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Midterm: Proposal

Project Proposal I: Course Journals

 

  • Elevator Pitch

v  Problem Statement: Course requirements regularly involve students’ submission to examination and submission of papers that then are reviewed, graded, and commented on by instructors. Furthermore, typically students are asked to complete an exercise, and then to move on to the next one, without necessarily incorporating the work of preceding exercises. The standard learning environment is static and encourages limited analysis and use of students’ products.

 

v  Solution: If “to teach is to learn twice,”[1] then many classrooms are failing to use the best tool for learning that they potentially have at their fingertips: Ongoing learning can be enhanced if students become a part of the teaching environment. In addition, while emphasis on the process of learning is an essential and sought after aim, the preservation of the products of learning can serve to provide a forum for dynamic discourse and scholarship. Formal instruction should provide a means for ongoing learning and dynamic discourse.

 

v  Implement: Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) will promote scholarship through an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal to be developed throughout the course, and beyond. Students will alternate roles as co-reviewer of others’ work and their own work for the journal. At the end of each semester, the journal will be published for open access and ongoing development.

 

 

  • Personas

v  Samantha is a second year Master’s student in the Special Education certificate program at Hunter College. Samantha is taking 3 other classes, and teaches part-time at a private elementary school in Manhattan where she has been serving as the lead teacher in an inclusive classroom of 8 to 10 year olds, some of whom have developmental disabilities. Samantha aspires to join the school’s administration soon after the completion of her degree, and dreams of bringing her understanding and appreciation of collaborative management to the fore. Samantha is single, in her late twenties, and living alone. Samantha has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, flkr, and recently made a handful of contributions to Wikipedia pages of her interest.

 

v  Julio is in his last semester in the program. A career changer, Julio is at least two decades older than the average student in the class. A former business consultant, Julio became interested in the field of special education after the birth of his son Ryan. Ryan, now 7 years old suffers from paralysis among other symptoms; he was born with a severe form of spina bifida. Julio is a married father of three children. He works part-time as a teacher’s aide in the local public school, teaching 4 year olds. To present, Julio uses a computer mostly as an “upgraded typewriter,” as he likes to say. He is largely unfamiliar with social media tools.

 

 

  • Use Case Scenario: All students who sign up for Hunter’s introductory course Health Policy/Management (and/or foundations course History of Special Education) will be required to contribute to the course journal. Instructor will use the journal as a main teaching implement, requiring participation as one component of the course grade.

 

  • Ideal World: Tools like blogs, interactive whiteboards, etc that combine free writing with communication tools for sharing work, developing ideas, and joint writing. Students should be able to do real-time view, edit, and track changes. Students should be able to post queries and share pertinent resource materials. Instructor will be able to monitor each student’s contribution. Published journal articles will be made available for critiquing and further collaboration.

The ideal product will likely take several months for me to complete. I need to learn more about the tools that I can use to create a dynamic, open, collaborative environment, and what all is involved in publishing and keeping the forum alive. I am sure that WordPress, HTML, CSS will come in handy; I am equally sure that there is plenty more out there that I need to tap into.

 

  • Stripped Down: Students will be assigned sections of the journal which they will post on a class blog. Students will take turns creating and commenting through the blog.

 

Development of the stripped down version should take a few months. I will need to try out WordPress, asap.

 

Project Proposal II

  • Elevator Pitch

v  Problem Statement: Twenty percent of children 9 to 17 years old experience mental health problems[2] and at least 1 in 10, or as many as 6 million young people have a serious emotional disturbance or mental illness that severely disrupts his or her ability to interact effectively.[3]  In New York City (NYC), a number of transitional age youth (TAY) 16-24 years old who have serious emotional disturbance/serious mental illness (SED/SMI are receiving remedial education and vocational readiness services. All the same, TAY are far less likely than their peers to receive assessment, coordination, or care for their health needs, though they are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors (smoking, etc), in spite of their oft times unique and challenging care requirements.[4] DOHMH contractors are not required to provide these interventions.

 

v  Solution: In a recent survey administered to TAY with SED/SMI who receive services from adolescent skills center (ASC) programs that are contracted with Department of health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), a large percentage of youth expressed an interest in receiving information about and linkage to various health services. TAY with SED/SMI need a forum that will inform and link the youth to available services, and provide them a space where they can share their stories.

 

v  Implement: Interactive website for providing health and other support information devoted to TAY with SED/SMI.

 

 

  • Personas

v  Brian is a 19 year old student with SED/SMI who attends an ASC in East Harlem that is sponsored by the DOHMH. Brian has been at the center since he was 14 years old, when he was expelled from his high school. Brian is bi-sexual. Since he does not like the “unnatural feel” of condoms, Brain worries about getting his girlfriend of six months pregnant and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from the men with whom he has sex. Brian has not had a physical exam since he left the public school system, three years ago. Brian has recently made another attempt to quit smoking; at the age of 13, Brian lost his mother to lung cancer. Brian lives with his grandmother, his uncle, and three cousins in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. Brain often does not go home at night because, “that place cramps my style.” He has taken to sleeping over at friends’ houses, or with his male sex partner of the moment. Brian wants to get his GED so that he can find employment; he hopes to be able to find his own apartment so that he can “settle down with my girl.”

