ITP Core 2 Spring 2019 – Interactive Technology and Pedagogy II: Methods and Practice

Final Project and Presentation

Final Paper Assignment for Core II

Your final work for Core 2 is to produce a project proposal that includes a basic proof of concept. Yes, we will be reading it for a grade, but your true audience for this proposal are the gatekeepers who hold institutional purse strings, allocate resources and space, approve curriculum, or administer technology resources. Your job is to convince this hypothetical reader that your project is intellectually and/or pedagogically vital, builds on but doesn’t duplicate existing work, is done in the most effective and efficient way possible, uses the right tech, and most importantly: that you can pull it off in the time frame that you have available to you: the ITP Independent Study.

Your project proposal should be 12-15 pages in length. You are welcome to follow the guidelines for the NEH Digital Humanities grants, or another discipline specific set of requirements. This proposal will be the basis for your ITP Independent Study proposal. Generally, it needs to include:

an abstract or summary with a clear problem statement
a project narrative that gives the practical, historical, theoretical, and technical contexts for the project proposed
an environmental scan of projects that operate in a similar technical, scholarly, or pedagogical space as yours
a clear, relevant, and detailed work plan or project timeline
proof that you have a strategy to complete the project within one semester

Proposals typically include a budget; you may choose to include this, but it is not required. You may find it useful to include your personas and your use case scenarios. Some disciplines may have other, discipline specific requirements; please include those if relevant.

The proof that you can complete the project can incorporate your biography, or a description of how the proposed project builds on your previous and related work, but in this instance, you need to complete a proof of concept for the project. This will be different for each of you, but it needs to demonstrate that you have learned enough about the task at hand that you will be able to complete it. Most of this learning is technical, but it might not be exclusively technical.

Some examples of past proofs of concept:

When proposing a group wiki assignment, one person created a simulation of one assignment at the halfway state, with the text edited in character by the user accounts for each of the 4 personas described.
When proposing an online resource for images for use in teaching theatre courses, one person created a record for one image in Omeka.
When proposing a mobile app, one person found an open source quiz app they could build on, changed the text of one of questions, and recompiled the app.
When proposing a student assignment to create multimedia historical maps of NYC neighborhoods, one student created a sample map with the Google Maps API that contained a map point for each type of media expected to be used (video, audio, photograph, text).
When proposing a game, a student might present a draft of the game’s narrative, or presented one element of its gameplay.

You will be turning in a text, and giving a presentation. The presentation will take place on one of the last two weeks of class, May 13 or 20. These will be 10 minute presentations, with 10 minutes for discussion/feedback. We will invite all ITP faculty to join us, though we don’t expect all will be able to make it for both of the days.

Here is the grading rubric.

The text will be due May 20th. Please upload it as a Word document to the Files area of our course group. We will not give extensions.

Collaborative Assignment Design Assignment

ITP Core 2, Spring 2019: Collaborative Assignment Design Assignment

You will collaboratively craft, with at least one student from another discipline, a scaffolded assignment for a final project in an undergraduate course that engages with one or more of the core ideas explored to this point in your ITP experience. (Your work on this assignment can link to your own final project for our class, or your own field, or a class you actually teach, but none of that is required).

We’ll give you some time for initial discussion with your partner during class on Monday April 15th. The assignment plan is due on Thursday May 2, when you and your partner will post to the course forum a final project assignment with at least three discrete, connected tasks, intended for an undergraduate course. All groups will read all assignments, and we will discuss them in the first hour of class on Monday May 6th.

The post should have the following elements:

A brief statement of the context of the course (discipline, level, institution type, instructional mode, is it real or imagined)
A statement about the place of the assignment within the larger learning goals of the course; why is it the final?
A draft of the assignment, addressed to your students
A statement of the technologies used in the assignment, and why
The criteria you’d use to evaluate the assignment

Midterm Assignment

Your midterm assignment will be to create a project proposal that has two scope variations: one full, and one reduced version.

Your proposal should follow this structure:

An introductory descriptive paragraph, which should include a problem statement, and say *what* your tool/thing will do.
A set of personas and/or user stories.
A use case scenario (where would someone find your tool/thing and how would they use it). Keep it short.
How you will make the full fledged version. This is your “ideal world” version that fulfills all of your visions and fantasies (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc).
Your assessment of how much time the full-fledged version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.
How you will make the stripped-down version. The stripped down version is the minimally viable product. It is the most *bare bones* version to prove that what you are trying to get at is viable. (what tools you will use, how you will get them, how confident you are that all the moving parts will work together, etc)
Your assessment of how much time the stripped-down version will take, and how much of the skills you currently know and what you would have to learn.

