Media and communications major Ashton Greenwood has spent much of her senior year gaining experience in the field as a sports production intern for WBAL-TV, and with the New Media Lab, which produces campus television programming. She also holds down a part-time off-campus job, is a member of Bartleby, UMBC’s literary magazine, and hosts an NFL podcast for WMBC, UMBC’s student radio station.
UMBC Students Offer a Glimpse into What it Means to be a Retriever in 2016.
We all remember certain highlights of our college days no matter how many years — or decades — we’ve put between ourselves and Commencement day. But what about the moments in between those highlights we hold so dear? Thanks to smartphone cameras and social media, current students are capturing it all — unfiltered — every single day for the world to see.
UMBC Magazine asked several current students to share moments from their everyday lives with us. No matter when you were a student, we think you’ll find something to relate to in the images that make up current Retriever life.
– Jenny O’Grady
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The winter holiday season can offer important in-person opportunities to strengthen relationships and deepen communication with family and friends, says Stacy Branham, lecturer in information systems at UMBC. Branham’s new article in The Conversation describes how the ubiquitous technologies that impact nearly every aspect of contemporary life for many in the United States have in some ways made it more challenging to build and maintain relationships. “Americans are more digitally connected, yet less interpersonally connected, than ever,” she writes.
“We need more empathetic communication—the slow, deep (inter)personal discourse that can nurture identity and build and strengthen relationships,” argues Branham, a computer scientist focused on human-computer interaction. Engaging in deep conversations with others can help people gain empathy, learn about other cultures, and experiencing what others have gone through, she says, explaining, “Empathy is not only the key to feeling connected—’I understand you’—but also the foundation for changing our narratives about one another—‘now I see we are not so different’.”
Unfortunately, Branham suggests, “contemporary communication platforms can make it harder to build empathy with conversational partners.” How does this work? “Our written interactions through technology are increasingly short, with less sophisticated language,” she says. “More and more, our thoughts are broadcast to everyone instead of intended for someone special.”
Branham also explores how social media can be a place for people to be validated or to impress others, rather than to connect deeply with others. “In many ways, our devices help us talk at instead of with one another,” she explains.
To counteract this, she suggests people find opportunities to connect directly with just one or a few other people at a time, whether online or in person.“When your communication is focused on or intended for another person, it can catalyze empathic connection because you have to imagine and capture the other person in your text,” Branham says.
Taking time to write down thoughts before or after face-to-face conversations is another way to have more empathetic interactions with others, she says, explaining, “Personal writing is a form of self-reflection and narrative crafting. Simply writing your thoughts out can change them.”
Read the full article “You should talk about politics this Thanksgiving – here’s why, and how,” in The Conversation. The article also appeared in Raw Story.
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Experts from National Geographic, NPR, and other national leaders in the arts, humanities, and sciences connected by webcam last week to discuss a series of ten powerful images for “How Science is Pictured in the Media and Public Culture.” UMBC and Reading the Pictures jointly produced the panel as part of the year-long Seeing Science project, which explores the role photography plays in shaping, representing, and furthering the sciences.
To prepare, explains Marvin Heiferman, Seeing Science curator at UMBC, “Meg Handler, editor-at-large at Reading the Pictures, and I spent a couple of months looking at the year’s worth of photographs that appeared in magazine articles and online pieces about the sciences to…see the various ways, from stock photography to photojournalism, that the sciences were represented.”
The discussion on December 1 took place on Google HangOut, accommodating live audio and video with viewer participation via live chat. Drawn from the ranks of curators, photo editors, visual scholars, and scientists, the panel included Rebecca Adelman, associate professor of media and communication studies, UMBC; Michael Shaw, publisher, Reading the Pictures; Max Mutchler, manager, Space Telescope Science Institute Hubble Heritage Project; Marvin Heiferman; Kurt Mutchler, senior editor for science photography, National Geographic; Corey Keller, curator, SFMOMA; and Ben de la Cruz, multimedia editor, NPR Science Desk, with moderator Nathan Stormer, professor of rhetoric, University of Maine.
Rebecca Adelman participates in Seeing Science online salon.
The series of ten images they discussed represented a broad range of science disciplines, were visually distinct from one another, and varied in their goals and purposes. Together, Stormer argued, they demonstrated how “science becomes visible to us when science is helping us see things —that is when it becomes apparent to us that we depend on it, live within it as much as we do.”
The conversation began with a colorful and formally engaging photograph of a massive general-purpose detector within the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Switzerland. Subsequent photographs included a new view of the Pillars of Creation from the Hubble Space Telescope; a human embryo being modified; four women from NASA’s most recent astronaut class; the early 20th century Chart of Physical Traits alongside photographs of faces overlayed with facial recognition software mapping grid points; an overhead view of a toxic algae bloom in Florida; a 4-month-old baby with microcephaly, published during the Zika outbreak; President Obama with a boy and his marshmallow cannon at the White House Science Fair; and two visitors wearing virtual reality gear at The Void in Times Square.