 

v  Rachel is a 22 year old who has been attending an ASC in the South Bronx for the past year, since she was graduated to “independent living” from foster care. Rachel moved from home to home during her tenure in the foster care system, only remaining at any given foster home for up to a few months. Rachel has had two abortions, and is fighting a growing marijuana habit. Rachel has not had a physical exam since her last abortion, two years ago. Rachel does not have a steady boyfriend though she “has some interests,” as she puts it. Rachel is living with her older sister, her sister’s sometimes boyfriend, and their two children in a two bedroom apartment in Morrisania. Rachel is a high school dropout and has no marketable skills. Rachel looks forward to finding her own place and “deciding what I’m going to do with my life.”

 

v  Mickie is 17 years old and enrolled in an ASC in Brooklyn when he found that he was having difficulty keeping up with his class work; he was recently diagnosed and missed several weeks of school due to his symptoms. Formerly a B/C student, Mickie has hopes of regaining his educational standing, and continuing on to get a college degree. Mickie has a steady boyfriend; they have been together for eight months, though Mickie has recently taken an interest in one of the students at his ASC. Mickie lives at home with his parents and a 10 year old sister in Forte Green. Mickie says that he has been practicing safe sex, though his boyfriend has been questioning why they should use condoms if they are faithful to each other. Mickie does not smoke or use drugs, though he confesses that “I love wine.”

 

 

  • Use Case Scenario: TAY with SED will use the website to get up to date information about health issues, including where to get no or low cost care. The website will include personal stories, and provide a platform for communication with other youth, and potentially with service providers.

 

  • Ideal World: A dynamic, interactive website that attracts and holds youth attention. It must be easy to use, even for the most concrete explorers. Confidentiality will be a key issue for users, yet there should be the ability to blog, and to have direct communication if so desired. Feature for uploading own stories, maybe?

 

  • Stripped Down: Static information website with Q/A features.

 

[1] Joseph Joubert.

[2] U.S. Public Health Service, Report of the Surgeon General’s Conference on Children’s Mental

Health: A National Action Agenda. Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services;

2001. http://surgeongeneral.gov/topics/cmh/cmhreport.pdf

 

[3] Prevalence of serious emotional disturbance in children and adolescents. Mental Health, United States, 1996. Center for Mental Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1996.

[4] New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. City Health Information: Promoting Healthy Behaviors in Adolescence. March/April 2009. Vol. 28(2): 9-20. At: http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/chi/chi28-2.pdf

 

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By Janice – March 14, 2012

Chrissy’s Proposal #2: Wiki Rewrite Classical Texts Project

Problem Statement

When teaching Classical Sociological Theory, the texts, for many, put off students right off the bat by the language the theorists use.  Often this is the biggest hurdle for students—they think they cannot understand the work.  Theory already come with this stigma attached to it that makes students think that it is above their heads, when (at least the way I teach it) it’s actually fairly simple ideas anyone of them can understand.  I would like to create a wiki space for my students to use to rewrite the texts into their own words with contemporary examples.

Personas

Tech-savy Tommy: Tommy isn’t particularly fluent in Classical Theory but he has used wikis in classes before.  He has all of the technical skills down, but doesn’t fully understand how to collaborate yet. He thinks that he will be fine in the course because of how much the wiki project is emphasized and how good his tech skills are generally.

Luddite Lucy: Lucy is an older student who takes school very seriously. She is comfortable participating in class discussion and talking with her classmates after school.  However, because of the generation gap she is conscious that she might lag when it comes to the tech skills.  She has heard the instructor say that they will do tutorials and that it is not that complicated, but she is still nervous.  She even considered dropping the course to one that didn’t require technology.  She stayed because no other section fit her schedule.

Capitalist Carlton: Carlton thinks Marx is a joke.  His dad works on Wall Street and is good friends with Bill O’Reilly.  Carlton is used to participating in a certain rhetoric that he hears at home.  If he had to re-write Marx he’d re-write the theory to support Capitalism.

Faculty Farrah: Farrah is excited to try to have her students collaborate and to have more ownership over the material, especially by literally putting it in their own words.  She has some tech skills but is a little nervous about what might happen if she has to trouble shoot.

Use Case Scenario

Tech-savy Tommy: Tommy would initially feel confident logging in and getting started.  If he is using the full version, he could utilize buddypress to share his skills.  Using buddypress might also have him form more of a sense of community, which might get him to start collaborating earlier and easier.

Luddite Lucy: Lucy apprehensively logs in for the first time and realizes that it actually is pretty intuitive.  She struggles finding the right buttons at first but once she firms up her skills on how to get to the wiki, she doesn’t have a problem using it.  For Lucy the issue is not using the technology but navigating between the blog, buddy press, and the wiki—she has trouble understanding why everything is in a different place because she doesn’t fully understand the logic behind the site.