You are welcome (but not required) to repeat the last two steps with scope variations in-between the full fledged and bare bones version.

In previous years, this assignment asked you to propose two projects. If you are, indeed, trying to choose between two projects and fleshing them both out would be useful for you, you can fulfill the midterm assignment by offering what’s above for each idea, minus the stripped-down version.

Class that week (on Monday April 1st) will be dedicated to workshopping the proposals. We will follow the following format: you will have 5 minutes to present your proposal orally (or one of your two proposals, if that applies), and we will have 5 minutes for feedback. Think of this as a pitch. You will want to lay out the project abstract, present very short versions of your personas, give one use case scenario, and then talk about how you would build it, and how long you think it would take.

You will submit your proposal to the Forum by Thursday April 4th, which will give you the chance to reflect the feedback you got in class on Monday.

Under the wire or Nathalie’s Bio

Hello all. It’s Nathalie Zarisfi. I was the last one in the classroom last week, and probably the last post up for the bio. I am hoping to shake that trend. So I work in the technology and pedagogy realm, as a Director of a Teaching and Learning Center at a private college in Long Island. I am interested in technology as it relates to equity in higher education. My day is mostly spent putting out fires and helping folks with their courses. But I sincerely believe in personal project time, being creative, building and tinkering and failing. And this class is my laboratory, my way of building safe space for me. Not because I want to do it undercover or away from my team, or my faculty. But because I don’t seem to carve out that time for myself at work. And I need it. I am desperate to experiment, and learn and explore.

I may have said this in class: I am a firm believer in failure. Its how our brains are wired. It has served me well. I remembering interviewing for a position at a large public institution, and one of the interview questions was something like, “Could you share with us your teaching philosophy” or the equivalent. And I have to tell you that I completely and totally blew that interview when I told that I encourage failure. Crickets, blinking stares. And then just like that, the interview was over. Discouraging but not unexpected. They will come around.

I don’t get a profoundly different response in my workshops or consultations. I work with a core of highly motivated brilliant people, who don’t feel like they have the option of failing at teaching, and most of the time haven’t even had the chance to learn how to teach. I try to make it more of a misstep, an act of humility, versus a free fall. Failure is a tactic that works, knowing and forgetting, and learning it all over again.

I am looking forward to learning from you, with you, and failing forward.

Cameron’s Bio

Hi all,

My name is Cameron Rasmussen. In the last few years I learned (through a very brief google search) that my last name means son of the beloved, so I have that going for me. I was born and raised in Sacramento, CA where my twin brother and parents still live. I moved to NYC to do an MSW 7 and a half years ago and haven’t left. I love music, hip hop and soul in particular, my spotify discover weekly and Friday release radar playlists are two highlights of my week.

Im a second year student in the social welfare program at CUNY and am interested in restorative justice and alternative responses to violence beyond a paradigm of punishment. Im interested in restorative and transformative accountability, both for responding to serious violence, but also in helping everyone everywhere be in better relationship with themselves and others, and more able to resolve conflict in ways that lead to that. Im also interested in gender and masculinity, how patriarchy and domination make accountability work much harder, and to identify and further strategies for uprooting patriarchy, both to make accountability more possible, and to help us all be in better relations.

Diana’s Bio

Hi all!

My name full name is Diana Melendez (full version being Diana Alejandra Melendez Romero.) I am the daughter of amazing parents, middle child of three sisters, cousin to many, godmother to a spirited 2 year old, sometimes runner and occasionally an artist, cat mom and enthusiastic friend to awesome people! I am originally from Mexico and have lived in NJ all my US-based life.

My background is in social work as a family therapist, behavioral health crisis services and also have some experience working in a middle-school, psychiatric hospital and doing in-home therapy with youth and families. While working with the Institute for Family Services, where I completed a post-graduate training, I was also able to participate in the organizing of the Liberation Based Healing Conference over the past couple of years which has been amazing! I also am connected with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and have been in the role of organizer/trainer through the Undoing Racism/Community Organizing Workshop, more so before I started studenting again.

I am currently a second year doctorate student in the Social Welfare program and am finding my interests to be in higher education and liberatory pedagogy. I am excited to be teaching in the social work programs at Columbia and NYU this semester as an adjunct lecturer and have been working to shape my classes to be the least lectury as possible. I believe higher education, and other institutional spaces where people come together, can be opportunities for critical-consciousness raising, relationship-building and resistance and that it is important for educators/researchers to use our access to sources/resources with a commitment to equity. I am looking forward to continuing to learn how to integrate interactive technology into these processes and maybe even claim a space within the digital humanities world!

