Music Journalist
This was a promotion with the team to the executive suite where I worked specifically on grant writing and feature creation.
Spent a lot of time re-searching and writing a grant proposal for the Microsoft Innovation Grant and managing two summer programs with CUNY students.
Our work builds off the prototypes these platforms have currently deployed and optimizes for the user experience of the neurodiverse learner. We are using the 1619 project as the course curriculum and the Pulitzer generated engagement opportunities as the active learning segments for the curriculum and creating a user experience for neurodiverse students combining the material on our learning platform. It will demonstrate how to take a curriculum and break it down on the concept level, and provide multimedia data inputs for conceptual learning to help students understand the impact and significance of the work. We are incorporating this learning into data journalism projects that students will build adding skills to their portfolio and helping the student qualify for employment opportunities.
Online learning platforms have only designed a knowledge base for math going up to introductory calculus concepts, chemistry, and business. This leaves all of the other domains relatively untouched. In person after school centers in America have created diagnostic assessment tests that help place students into the learning journey and provide active engagement opportunities for students by requiring that students complete physical packets everyday for a specified period of time. The personalization process and ongoing diagnostic component comes into place when students go into the center and work through one of their assignments with an instructor. The instructor can view in real time what portions of the material the students understands and does not understand and can make recommendations about if the student should move forward in the curriculum or if the students needs to repeat a lesson to gain concept mastery.
We are building a data warehouse full of text, images and video specific to the 1619 project including all of the writing from the project - https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf and the Pulitzer generated exercises for student engagement - https://pulitzercenter.org/builder/lesson/activities-extend-student-engagement-26505 . We are matching the learning to the exercises in a web based platform with multimedia content. We intend to use these two resources to create a concept map of all of the concepts described in the project and sequence the material into an American History learning pedagogy that can be used to help students actively engage with historical events. We will test and record students’ conceptual understanding through data journalism projects that build off of new skills practiced during the concept understanding process. We plan to use Azure knowledge mining to help us parse through all of our data sources and enable filtering at the concept level. This demo-https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/videos/knowledge-mining-ai-driven-content-understanding-with-cognitive-search-on-azure/ inspired this project.
We have a curriculum with content for user experience design and a data science. Both programs aim to expose students to design and data science at a high enough level where they have a portfolio and enough information to continue building. Our students lack exposure to either of these fields and our platform aims to create a personalized learning journey that presents the curriculum in bite sized pieces and challenges the students’ understanding after every milestone. We are not creating new content per-se we have taken resources that are currently available for free on the web, but we have put a lot of work into creating concept maps and feedback loops that help us understand concepts the student has mastered and concepts that still need more work.
After a student has explored a curriculum chunk they are asked to respond to questions about the chunk to test their understanding. The text input from the student is compared to a master index of responses that indicate the students level of understanding of the material. We use azure cognitive services to parse the text input and create an understanding index for that user. With the understanding index we are able to select the next resource to send to the user and re-test their understanding. This leads to each student having a personalized learning experience and enables students to move through the resources at their own pace.
I worked withh the COO to design the project.
I assumed that it would be much simpler to gain buy in from other members of the team and that they would understand the direction I was trying to go with the technology. It was much more difficult than I expected to gain buy in from other member of the team because they didn’t seem to udnerstand the technology.
This was a grant proposal and if implemented we would use Azure Machine Learning Cloud Solution Tools.
Getting buy in was difficult and getting time with other sectors of the company to explain the usefullness of the project was a big challenge.
We did not receive this grant but we were awarded two other grants.
Grant writing is a trial and error sort of deal. I think that taking a course on scientific writing could be useful in understanding grant writing. You need to focus on writing for non-technical readers and that can be challenging.
Core Sales Team with Bloc.
We had a few paying customers and the job of the product engineer was to speak with the customer and identify bugs in the working product to fix them right away.
Fixinf engineering and fixing bugs in the code. A bit of design. I did redesign the home page.
Lead software engineer and another product engineer.
I figured customers would make more time to test a product they were paying for. It seems like if you are not building a product that solves an immediate need and the funds have already been allocated to the service, the end user might just forget about the product and continue using the solution they came up with beforehand.
What technology or tools did I use?
material design
Communication and technical debt were really big challenges with this team.
What was the outcome of the project? I moved into a director role.
What external courses or educational resources did I use to skill up? Exploring what stakeholders are and why they are important was a huge takeaway from this team.