Capitalist Carlton: Carlton adjusts fine to the technology, but has a problem with the material.  He doesn’t like that even the ‘conservative’ sociologists would like to move away from capitalism.  He tries to undermine Faculty Farrah by rewriting the radical out of Marx.  He also doesn’t support the idea of collaboration and says that Wikipedia is written by a bunch of hippies who should get a job; this makes collaboration is difficult.  Students are apprehensive about changing Carlton’s work because of his aggressive presence in class and online.

Faculty Farrah: She sets up the site and tries to hang back.  The students seem to be helping each other out when one is struggling which makes her feel good.  She has the choice to look at the history to see if she wants to grade using that method, but instead chooses to give the same grade to everyone because she can see on the social networking aspect of the site as well as in class discussion that everyone is interested and participating.  However, she is still struggling with how to assess Carlton’s contributions.

Full Version

In the full version I would buy ClassicalTheory.com and set WordPress up on a server.  I would need use a wiki plugin as well as buddypress so that students could have a social network on the site and not have to go to email to communicate with each other.  It would also be connected to the main class blog.

Full Time Line

Setting wordpress up on a server and adding plugins might take a little bit of time to figure out—about one semesters worth of preparation.  I would also have to redesign my syllabus to fit this project in.

Reduced Version

In the reduced version I would use Wikispaces or moodle.

Reduced Time Line

I could implement this next semester in a basic version.  It only takes a little bit of familiarizing myself with the sites.  The way the assignment will be graded and the portion of the grade as well as the timeline throughout the semester would also have to be decided before implementing

 

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By Christina – March 14, 2012

Chrissy’s Proposal #1: Online Asynchronous Graduate General Assemblies

Problem Statement

The Graduate Center has been having General Assemblies (GA) since the Fall of 2011, inspired by the Occupy movement, and Occupy CUNY, they meet weekly on Fridays.  Although attendance is not required at every meeting to be a part of the movement, students have commented on the listserv that the movement could make better use of technology so that the physical space was not privileged over the online space. A secure website with a social networking function and with lots of different features may help to solve some of these problems.  This website would also have to take the consensus and direct democracy models used at the GA into account, as well as dealing with the paradox of having it be open but also secure from surveillance.

Personas

Student who can attend meetings regularly: She is in the core group of students who schedules and workload work with the Friday meetings schedule.  She is also a participant in the working groups of the GA.  She is invested in the movement, but also want to make the movement open to all students while still maintaining a structure that allows them to maintain their level of functioning.  She feels stuck in the paradox of trying to use the meetings to adjust the movement to the include needs of people who don’t want to/can’t come to meetings.  She would like to know how she can hear those people’s voices.

Student who can’t make meetings: She is invested in the political ideology of the movement but cannot take on any more weekly commitments.  She often has ideas she would like to contribute or would like to network for smaller working groups.  When she attends the occasional meeting she feels self-conscious contributing to ideas the core members have been discussing and solidifying.  She reads the debates and discussion on the listserv and feels like if she could contribute on her own time participation might be more practical.  Sometimes she doesn’t participate on the listserv because she knows the follow up will happen in person at the meetings.  If contribution to the movement, like proposals for actions, could be done online without having to go to the in person discussion she would feel like she could lend her voice more to the movement.

The Chancellor: Members of his administration might use surveillance measures to see what is going on in the movement.  One might be happy to see a website where they could create an online persona to see what actions the students have organized in order to build up a police presence at the event.

Use Case Scenario

Student who can attend meetings regularly: This student would use the website in order to relay information from the in person meetings to the larger public.  However, this student would also have to try to decentralize the primacy of the in person meetings and not just relay information from those meetings, but use the site as a place where they also develop their group’s ideas.

Pros: This would allow the group as a whole to expand its membership, and hear more voices, which is a large point of the movement.

Cons: For some goals the movement is already incredibly successful.  The in person meetings are generally well attended by those who can attend and adding an extra step to this may complicate the situation, especially during the early introduction of the website.

Student who can’t make meetings: She would use the site to network for other people interested in building proposals together and use another aspects of the site to present it to other GA’ers.  Discussions would be asynchronous so there would be no need to participate at a certain time of the day, this would work well for her schedule.

Pros: She would be able to contribute to the movement on her own terms.

Cons: Since the site is designed to include people like her, there are no cons for this persona.

The Chancellor: As the site will be online, we won’t be able to verify visually who is accessing the site. The Chancellor may want to try to find out more details about upcoming actions, so he would go onto the site and create an account, or use an anonymous guest account to see what everyone is talking about.  Events often try to publicly shame him, and he’s starting to be a little self-conscious.  He’s going to go undercover as an online occupier to find out who will be making barn-yard noises at his next talk.

Pros: On some level having anyone be able to access the groups plans demonstrates the principle of transparency that is so important to the group.  Perhaps the Chancellor should have some access to the information on the site, as it pertains to him and the University he is apart of.

Cons: In contrast to the Pro of open access, anything online brings up the issue of functionality versus security.  If the people that we are giving open access to then try to block the actions of the movement there is a contradiction that needs to be resolved.

