We are re-introducing profiles of University Outreach and Engagement faculty and staff as an opportunity to get to know our colleagues a little better. Say hello to Charles Robinson, special initiatives, University Outreach and Engagement and the College of Liberal Arts.
How long have you worked with University Outreach and Engagement? Since 2014.
What’s the best part of the work you’re doing? Interacting and collaborating with colleagues and communities all across our state—and producing real and valuable results on their behalf.
Created at the OSU Makers Fair: Charles Robinson’s portrait burned on wood.
What work accomplishment are you most proud of? I can look back on many things and feel proud for what I’ve been able to contribute. But the single most important one to me has been the creation and growth of The CO•, the group behind The Corvallis Maker Fair and a number of related events that focus on building community and resources around hands-on learning. The CO• began as a grassroots partnership between a few units on campus, including the College of Liberal Arts, the Division of University Outreach and Engagement, and the Valley Library. It now includes many OSU and community groups and focuses on offering a 2-day series of maker activities on campus each spring and is moving into new areas of research and statewide partnership.
How should success be measured? Good stories!
If you could learn the answer to one question about your future, what would the question be? What’s next?
What smell brings back good memories? Coffee. Always.
What is your favorite season? Autumn.
If you could call up anyone in the world and have a one-hour conversation, who would you call? My grandfathers. I never met either of them, but as I grow nearer them in age, I think I just might be able now to truly understand some of the things they would have to say.
What song always puts you in a good mood?Institutionalized by the punk band, Suicidal Tendencies.
Do you engage in social media? If yes, what’s your favorite social media platform (for work and/or play)? Reluctantly and awkwardly. For work – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (#osuspark #TheCOCorvallis). For play (and proud parent moments) – Facebook.
What are the three best apps on your phone? Dropbox, Evernote and Google Photos.
Have you traveled to any different countries? Not nearly enough! Which ones? Not nearly enough! Mexico, Canada, Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and Denmark.
Where is the most awe inspiring place you have been? An ATM machine on the outskirts of Salem. Yes, I’m being cryptic – sorry, this one’s just for me – but you asked!
Based on excerpts written by Cole Crawford and edited by Ann Marie Murphy
Cole Crawford, University Outreach and Engagement’s first GTA
Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) Cole Crawford broke new ground and accomplished plenty during his academic year tenure with University Outreach and Engagement under the supervision of Charles Robinson, special initiatives, University Outreach and Engagement and the College of Liberal Arts. He is the first GTA to work with University Outreach and Engagement.
“Charles Robinson tailored GTA responsibilities to take advantage of my existing digital skills while also providing me exposure to event management and public relations work,” Crawford revealed. “Because of the position’s flexibility and variable work requirements, I was even able to co-teach a digital humanities course in my home department (English, in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film) during winter term, which complemented my University Outreach and Engagement publicly engaged work.”
Crawford worked on two major projects: the Corvallis Maker Fair and Listen Up! Oregon Object Stories.
Oregon State University 2017 Maker Fair
The Corvallis Maker Fair, produced by “The CO•” and now in its fourth year, is an event dedicated to bringing together makers from across campus, Corvallis, and Oregon to celebrate and share their methods for hands-on learning, while exploring and researching the way people learn in these environments. Activities ranged from virtual reality to robotics to origami. University Outreach and Engagement is one of several co-sponsors of the event.
Crawford served as the website and social media coordinator on “The CO•” leadership team, including collaborating with a team of FLUX design students to refresh “The CO•” logo and promotional materials. Recruiting exhibitors, working with the “SEA Through the Eyes on an Artist” partner event put on by the College of Education, gathering exhibitor and attendee feedback, and helping set up and run the actual event were also his responsibility. The event attracted over 60 exhibitors and an estimated 1,900 attendees over two days. See more photos from the event here.
Victor Villegas demonstrates drone technology at the 2017 Maker Fair at Oregon State University
“Being able to jump into planning such a major event was exciting,” Crawford said. “Especially because I strongly believe in makerspaces, publicly engaged research, and an ethos of tinkering and exploration. I loved seeing attendees ranging from children to grandparents interact with exhibitors, learn about the science that facilitates maker activities, and build and play with micro-projects.”
Crawford worked with Robinson and Liddy Detar, Ph.D., an instructor in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), College of Liberal Arts, on Listen Up! Oregon Object Stories. Listen Up! is an accessible, creative, and intellectually engaged digital space which invites Oregonians to digitally represent personal objects through images, descriptions, or 3D scans; imbue those objects with meaning through story-telling in the form of text, video, or audio; and share their object stories across Oregon, starting with Oregon State University and its Extension network.
