Kate Schwarting- Personal Introduction

Introduction

Hello, My name is Kate. I am originally from Saint James, NY. I am a graduate student in the theater department completing a masters in interdisciplinary arts. I did my undergraduate work at Stony Brook as well and majored in Geoscience, Studio Art and a minor in art history. Here is a link to some of my undergrad work from way back just to give you an idea how all these fields came together for me:

http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ureca/feature/June2010.html

I currently work at the Craft Center on campus helping develop leisure activities for the students. I also help at the Paul Zuccaire Gallery and The Simons Center Gallery. I am the current artist in residence at CEWIT and am working on developing an installation that I hope to premiere this spring. I am interested in both science and art, but mostly on how these two fields can intersect. I think that the fundamental principles of art can be used to engage people in discussions about science including those that are complex and often deter some individuals from the subject. I think technology can play an intriguing role at this intersection. I am currently teaching an Intro to Visual Interpretation class. I am taking this course for several reasons. The first is to be able to disect the capabilities of these technologies and have that knowledge to apply to my work in the future. I also taking this to get more insight into the interaction between technologies and the classroom experience.  I am already seeing a multitude of ways I would love integrate some of these into the course I am teaching to better engage the students. I am also interested in the creation of identity through the use of social networks. I am pretty comfortable with technology though I am usually the one who has things go wrong with it, however I like finding solutions to these problems. I try to use it with purpose and have a reason for using it. I have played with some coding and hope that I can be proficient at using it with in my work in the near future. Outside of my work and studies, I like spending time with my pets including cats, ducks and a chinchilla and working with local animal rescue groups.

I am active on Facebook, 2 Instagram accounts, and Pinterest. I have a Twitter account but have not tweeted.

Technology is really apart of every aspect of my life considering I use glasses to to see properly and I would consider them a technology.

Thoughts on the readings

I found the reading very engaging especially because I can relate it to the class I am currently teaching. It is based on the students being able to interpret visuals and understand how to go about this. To be able to do this, it is essential that they be able to communicate what they see and to me harnessing the possiblities in social networks and disruptive technologies would make a class that needs discussions thrive.

In regards to Disruption + Innovation, I think the future is going to involve a collaborative environment between MOOC based learning and in class learning environments. I think this this hybrid can create an interesting learning experience for students and I find the discussion of the future of higher education to be very interesting.

Also, a few thoughts on the podcast we listened to in class. I felt it brought up the interesting topic of anonymity in social media. Anonymity gives the individual the ability to to say anything with out reprocussion. This has both negative and positive results. It can highlight areas of our society that still needs work or better understanding that are hard to face either either by the community or the individual posting it. Though many negative comments can hold a lot of weight socially, it is the individual that puts his/her name to post that takes ownership of the comment and can become a “community leader”.