of ongoing research projects in need of participants. Individuals interested in participating in research could then peruse participant selection criteria and contact experimenters if they find a project they’d like to be a part of.

3. For the past year, I’ve been meeting weekly with a small writing group of fellow linguistics students. We help each other set writing goals, balance our personal work with our many other commitments, and find ways to help each other meet the goals we set out for ourselves. This group has been extremely helpful and, lately, I’ve been wondering if we could be even more useful by actually participating in each other’s writing process. This idea sprouted while I was somewhere in Chapter 2 of Planned Obsolescence and was crushed when I got to Chapter 3 and discovered that CommentPress exists. I’d like to try using CommentPress this semester with my writing group to figure out if there are any modifications we could make to align it more with (or better complement) the nature of our in-person interactions.

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:

 

Pamela’s Project Ideas

Here are some thoughts, mostly embryonic, about possible independent projects:

1) I’ve been working on incorporating simple digital tools (online searches and PowerPoint/Prezi presentations) into a dramaturgical pedagogy with my theatre classes. I’m just trying some things out this semester, but I think that there is more to be developed here, including some kind of formatting that students can plug their information into so that they don’t spend too much time on form rather than content.

2) Since I will be on a Writing Fellowship next year (location TBD), there may be opportunities to develop something in that context. I’m especially interested in the ideas of active learning and critical learning from James Paul Gee’s video game pedagogies.

3) I’d love to work on a mapping project related to my own research into the movements of scenic designers around Europe in the seventeenth century.

4) My department has an image database that is constantly growing but not widely utilized. It might be useful to see how it might better serve student need and try to optimize it.

5) A central location that collects freely available theatre images, films, and sound files is something that I know I would have liked to have when I was starting to teach, so maybe putting something like that together.

6) There are large number of my colleagues in theatre who don’t know what tools CUNY makes available to us, or how to use them particularly well. I could coordinate a few workshops on CUNY tools particularly for Theatre students.

7) I’m just branching out into mapping (I’ve done a little using ArcGIS) but I’ve found that learning tools tend to focus on examples that don’t work for the humanities (optimal locations for businesses, density of certain professions). I’d like to see (put together once I’ve developed stronger skills) a workshop focus on mapping for the humanities, with an emphasis on how we can gather our data and get it into the appropriate file format because often we can’t pull from readily available sources. I’d also be interested in learning more about open source GIS, since it isn’t dependent on institutional access.

8)Two possible ideas for the “ethnography of technology” option: a review of instructional technology in introductory theatre courses, or an investigation of the methods and effectiveness of an ongoing Twitter project in CUNY undergraduate acting classes started by some of my colleagues.

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