Full Version:

The full version would be run in someway like the commons.  It would use wikis, social networking, and have a blogging system to perhaps be linked with the current wordpress sites that publish news and events related to Occupy CUNY.  Because the commons already exists I can say that I am confident that a system like this would work.  What would have to be different is the level of security and privacy, especially for when discussing direct actions. There would need to be a way to have accounts, but preserve anonymity. Another component would be a skype-type feature for people to collaborate in real time.

Full Time Line

The time line for the full version would take at least a year with a team of skilled people.  I would not be able to build this myself at this point. The academic commons is open source so the structure of it could be replicated in some way.

Reduced Version

This version would use borrow from already functioning sites like wordpress.com or opencuny.org, wikispaces.com, and the already existing googlegroup, or chatzy.com.  People would have to use the listserv to share where there they collaboration would be occurring.  For people who do not want to use their full name there could be a few accounts that could be open accounts—guest accounts.

Reduced Time Line

This could be done immediately; it would be creating the culture to use the tools that would take longer.

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By Christina – March 14, 2012

Amy’s Proposal #1: Food Justice

Abstract

Currently there doesn’t appear to be an online space dedicated to the sharing of stories and advocacy efforts of young food activists. Given the recent growth of the food justice movement, it is important to highlight their stories and work, and create a platform within which young activists can connect, share, collaborate and organize efficiently. This web-based tool will be a food justice participatory mapping and storytelling social networking site. It will allow young food activists in NYC to map their work, day to day actions and stories as it pertains to food activism. Various applications will be available to users, including apps like Dipity, which allows for the creation of multi-media interactive timelines, and a collaborative mapping app, like Google maps.

Personas
  • Mikaela is a 19 year old high school graduate from PS235 who recently got into urban farming through her involvement with her high school garden. She’s attending Pratt in the fall (undecided major for now) and wants to find other young people her age who share similar interests — she’s thinking of starting a student group to work on food access issues around Pratt, or help build school gardens. She’s an avid Facebook user and tweets non-stop and has a very strong online presence.
  • Zooey is a 21 year old very committed community organizer working for Just Food and going to school at Lehman. She’s very new to technology and relies on her colleagues to handle the social media part of their work. She comes from a long legacy of community activists though, and shares stories about her parents and grandparents constantly, as her inspiration, and to inspire others to learn and act. Everyone keeps telling her to document her story. She’s also the go-to person for understanding food policy and is working with her colleagues to find a way to digitize and simplify information about current food policy advocacy efforts.
  • Oliver is a City College graphic designer who just submitted to the CUNY Fight the Fizz anti-soda counter advertising media contest. He just started learning about the horrors of food corporations and the negative impact they’re having on health and wants to start blogging about it and posting his related art and finding out what others are doing in this area.
Use Case Scenario
The site will be built with WordPress and users can participate in any aspect of the site — whether it’s to find others to collaborate with, learn about the latest food policy actions, organize events, or simply share their own related work.
Full Fledged
  • Profiles via BuddyPress will be installed so every user (or organization) has their own profile.
  • Participatory mapping tool (GoogleMaps?) — this would be like Yelp + RealTimeFarms and serves as a resource that helps advocacy efforts. For example, the maps could provide information (eg, about, time, hours, location, reviews, contacts) on CSAs, community gardens, school gardens, restaurants that are locally sourced, farmers markets, organizations, events, etc.
  • Dipity is a free digital timeline website and can be embedded on other websites. Timetoast is a similar free program. This will allow people to share their stories, upload media, videos, photographs, news stories, (in the similar vein as Facebook’s new timeline motif). The idea here is to provide people with the space to tell their stories of how they became food activists (or more broadly, what led them to where they are now). The other way this can be used is to track policy change/advocacy efforts (eg, what’s going on with the Farm Bill now).
  • Event calendar — WordPress has several plug ins to address this feature.
  • Action alerts — users can send out action alerts or petitions to sign
  • Video embedding
  • Twitter feeds that pulls in tweets based on hashtags
MVP
The MVP version would include the WordPress and BuddyPress install, calendar of events and embedding of a digital timeline app. This version would also be built within the CUNY Commons and target food activists with the CUNY system. Any interested student can join the group and add their stories, events, places of interest, action alerts, meeting minutes, etc. Groups like the GC Food Studies Collective or the CUNY Food Justice Community could have an online presence here, for example.

Time/Skills
It will take 5-6 months to implement the full version, and about 2-3 months to implement the MVP. I’ve created a few very very basic WordPress sites through the Commons already, but to customize and embed outside programs like Dipity and GoogleMaps will take some time to learn. Also, I’d like to learn how to use Photoshop or other tools to create images and logos.


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By Amy – March 14, 2012

Ria’s Idea 1: Conference Website

Cinema Studies Group’s Conference Website

Project #1: Ria Banerjee

The Elevator Pitch

Each year, the Cinema Studies Group at the Graduate Center organises and hosts a grad student conference. Increasingly, these conferences are accompanied by websites, and each year, the sites go up depending on the organisers’ abilities. The organisers change by year; so do the websites for the conference. Having some continuity among these sites is highly desirable—it would include up-to-date conference information, give the conference a historical sense, show the range of topics we’ve addressed, avoid repetition in topics from year to year, and perhaps most importantly, serve as a permanent online showcase for graduate student work from our institution and elsewhere.

