I want to thank ALL of my wonderful students from THE FUTURE (Humanities 409 and Humanities 409 Honors) at San Diego State University for their energy, enthusiasm, and intellectual curiosity! You are always the inspiration and the guiding force for the design of my courses.
A very special thanks to Ethan Garcia and Polly Card for creating and producing this video to feature my classes. Always a big thanks to the crew at ITS! Especially James Frazee, Sean Hauze, Ku Moua, Boun Moua, Antonio DeNinno, Aurora Jones, Leo Lopez, Wang Yang, and Carol Tohsaku!!!
Thanks to Sean Hauze, Polly Card, and James Frazee for organizing such an amazing event! The CSU Immersive Learning Summit hosted attendees from 23 California State University campuses as well as industry leaders. Special thanks to Ethan Garcia and his crew for creating this awesome video about what we are doing at SDSU. A special shout-out to my students David San Juan and Dwayne Wilkes who are featured in this piece.
Two days ago, I was privileged to share how I am incorporating VR and AR into my Humanities 409 class with San Diego State’s Center for Teaching and Learning. This journey began last year with Dalton Salvo’s invitation to experiment with Virtual Reality, and has evolved into a Humanities class that now has “lab time” built in.
We use VR and AR to physically to explore theory and to practice responsive critique to examinations of middleware. Below is a snapshot from one of the course syllabi.
These explorations allow for social constructions to be interrogated in innovative and improvisational ways. By incorporating dedicated time in class to experimentation, and students reflecting on those experiences, I hope to collect data that will help create a new structure to specific Humanities classes-a format that supports Digital Humanities experiential learning and students’ ability to express their ideas.
Yesterday was my first prep day experimenting with the capabilities of AH1120 that will be basecamp for Humanities 409 [Honors]. The course, entitled “The Future”, engages with speculative, pop-ontological, and techno-anxiety inducing sci-fi to explore the broad spectrum of realities presented in visual as well as written narratives, and to critique the social constructions of bodies and spaces in futuristic narratives. Last year we had the privilege of being introduced to VR thanks to Dalton Salvo (Ph.D. candidate, U.C. Irvine), who was creating his M.A. thesis in Virtual Reality and generously shared the experience with my Humanities class and many others. The experience of VR connected the course’s theory work in the exploration of reality from Jean Baudrillard, Lewis Carroll, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein (to name a few). It gave the students a physical space to engage with theory, ultimately providing an active learning experience. To view my student’s Jessica’s Vlog reflection, please click here.
Thanks to the hard work and innovative ideas of Rudy Arias, Sean Hauze, and Polly Card from ITS, VR has become a present actuality in the classroom and beyond at SDSU. Not only do we have access to VIVE, but Rifts, Hololens, and 360 Cameras. AH1120 now operates as an interactive learning space AND a lab. With this capability, our class can continue engage in discussion with digital visualizations operated through 5 screens, iPads, and airplay but also pivot gears and dive into physical explorations of social constructions, testing boundaries and borders of contrived realities.
Feminism to me, as a girl, is just as hard for me to understand, as it is for the guys. The feminist label is a double-edged sword. If I call myself a feminist, I’m seen as an extremist who is always angry at the world, whereas if I don’t call myself a feminist, then people question, “what, you don’t believe in equality?” or “you don’t believe in women’s rights?” Based on the actual definition of feminism, I think that I am a feminist because I support women and their rights/fight for equality. Without the feminists before my time, I probably wouldn’t be here today, in college, getting an education, and bettering myself for an actual career in the world. Equality is something that I don’t think will be achieved in our lifetime, but I think it is something to continuously strive for. Inequality is taught and ingrained in our brains practically since birth, for we have always…
I’m so very excited about our upcoming showcase of digital pedagogy projects that have been implemented this year-and even more honored to have a few of my students showcase their work and present with me!
The Digital Tools Workshop at SDSU that I led yesterday spurred some great ideas from the attendees! Love meetings when the creativity is flowing! Thanks to Jessica Pressman for inviting me to present-looking forward to my next tools workshop in the new year. Notes are linked here to out Center for Teaching and Learning Blog.
