My residence on the SIUE Edwardsville Campus for the past couple of days brought to mind how a place can greatly influence your daily routine. A recurring question I have is: “Why does life here feel so distant, in terms of its physical distance, from what students actually need?” For someone who has recently moved to this area, primarily for an International Student and is not from the area, it may seem as if everything that is relevant or vital to them, is located just beyond the campus borders.
To provide some context, Edwardsville is a small college town, primarily set up for the automobile and suburban environment. Edwardsville’s main campus is very walkable; however, the majority of the necessities in students’ daily lives (groceries, dining establishments, social areas) are situated away from the campus. Without personal vehicle access, students rely on limited forms of transportation, which may create the perception of living within a confined and repetitive lifestyle. If you were to compare the college town environment to the culture in my home country of Cyprus, where individuals do their daily activities within busy, compact spaces, it may create a sense of isolation.
Understanding the role that space and environment play in creating connection, independence, and well-being is an important consideration when thinking about how to help international college students adjust to life away from home. To better understand the college community and town of Edwardsville and how to continue to improve the experience for international students, it is important to understand how a design can create a better overall experience for all students in a college town environment.
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This is my second year here at SIUE, & I am a business major. I am from the southside of Chicago. I am a nail technician and a beginner tattoo artist. I have been doing nails since I was 14 years old. I love to draw; I love art in every form. I also love music; I listen to music every single day; it is practically the only way I can make it through the day.
We’re doing a lot of place-based work this semester. Reflect a little about where you live. (This can be on campus, in the local area, or wherever you’re from.) What questions does it spark? Think about the times you’ve thought “I wonder where that comes from,” “I wish this could be different,” or even “Damn it, why does that happen?” Writing for someone who’s never been to that place, your blog post should lay out 1) the question, 2) the context, and 3) why your audience should care about it. Add the tag “Place” before you publish. (150-200 words) [Reflect, 20 pts]
One of the most effective ways to read and engage with a text is to annotate it as you go. This is particularly true of dense texts! (I’ve tried to avoid those in the syllabus, but sometimes you’ll come across things that are unfamiliar or complex.) Annotations can be anything that stands out to you — underlining a phrase that makes a key point, definitions of unfamiliar words, questions or comments in the margins, or whatever signs and symbols help you make connections throughout the text.
You might have your own strategy for annotating your readings, and throughout the semester, I encourage you to use whatever tools and methods are most effective for you. Today, however, we’re going to try out Zotero. Zotero is a free and open-source tool for reference management, note-taking, and annotation, which you can use on your own or collaboratively. (If you don’t already have a system for taking notes while you read, I recommend trying Zotero out for a few weeks!)
- Create a Zotero account. Visit www.zotero.org and click “Log In,” then “Register for a free account” to create your username.
- Join the class group. Go to https://www.zotero.org/groups/6392594/hum230sp26 and click the red “Join” button.
- Annotate the syllabus. Find the class syllabus in our library. You’ve already read through it once, but go ahead and skim through it again. Is there anything that catches your eye? Leave an annotation on the document. Maybe it’s a tool or topic you’re interested in, or a question you have about a class policy, or even a typo you notice.
- Add some metadata. As a group at your table, choose an item in the class library that doesn’t have complete metadata (that is, the information you’d use to cite it). Gather and enter as complete information as you can. You might need to correct what’s there as well!
Looking through the syllabus and topics, I saw a few things that seemed interesting throughout. I think Unit 2, with Thinking (with) Machines seems interesting for a few reasons, especially because of the AI sections. I have a lot of mixed feelings about different types of AI, but that makes me more interested to learn and have more information on things like this. I’m hoping to come out of this class more informed on AI and everything surrounding it, especially in the sense of the digital humanities. I think Digitization Technologies is also an interesting topic that I haven’t thought enough about before this class. Historical archiving and stuff like that are interesting and I look forward to learning more about it and digitization and accessibility. I think accessibility in the Audience and Accessibility topic seems interesting as well. Going into computer science, things like this will likely be important in the field for me, like universal design and many aspects of audience and accessibility.
I am most interested in the section where we are going to talk about AI imaginaries and how it writes fiction. I find it interesting how it writes a varying amount of stories from different perspectives. Sometimes the stories are lighthearted and sometimes they can have deeper or darker meanings. As far as topics I would like to pursue farther, I would enjoy looking into why AI has a tendency to lie or provide false information. Is it because the learning models are not provided with proper information, or rather that they are programed to provide false or vague intel. Like different models such as ChatGPT or Grok AI provide very different answers to moral questions. So much so that there have been many jokes that have arisen because of the moral standpoints from these models. This has lead many people to ask questions regarding the safety of these programs and what we can do to prevent any issues from arising.
Hello everyone. My name is Matthew Evans and I look forward to working with you all. I am studying here at SIUE to pursue a major in business and specializing in supply chain management. I find that technology is an amazing addition to our future. Making work, school, and many other things much easier to manage in our every day lives.
At the end of the day it is up to us to determine how to use these advancements. It is in my best hope that we can use what we have to determine the pros and cons to what these tools will bring.
When looking over the syllabus for what we are going through this semester, I found some things of interest. Firstly, the history of computing. This subject seems interesting, and I wonder how deep we will go into a subject like this. Are we going into coding, or are we starting with the earliest computer developed by man? Secondly, AI imaginaries. I have gone through school knowing how AI is bad and shouldn’t be used, so I’m curious to see what we do in this section. Third, The Dredd Scott decision. I wonder how this period in history combines with Digital Humanities. This is a history subject, and that is what I find odd. Finally. Digital Storytelling. I am curious about what this means. Is this on how writers use technology to write stories, or is it on how game designers make up a story in a game to explain to the player? These are some of the things that stuck out to me on the syllabus that I found interesting in this class.
Hello, my name is Preston Beltran. I am majoring in computer science here at SIUE. Besides that, I enjoy playing video games and collecting vinyl records. Record collecting has become a hobby of mine last summer since I got a turntable setup and bought my first record. Ever since, I have bought maybe a little too many, but there are too many great albums to just say no to. Otherwise, I love gaming with my friends on my PS5. My family also likes to travel and my favorite place we traveled to was Puerto Rico. It was a great experience and had great views and food.
I’m really looking forward to the week 6 and week 14 reading involving St. Louis history and COVID-19. I moved to the St. Louis area about a year ago and I’ve had a lot of fun learning more about local history such as the World’s Fair, Forest Park, and Cahokia Mounds. There’s so much history all over the city and I’m always excited to learn more about where I live now.
COVID-19 was a worldwide event and hearing about other people’s perspectives from different regions is always interesting. It affected everyone in unique ways from having to change our work culture, school culture and just everyday life. Some people had doomsday preparations with bunkers, others had financial backup plans to work from home and some were already self-sustainable with homegrown food and filtered water. It’ll be really interesting to explore how our personal culture might’ve been involved in these decisions through this class.