 

The Personas

* Alpha is a grad student and co-organiser of the conference for 2013, and in charge of website maintenance. Alpha is fairly computer-literate, and therefore can create and update pages on a WordPress site, including adding images, but there Alpha’s knowledge ends.
* Beta is a graduate student from University of Minnesota flying to New York to attend this graduate conference. Beta is really nervous, but also hopes that this is the beginning of a long career in academia. Beta is fairly desperate to do what needs doing to land a job after graduation. Beta has never been to New York before, and has only a vague idea of where to stay, where to eat, and what to do. Like all grad students, Beta is on an extremely tight budget.
* Gamma is a professor who has agreed to be a panel chair on this conference to show team spirit and support, but has no idea what the conference is about or what the panel will be on. Gamma would like to know what papers will be presented at their panel (or at least the abstracts). Gamma is somewhat impatient with the whole process.
* Delta is the chairperson of the GC Film Studies department, and therefore only tangentially related to the student-run conference. However, Delta would like to keep an eye on the proceedings as it reflects upon the department as a whole. Further, Delta would like to help with organisation (a little) and expenses (more); unlike Gamma, Delta enjoys being involved but doesn’t know where help is most needed.
* Epsilon is a prospective hirer interviewing Beta a few years down the line. Epsilon is on the fence about Beta, and decides to look into previous conference work. Epsilon sees the recurring nature of the GC’s film conference, and realises that Beta’s work, even in graduate conferences, is worthwhile. This has an impact on Epsilon’s decision to hire this new colleague. (I realise that Epsilon is unrealistic as far as the status quo.)

 

Use Case Scenario
This website would exist online through an organisation like the Commons, which is attached to the parent institution tangentially. This reflects the tangential nature of the graduate student, whose ties to the alma mater are not the same as those of faculty. It would contain information about previous years’ conferences (including abstracts of work presented), and would also contain important information about the current year’s conference—rooms and times for panels; places to eat and stay nearby; train stations and simple directions for use.

 

All the Bells and Whistles

Features that the site would have:

  • Information about panels. This is obviously the most important part of any conference—the date and times, the campus and rooms, and the name of the panel chairs linked to faculty websites (either personal or departmental). This section would list the paper topics to be presented, and link to the abstracts submitted. In the best possible world, plagiarism wouldn’t exist, and therefore there would be no problem with putting people’s abstracts online. Paper presenters would also be able to input their own web addresses, as desired, and use the site to upload and send their papers to the respective panel chairs. This page would be the “hub” of the entire site, where the most crucial information for each year is made available. It is also very simple to set up, because essentially this information would all be connected via hyperlinks.
  • Information about Keynote Speaker. Most often, the prestige of a conference depends on the big name presenting interesting, new scholarly work, and so this section is second in importance only to the panels themselves. This page would link to the Keynote Speaker’s faculty/personal page through hyperlinks as well. In an ideal world, the Keynote would prepare an abstract in advance, which would be available for viewing. This section would also have a small video embedded to stream or download the talk as well as a transcript of what passed. In the ultimate version, the video would actually be in real time as the talk was delivered, and would be interactive, allowing those who couldn’t physically attend to pose questions in real time. I would use Skype or something similar to configure this.
  • Archive of Previous Conferences. As each year passes, the current version of the conference information would be automatically archived and stored in read-only format. Even though plagiarism doesn’t exist in this world, it would probably be good if the abstracts and papers previously uploaded were protected from uncontrolled use. I would like to convert them into a “limited page previews” format similar to what Google Books often uses. Those who are curious, such as Epsilon, would be able to read some key passages from Beta’s talk, but would need further permission from Beta to access the entire thing. I would have to figure out how to configure this, both in terms of restricting access, and then allowing it after certain protocols are satisfied.
  • Area Information. This section would be based around a Google Maps image of the Grad Center campus. I found that this is not as simple as it sounds, and currently I don’t have the skills to do this. Built around this image would be a host of useful information: coffee shops, restaurants, and hotels would be most useful, with short 1-line descriptions from the site admins/conference organisers as well as links to Yelp or Tripadvisor listings about cost, safety and distance.
  • Back-end Utilities. These are tools that the conference organisers would find most helpful. This section of the site would be hidden and require log-in.
  • Registration Form. While this is not a “back-end utility” per se, the form tool I used on our installation of WordPress is too simple to do all the things that a registration form really should. Filling out Registration should put the registrant’s information into a simple spreadsheet for organisers; this spreadsheet should link into a “mail merge” function, so that name tags and conference packets can be easily prepared. Google Forms compiles all the registrants into a handy spreadsheet, but seems incompatible with WP for now.
  • Budget Tool. Each new set of organisers should have the wisdom of the previous ones to use, without having to actually track them down and ask. A pre-made budget tool to manage money would be most useful, which lists the grant money obtained, the “needed” expenses (room rentals, equipment rentals, water, files, paper, etc.) and allows flexibility for the “wanted” expenses (closing reception, breakfasts and packed lunches, honoraria, etc.). I have been looking into open source money management software for this, but am unsure how well Gnu Cash or other such would work. Maybe just a fancy spreadsheet will be enough for this.
  • Equipment Lists. It is difficult to know how many name tags to order for a conference, or how many file folders and bottles of water and wine we might end up using. The Equipment List would manage lists of what previous organisers purchased, to help the current ones guesstimate. It would also be possible to link this List to the Budget Tool, so that the amount of money entered under “Water” on that would be converted into actual bottles of water on the current year’s list. I envision this in a simple 2-column format, where the first column remains static with previous year’s numbers, and the second column is variable depending on the amounts entered in the Budget section.
  • Wish List. This is where Delta and Alpha can interact most usefully in terms of providing money or resources for the “wanted” expenses.
  • Mobile App. This is the most fanciful part of the project. I have looked into using app builder software to do this, but my research on this is still in beginning stages. The mobile app would allow those interested to download the information they choose (panels, panelists, locations, maps, etc.) onto their smart phones to take with them when they are away from a computer.