Lisa’s ITP Bio

Hi friends!

My name is Lisa Ng, and I am in my last semester of the Master of Liberal Studies Program in Data Visualization. I received my B.A. in Urban Environmental Policy from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. I am currently a student advisor at CityTech. This is my twentieth consecutive year (wow! but also, hopefully my last year) as a student in the New York City public school system. I am currently waiting on results from various PhD programs to determine where I will be for the next few years.

My academic interests lie in waste, race, data, their relationships to one another, and how they are used to tell stories that affect lives. As an undergraduate, I developed an interest in trash and waste as a tool of pedagogy – because everyone interacts with trash, it serves as an accessible means to understand ubiquitous systems such as capitalism, racism, colonialism, etc. At the CUNY Building Performance Lab, I developed an interest in data, which led me to the MALS program at the GC and eventually to the field of Digital Humanities. I am especially interested in how technology can make archives and lesson plans more accessible.

I have been all over the place in terms of my interests, but that is driven by my curiosity of our environment and my genuine love for people. That is what brought me to the ITP Program. I have spent the past five years organizing and participating in multiple conferences. I also have experience working with and in various community organizations with bases in low-income Asian-American communities in New York City. If you have any questions about anything listed above, feel free to contact me!

Elizabeth’s ITP Bio

Hi everyone!

My name is Elizabeth Che (but you can also call me Liz). I am a doctoral student in Educational Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. I received my B.S. degree in Psychology and B.A. degree in Political Science from the Macaulay Honors College at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. I am currently serving as the Chair of the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA; APA Division 2: The Society for the Teaching of Psychology) which aims to develop resources and services to support the classroom experiences of graduate student teachers.

My research interests relate to the broad areas of language development, development of effective pedagogy, and the effect of incorporating technological tools in the classroom. I am involved in efforts to evaluate the impact of teaching with Wikipedia in Introductory Psychology, by having students contribute to biographies of distinguished scientists as part of the WikiProject: PSYCH+Feminism.

I participated in the Open Pedagogy Fellowship over this past winter session where I learned how to use the GC Commons and techniques for converting my Introductory Psychology course into a zero-cost course for students. I am still working on the course site, but I plan to have it completed by the end of this or the following semester.

Jeff’s ITP Bio

Jeffrey Suttles is a graduate student at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Literature, Arts, & Communications from City College of New York. Jeffrey is a self-taught musician that decided to go back to school to fulfill his aspirations to excel in music, media, and life. He is currently employed with the New York City Department of Education as a substitute teacher.

Jeffrey created a Social Justice blog called Humanities Heart as a member and employee of the New Media Lab. He recently completed his Digital Capstone project about BLACK ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT, which dissects what it will take to create sustainability in urban communities. He incorporates is musical ability by writing and performing in various venues in New York City. His goal is to engage people through multimedia platforms about the injustices that continue to plague our communities. In this way he believes that he will lend his voice to the movement, as part of the solution, instead of accentuating the problem.

Let’s Do This – Spring, 2019!

I’m Ash. I am a level 2 Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance. My academic work centers around theatre practices in war zones and areas of conflict. I am a director, actor, and playwright. I am interested in creating work that transforms the way that people see the world. As a millennial artist, I am particularly drawn to how the events of September 11th, 2001 shaped my generation. This has been a question that I have asked in much of my work, which has looked at the implications of the war on terror, patriotism, religion, security and surveillance, xenophobia, and the refugee crisis.

I am loving my time at the Graduate Center, though I am a practitioner at heart. It’s been very exciting to further develop theatrical praxis in a supportive and stimulating atmosphere. Currently, I’m working on creating a one-woman production of Antigone set at the US/Mexico border. I’m often working on multiple projects at once. I like staying busy and motivated.

Upon receiving my Ph.D. my goal is to continue doing what I’m doing now but be paid a living wage to do it… Lately, though I have been thinking a lot about journalism and dabbling with the idea of what having a job in journalism (like at Democracy Now! or an independent organization) would look like. I know it’s impossibly hard, like theatre. I am particularly interested in photojournalism (here is a link to my photo website: www.introublewiththeking.org). My life has some epic scope creep, but I’m okay with it – keeps things interesting at all times.

ITP has been absolutely transformative. It has greatly informed by teaching and I’ve been exposed to exciting new ideas and technological practices that I had only vaguely heard of. I am particularly interested in technology and pedagogy as activism. This is what initially brought me to ITP. I’m looking forward to continuing working with and learning from all of you.

This is my cat, Kirby. Isn’t he great?