The depth and spectrum of the panelists’ expertise created a fascinating discussion that began with initial emotional and intellectual responses to the images and quickly delved into, as Adelman described, “how the photograph acts as a visual metaphor for how science gets communicated to audiences of non-scientists.”
Marvin Heiferman participates in Seeing Science online salon.
“What was interesting and revealing to me was to listen to the various ways people with different relationships to science and imaging looked at and responded to the images discussed,” says Heiferman. “Since Seeing Science is an interdisciplinary look at how images function, that variety of responses is what gives a discussion like the one we had its depth and richness.”
Melissa Cormier ’17 M.F.A., intermedia and digital arts, tuned in to the event from the on-campus viewing party hosted by UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC.) “My current thesis work deals with co-opting traditionally scientific aesthetics and methods of display and observation, so it was an opportunity to witness how those types of images are spoken about and discussed by the various panel members,” says Cormier.
Reflecting on the live chat function of the Google HangOut, Cormier shares, “It was a great experience to be able to interact with such a distinguished panel and feel included in the conversation. It also gave me some new research avenues to pursue in my work, as well as affect the language I will use to discuss my work.”
Reading the Pictures’ salon archive now features in slideshow format the ten photographs that formed that backbone of the event. A video of the discussion is available on YouTube.
Through #SeeingScience, readers can also explore fifty additional media images that Reading the Pictures featured on Twitter and Instagram in the weeks leading up to the event.
Header image: New view of the Pillars of Creation, visible light, detail, 2014; courtesy of NASA/ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/J. Hester, P. Scowen (Arizona State U)
]]>A popular request from faculty is a tool to track student attendance. Many instructors who teach large classes use clickers to assign points for student engagement as a proxy for attendance. However, this method isn’t always conducive for smaller classes.
A new feature to UMBC’s Blackboard site, Qwickly Attendance enables faculty to take attendance that is automatically graded in the Bb Grade Center. Faculty can take attendance using a list on screen or allow students to check in on their own browser, validated by a PIN, during a countdown period set by the instructor.
Perhaps the most appealing feature of Qwickly Attendance is the grade center integration. If set up by the instructor in the Blackboard course shell, Qwickly Attendance will automatically create one grade center column and keep a running grade for each class for the whole semester or per session.
Earlier in the FA2016 semester, 30 courses piloted Qwickly Attendance. In a survey taken after the pilot, faculty who used the tool said it allowed them to focus more on teaching than attendance. Faculty also said the tool encouraged students to be more accountable for their own attendance since they can check their attendance record if the link is added to the course menu. The tool can also send a customizable email to students when they are marked as absent for the day.
Qwickly Attendance is a new tool at UMBC. Instructional Technology provides training during the Skill Builder Boot Camp as well as the Skill Builder Course Management workshop.
For more information about Qwickly Attendance:
Review the Qwickly Attendance FAQs or visit our extensive FAQ collection
Request a consult with a member of the instructional technology team
The winter holiday season can offer important in-person opportunities to strengthen relationships and deepen communication with family and friends, says Stacy Branham, lecturer in information systems at UMBC. Branham’s new article in The Conversation describes how the ubiquitous technologies that impact nearly every aspect of contemporary life for many in the United States have in some ways made it more challenging to build and maintain relationships. “Americans are more digitally connected, yet less interpersonally connected, than ever,” she writes.
“We need more empathetic communication—the slow, deep (inter)personal discourse that can nurture identity and build and strengthen relationships,” argues Branham, a computer scientist focused on human-computer interaction. Engaging in deep conversations with others can help people gain empathy, learn about other cultures, and experiencing what others have gone through, she says, explaining, “Empathy is not only the key to feeling connected—’I understand you’—but also the foundation for changing our narratives about one another—‘now I see we are not so different’.”
Unfortunately, Branham suggests, “contemporary communication platforms can make it harder to build empathy with conversational partners.” How does this work? “Our written interactions through technology are increasingly short, with less sophisticated language,” she says. “More and more, our thoughts are broadcast to everyone instead of intended for someone special.”
Branham also explores how social media can be a place for people to be validated or to impress others, rather than to connect deeply with others. “In many ways, our devices help us talk at instead of with one another,” she explains.
To counteract this, she suggests people find opportunities to connect directly with just one or a few other people at a time, whether online or in person.“ When your communication is focused on or intended for another person, it can catalyze empathic connection because you have to imagine and capture the other person in your text,” Branham says.
Taking time to write down thoughts before or after face-to-face conversations is another way to have more empathetic interactions with others, she says, “Personal writing is a form of self-reflection and narrative crafting. Simply writing your thoughts out can change them,” Branham explains.
Read the full article “You should talk about politics this Thanksgiving – here’s why, and how,” in The Conversation.
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