    •  

    The Minimally Viable Product/Proof of Concept

    The blog that I am working on is the minimally viable product for all these ideas. It does not have any budgeting/back end tools, no maps, no streaming video. It does not serve as an archive, and converting the current year’s conference information into an archive after the end of March, when the conference takes place, will mean manually moving all the information over into another tab. Also, I can’t remove the “Comments” section at the bottom of each page, although I have disabled any comments on posts. It does have a rudimentary “Registration” page, but the information I receive from the plugin is not useful so I will have to learn how to properly configure it.

     

    Time and Skills

    Minimum time to become adept at WordPress: 6-9 months of consistent learning and work

    Minimum time to research software, plugins, and app builder: 6 months of research and testing; 4-5 months of building

     

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    By ria banerjee – March 13, 2012

    Kiran’s Projects: OLL and MADS

    Project 1: Online Learning Lab (OLL)

    Introduction

    Problem: Introductory science classes are content overloaded and the challenges facing the average undergraduate student in his/her first introductory biology class are traditionally addressed by an instructor-student flow of interaction. The average introductory science class is comprised of an excess of 200 students which is usually subdivided into smaller sections of 20-30 for the laboratory component or for problem solving workshops, which are coordinated by graduate student adjuncts. This division and compartmentalization of a single course, fragments the content and the community of the class in a way that diminishes the learning potential of the individual undergraduate student.
    Students can learn more from each other than from a teacher centered model, especially when the class population is huge and very diverse. Using asynchronous learning increases student time-on-task and can allow for interaction between students and their respective instructors and the course coordinator.

    Feedback in many forms is critical for learning science, since true science education is based on hierarchical transferrable models. Meaning concepts learned in a lecture are demonstrated in a teaching laboratory and enforced and applied in assignments, requiring students to create a model of a concept, test it, apply it and build on it. At every stage of the process, verification by an expert (the instructor), is important for subsequent learning. The Online Learning Lab proposes a means where student interaction and community is fostered can improve the introductory science course in many ways.

    The OLL is a modular online interface that facilitates interaction for about 20-30 individuals. It is private and allows some hierarchical moderation but is not centered around it. It’s purpose to foster instructor moderated but student centered communal and collaborative learning in laboratory/workshop sub-sections of a much larger lecture class.

    Personas
    Joshua is a first generation american. He is registered for predominantly science classes. This is his first semester starting the premed track at CCNY. His is a frequent user of social networking sites like facebook and tumblr and so he is familiar with blogging but he has never used an online interface for an academic purpose. This is his first time experiencing a course with 200 registered students.

    Yoon hee  is a post-bacc. student who is taking biology classes with the intention to apply to graduate school for a professional degree in biotechnology. She has used blackboard and is very familiar with a teacher centered facilitative online component of a large lecture class.

    Abhinav is a 3rd year doctoral student of neuroscience. It is his 2nd semester teaching an undergraduate lab section. He is currently working on taking his 2nd exam and juggles grading, office hours and bench lab work and analysis. He tutors highschool students in math and science on weekends. He has a facebook account which he uses frequently to plan events with his friends and to keep in touch with his estranged relatives and friends from his college years.

    Use case scenario
    Introductory Science Course Laboratory Platform: An interactive Lab manual that is not restricted to providing experimental protocol for each class activity, but also facilitates instructor student interaction and community building within individual laboratory/recitation/workshop sections of a larger science lecture class (population 200 students). The instructors,  in most cases graduate students or teaching adjuncts, can set up the platform for management of their sections. Students can collaborate on group projects such as presentations and experiments, as well as conduct peer review of their reports, as is common practice in many laboratory classes. This platform should enable student-student interaction beyond the class meeting which is particularly useful in science classes where there is emphasis on assigned problem solving.
    Additionally, instructors can set up online quizzes as well as post extra material in a central location, sorted chronologically for each class meeting for student use.

