Category Archives: Community

Bittersweet, Like an Apple Removed from My Heart

So guess what? This is it. It’s a bittersweet moment as I sit here typing out my final blog post. I had so many goals and aspirations to achieve this semester and reached some while never thinking twice about some others. Then there are the goals that I achieved without intending to. You may be wondering what some of those goals are, but I’ve decided to not tell you. If you’re reading this, then let me tell you that you have been blessed with a magnificent brain that can come up with ideas that I could never dream of—don’t let me hold you back.

 

There is one thing that I learned this semester that I really think you should keep in mind. It’s all about people.

All of this. School, technology, families, the postal service, all of our communities, everything. Don’t take people for granted, but in turn, don’t take yourself for granted either. You’ve fought half the battle by just taking the moment to read this. It proves that you not only want to, but can do it. If you’re having this read to you, guess what, you still can.

 

After school special aside, this has been a great semester. It’s one of the first courses where I felt like whatever I put in I got in return. I definitely appreciated that it was taught and attended by university administrators–not to have an outlet to vent, but it was encouraging to see that the people behind so many emails care about improving the school and are motivated to do it with students in mind.

As you should know by now if you’ve been keeping up with this blog and course, we had iPads all semester. Needless to say that all my plots to keep mine have been thwarted by that nifty ID number on the back. Oh well. I must say that I don’t know if this semester could have been possible without them. They established a baseline technology that we could implement in whichever ways we saw fit to be successful in school. I frequently caught myself panicking if I left my iPad at home (moreso than if I left my phone). It has been everything this semester–never leaving my side. It took some getting used to, but wasn’t unbearable, and since it was new, it forced me to begin thinking out of the box in general. In essence, it was disruptive. Knowing that I would be giving the iPad back, I can speak honestly and say that I failed and didn’t push it as far as I could. As a broke college kid, I refused to spend money on it. If I had brought my own, or purchased it in the beginning, I think my selection of apps and utilities would have been much more in depth (would have had an external keyboard too). Do I think iPads should be implemented in education? Definitely. Will something new need to be added eventually? Definitely. Is that okay and natural? Definitely.

 

I bid you adieu, and may the dreams of a back button forever rest with you, my dear Future People.

Technically Yours,

Richard.

Closing Remarks Chris W.

This class has been a great experience. Coming into this class I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Honestly, I enrolled in the class because I heard we’d get to use an iPad for a semester. While the iPad was nice, I’d say the best thing about this class were the excellent discussion we had in class and how fluid the syllabus was. This class has really opened my eyes to the subtle complexities of community development and really helped me define who I am as a person. The guest we had in class pushed me to do what I want in life (which is to work in the gaming industry). The last section, Design, helped me take a new approach to the creative process that I will definitely use later on in life.

This class has shown me a few apps that I really enjoyed using. In no particular order SwiftKey, Adaptxt, Evernote, and POP.

Adaptxt: If you want swept functionality on your iOS device I would definitely recommend this app. The user interface is clean and is very responsive.
SwiftKey: This is another third party keyboard that has the swipe functionality. From my experience sometimes the keyboard wouldn’t appear and you’d have to tap on the lobe icon more than once. Otherwise it is a great app to use.

Evernote: This app is a powerhouse! From presentations to website layouts Evernote can do it all!

POP: In the design section of the course both teams used this to make the layout of our apps which were our a part of our Final Synthesis.

Lastly, the iPad was really useful this entire semester. Slowly substituted paper with the iPad and it became an integral part of my day to day. This device is useful beyond belief and after this semester is over I will seriously consider buying one for myself.

Cheers to a great semester!

Sam Richards Online Tonight

Hi all … I wanted to point you to the TV series that I worked on for over a year while at PSU with Dr. Sam Richards, an interactive TV show based on his incredibly popular and challenging Race Relations sociology course. You guys got to meet Sam “in class” when he did his virtual drop in … this is the exact show I was talking about. After close to three years the vision is coming true with an online screening tonight. I urge you to watch and think along with the program. I’d love to hear follow up comments from those who tune in. Watch through the lenses of community, identity, and design. Here is a preview …

Listen Up, Can Anyone Hear Us?

To prepare for Thursday’s synthesis presentations, those of us that like to be Too Disruptive would like for you to do two things. First, take a look at Sam Richards’s Ted Talk,  “A Radical Experiment in Empathy.”

Then, we would like for you to take a brief, semi-anonymous quiz. Especially since this is such a small class, we hope that everyone gets a chance to take the quiz (even Cole). Also, please do so no later than Thursday at noon so we will have time to compile the results.

Click here to take the brief quiz, Making ‘My’ Way Downtown

What We Want From Faculty

A pop up WordPress site from students at UVA in the wake of the Martese Johnson incident. That’s a terrible word, incident, to describe what happened to this young man. Even in the absence of an appropriate word I felt it was an important site to share for lots of reasons. Through the lens of both community and identity I feel there is much to discuss. What in these words can you relate with?

 In class on 3/19/2015, our class discussion touched on the lack of support students feel from faculty in the aftermath of the brutalization of Martese Johnson and at other times of crisis here at UVA, especially when those crises center around race. We took the last ten minutes of class and wrote out what we wanted to tell our faculty. These comments are excerpted from those 27 students’ in-class responses. Who are we? We are women and men. We are Asian, black, Latino, white and multiracial. We are from a variety of cultural, national, ethnic, socioeconomic, gender and sexual identities and backgrounds.

Thoughts On Identity – Chris

My name is Chris and these are my thoughts.

http://youtu.be/YG57O59IwXw

I made this video using only the iPad and iMovie. It took my a little longer then I’d like to admit to figure out how to split video clips but once I figured it out it was easy. I have used iMovie on my Macbook Pro, so the software is not foreign to me but as seen above creating what I consider great content is a challenge. In hindsight I should have used the case as a stand and recorded from a desk. It was a fun experience regardless.

iPad reflexion – Week 4 – Shady

On the positive side, I’m really enjoying just bringing the iPad to class.  All the content is there, it’s easy to use, it helps me collaborate with my team-mates, I can get up to do a presentation without having to carry anything else other than the iPad.

On the negative side, because i’m not too familiar with it, I feel it slows me down when I’m trying to move fast through Google Drive.  I find it cumbersome to name, sort, and share documents.

The most surprising thing so far is the fact that I have been doing really well without a keyboard.  I was set that I would need one when I first got the iPad, but so far, I have been working really well with the native iPad keyboard.

Chris Takes A Trip On the Cluetrain

21. Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.

  • If you as an organization take yourself too seriously, you suck up all the fun of work. Why do something if you cannot enjoy it and why take out the fun when you can put fun in?

22. Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.

  • This goes hand in hand with 21. Putting up a front is the last thing you want to do. People can see through phony masks of humor.

68. The inflated self-important jargon you sling around —in the press, at your conferences —what’s that got to do with us?

  • If people cannot understand what you are doing as a company, it would be difficult for new people to get into what you are doing as a company.

Work and fun should go hand-in-hand and if you are not having fun at work, make your own fun!