    Design and testing of complete version
    It can be built on wordpress, allowing student blogging and comment entries with comment press and a buddy press install for instructors. Extensive styling may be required to create an optimally functional layout for students and instructors. Survey tools like surveymonkey.com or wufoo.com can be used for the online quiz generation/activity. Ideally, embedded media and quick-preview of documents and webpages (like dynamic drive) would be used to avoid navigation away from the platform during student use.

    —All material should be permissible for exporting to instructors as well as students if necessary.

    Time assessment of complete version
    8 months

    Method for MVP and proof of viability
    Do a wordpress install with comment press and buddy press and configure using a basic theme to style on my own hosting space. (happening at present)

    Test amongst my fellow lab instructors.

    Time assessment for MVP
    3 months

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    Project 2: Mammalian Auditory Development Scheme (MADS)

    Introduction/ abstract:

    When studying many aspects of mammalian neural development, rodent models are used because of their  conserved fundamental anatomy. In auditory brain research, they provide the additional advantage of altricial hearing where the animal has a delayed onset of hearing function which happens postnatally but still follows a conserved physiological pattern. There are two aspects to studying this development: central (brain) and peripheral (ear) development and the coordination in between. An integral central component involves the growth of multiple specialized centers in the brainstem, called the superior olivary complex (SOC), which consist of a melange of dedicated neuronal and glial cells and the extensions of each which connect, or wire the whole system together. Independently of this, peripheral nerves from the sense organ within the ear (the organ of Corti in the cochlea) form the auditory nerve which extends into the brainstem and connects to the SOC, essentially completing the circuit by a conserved time point in a rodent’s life (two weeks old).

    Part of my research for my thesis investigates the changes in volume of different nuclei in the SOC during this developmental stage in rats and mice, and also looks at the relationship of the onset of hearing function with the changes in the SOC anatomy. We have shown that actively proliferating cells within the SOC nuclei lose their capacity to divide and multiply after 15 days postnatally and have identified the type of cells which contribute most heavily to the changes in volume, as glial cells. Additionally, we are investigating the changes in myelination (myelin is the insulation with surrounds individual nerve cell extensions, and drastically improves electrical conduction) in the extending auditory nerve innervating the first nucleus in the SOC, the Medial Nucleus of the Trapezoid Body (MNTB). The changes in myelin patterning including its density and maturity is dependent on glial cells of both compartments of the system, central and peripheral.

    In our lab we have generated micro CT scans of the gross anatomical changes taking place in the peripheral structures as well as done three-dimensional reconstruction of SOC nuclei, creating snapshots day by day of the changing volume as the animal tends to auditory maturity. I would like to include a cohesive multimedia component to my thesis visually illustrating the synchrony of what I have described above.

    Personas
    Alison Caine is a graduate student of the biology studying evolutionarily conserved patterns of physiology related to hearing in vertebrates. Her interest revolves around assessing the changing structure of the peripheral organs of the auditory system across ancestrally related vertebrates from mammals to amphibia and reptiles and the correlation with unique function per species.

    Dr. Luis Carnaval conducts a course in the speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University. His work investigates the effect on hearing development and auditory processing, of multiple congenital disorders of the nervous system.

    Use case scenario
    Anyone studying/researching/learning about auditory development in the brain can use this since it will be much more cognitively accessible in an illustrated visual dynamic form than as independent data from a series of experiments.

    Design and testing of complete version
    Create a narrated animation using accurate media from experiments (micro CT scans, 3D models and confocal microscope images and volumes) that illustrates my thesis work in the context of established anatomical and physiological knowledge on auditory development in mammals.

    This will require extensive knowledge of animation design and finding a way to interface the many forms of scientific media used to accurately depict the results of the experiments  in which they were used by using the proprietary software in which they were generated

    Time assessment of complete version
    3 years.

    Method for MVP and proof of viability
    Analyze the media the lab has generated from experiments to display in a narrated animation which provides a visual estimation of the events of development. This will require learning to create and modify animations in something like Blender, which can do to-scale animations and incorporate audio for the narration and text for annotation.

    Time assessment for MVP
    1 year

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    By Kiran – March 12, 2012

    Trade School class on Economics of Education

    I will be going to this Trade School class after our class on March 29th, and welcome you to join me. You will have to figure out which of the teacher’s barter requests you can fulfill, as Trade School runs on barter exchanges:

    What does it mean to teach or learn something?  How does that transaction then fit into economics?  At a time of growing student debt, weighty university infrastructure, inventive start-ups, and changing technology, how can you think about the economics of education?  This class grows out of observations and hopes:  (1) The Occupy activism seems partly rooted in paralyzing student debt, yet also itself offers the structure for a radical DIY education movement.  (2) In the same way that iTunes unbundled an album into a playlist, technologies enable the unbundling of higher education.  Institutions like General Assembly, Brooklyn Brainery, and Skillshare could be beta versions that grow int large, democratically available, curated learning platforms.  In this participatory lecture, we will try on a lot of these ideas and think openly about inventing the future structures and systems of education.

    More on Trade School here.

     

     

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    By Michael Mandiberg – March 12, 2012

    Oral Citations on Hindi Wikipedia

    People Are Knowledge is the film I mentioned that explores ways in which video and oral testimony/history/documentation can function as a citation in oral cultures. Here is the coverage in The Hindu, and below is is from the Wikipedia Signpost:

    Verifiability and No original research are two of Wikipedia’s core content policies. The core idea is that noteworthy information will have at least some source that Wikipedia articles can cite, and if not, then the information isn’t noteworthy. While this might hold for the Western world, local information is rarely written down in areas like India and South Africa; there, knowledge exists predominantly as the spoken word. In the UK, for example, one book is published for every 372 citizens each year; but the ratio in South Africa is roughly 20 times smaller, and in India as much as 30 times smaller, with one book per 11,000 citizens each year. This raises an important question: how can there be a balance between local knowledge and global knowledge in Wikipedia if local knowledge is all but non-existent in the written world?

    People are Knowledge, a CC-BY-SA film published a few days ago, offers an answer: instead of written citations, Wikipedia language versions like Hindi, Malayalam and Sepedi could use oral citations. Interviews and recordings could serve as a source of knowledge for Wikipedia. The team which tried this did experience problems early on, as documented in the 45-minute film: two residents of a small village described a local children’s game differently. The team’s solution seems to fit the mindset at Wikipedia: present both sides in the Wikipedia article.

    And If all goes well with my .ogv embed code and your browser, here is the video it looks like WP does not like .ogv files, in which case, the video lives here: People are Knowledge

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    By Michael Mandiberg – March 8, 2012

    “When Teaching Becomes an Interaction Design Task: Networking the classroom with collaborative blogs,

    Mushon Zer-Aviv’s article provides thoughtful admonitions concerning the pitfalls of blindly using technologies within the classroom without considering the types of learning processes that each tool fosters and potentially hinders.  Here are some comments that I found most interesting:

    “I see no point in using tools and methodologies in class that would be useless outside class. This is equivalent to saying that learning is something that happens in class but not outside it.” One of my favorite but hackneyed quotes by Dewey is: education is not preparation for life, but life itself.  Everything that we encourage students to do within our classrooms should enable them to critically engage in the world as it is right now; we can’t continue to be preoccupied with the future if we want students to see value in what they are learning today.  It is a daunting, but necessary task to find relevance in everything that we teach.

    “I believe we should try to teach our students to teach themselves. This, too, is more easily said than done. Acquiring self-education skills is demanding and some students get it more easily than others.”  I never really thought about how to structure learning experiences so that students teach themselves.  I’m interested to know how others cultivate a community of self-learners.

    “Are we promoting a learning environment that benefits those like us and cripples others? I have to admit I am still grappling with this question and would appreciate a wider debate of this subject.”   Most educators tend to teach and assess students the way that they learned.  I believe the realistic compromise is to prepare students to succeed in our extant world-whether this means excelling on an exam—and expose them to multiple means of expression.

    The author’s statement also forces us to think about this issue of access.  I also don’t know how to answer this question without sounding privileged to an extent.  When I encourage teachers to construct Google sites or wiki pages where they can post their syllabus and class assignments, they always say, “Well many students don’t have computers at home.”  I get frustrated by this answer because ALL of the students have web-enabled cell phones.  The students have also internalized this attitude of have-not to excuse their ability of being challenged and held accountable.  I believe that access shouldn’t always dictate a teacher’s expectation of students.

    “Another caveat of the networked classroom is networking technology at large: information overload and attention scarcity.”  The influx of information has helped us to expand our background knowledge, but hasn’t taught us how to critically think about it.  How do we teach students to be better judgers of information?

     

     

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    By m. akinyele – March 6, 2012

    Valuing “Why”

    This week’s readings were timely and gave me a great opportunity to reflect n recent experiences with Wikipedia, readings, workshops, assignments, and classroom discussions: It was like a moment of experience synthesis  where all roads seemed to come together.

    Each of this week’s authors reinforced the value of using technological tools for the purpose of creating active learning environments.

    Barotn’s suggestion that  “The key pedagogical benefit wikis offer is epistemological. Wikis demonstrate, in a clear and obvious fashion, how knowledge is a function of communities engaged in ongoing discourse.”

    The emphasis on communal learning and learning through contribution is just what my recent experience with wiki amounts to: In journeying through wiki-etiquette, though frustrated at times, I realize that a whole world of learning has opened up for me. I in turn look forward to bringing this type of experience into my classrooms. I happen to whole-heartedly agree with Aviv that, “…we should teach methodology, not technology. We should value the “why” over the “how” This is particularly real for me as I flex my technology muscle in the workshops and do my best to take in the new languages and ways of imaging. It is not enough to learn today’s tools; the focus should be on an appreciation of the process.

    The thing is, a concern about getting this method spread wide persists in my mind. How can we guarantee the democratic distribution of these democratizing tools? How can we sure-up the technologically less inclined to succeed with the reality of having to learn the new languages and technologies if this truly is the direction that our formal education will follow?

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    By Janice – March 6, 2012

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