Listen Up! users can contribute object stories, respond to public events created by other users, and build collections of content which address specific topics or prompts. The project is inherently interdisciplinary and draws on digital humanities building practices, engaged teaching, and community partnerships to create public scholarship. Listen Up! is flexible, and can scale to accommodate individual contributions, classroom collections, and statewide events.
Originally deployed as a teaching exercise by Detar in her WGSS courses, Listen Up!, she transformed the classroom activity into a hybrid online project to collect a broader range of object stories. Users can contribute stories directly through the website, or work with the Listen Up! team at events.
Crawford created the project’s data model, which assures user privacy and agency; developed several iterations of the Listen Up! website; helped write a Learning Innovation Grant proposal and a successful submission to the 2017 Engagement Scholarship Consortium Conference; planned and ran three in-person object story events at “The CO•,” the Valley Library’s Crafternoon event series, and Moreland Hall; and collected, transcribed, and edited forty multimodal object stories from these events.
Object story contributors have spoken on the metaphorical meaning of a sandlewood watch, the importance of hybridity through an implanted defibrillator, and the power of comfort objects to help overcome developmental disabilities. Crawford will present Listen Up! at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium in June 2017.
“I highly recommend that graduate students take advantage of alternative GTA positions,” Crawford said. “Assistantships focused on research and teaching are the most common ways for students to support themselves during full-time graduate study, but for students like myself who are interested in alt-academic careers or roles outside higher education entirely, positions that incorporate service and administration work can be even more valuable. Finding the right GTA position can help students tailor their graduate education to their interests while honing numerous marketable skills and making a noticeable impact at OSU.”
Crawford is currently searching for a full-time position in digital humanities research support and program coordination, and his experience with the Division of Outreach and Engagement and College of Liberal Arts has prepared him well for the application and interview process.
Read Crawford’s MA thesis titled “Respect the Gap: From Big to Boutique Data through Laboring-Class Poets Online” here: ColeCrawford_RespectTheGap_DefenseCopy
Charles Robinson sports OSU eclipse viewing glasses at the 2017 Maker Fair
“Cole’s thesis fits solidly in the tradition of digital humanities scholarship, but takes bold steps forward in exploring how narrative, history, and meaning are built within the relational networks of data sets (British labor poetry in this case), and how these networks can be better understood via approaches that blend rigorous data-mining with historical and literary nuance,” stated Robinson. “His use of the idea of ‘boutique’ data sets is a helpful way to stake the claim for the value of smaller and incomplete historical/literary data sets vs. the ‘big data’ notion so prevalent in discussion of data analysis/visualization/etc.”
Written by Charles Robinson, University Outreach and Engagement special initiatives, including Extension Reconsidered and Engagement Academy
Art has the ability to connect people, share knowledge and experiences, and serve communities. Teaching art at a land grant university means getting off campus, experiencing the landscape and connecting with Oregonians. And that is especially true for students participating in the Creative Coast as part of ART 406-Community Arts Studio.
In 2014 and 2015, Community Arts Studio students and others headed to the forest. In 2015 and 2016, ART 406 headed to the Oregon coast to take part in the State of the Coast conference and learn about the Marine Studies Initiative.
Creative Coast students from the OSU Art, Music and Theater programs visited Cape Perpetua over two Saturdays in the 2016 Spring term as part of the joint partnership between the College of Liberal Arts and the Division of University Outreach and Engagement. Engagement with Oregon’s people and landscape is a guiding principle of the College of Liberal Arts, and art is a powerful means to realize that educational and social purpose.
On the first Saturday, students learned the cultural history of Cape Perpetua from local historian Joanna Kittel. They also heard the poignant and tragic real-life story of Amanda, as told by Don “Doc” Slyter of Coos Bay, an elder of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indian Tribes. Amanda was a blind first-nations woman who was forced to walk over the rocky terrain of Cape Perpetua on her way to the sub-Alsea reservation at Yachats, where she later died. Mr. Slyter played a moving musical piece on his flute for the students, titled “Amanda.”
OSU Extension Service partners at Cape Perpetua and the U.S. Forest Service Rangers also aided students with their research by taking the students on natural history tours of the Cape Perpetua area. The tours enhanced the students’ understanding of the relationship the forest has to the ocean and allowed them to explore the tide pools.
Art student Auna Godinez responded to the story of Amanda and recreated part of the walk by walking 1.5 miles in bare feet to the Cape Perpetua lookout. Back on campus, she planned to create a painting of Doc Slyter playing his flute combined with a dream-like narrative-image of the story of Amanda.
Likewise, student Hanna Gallagher also responded to Doc’s story about the forced movement of the first nations people. She chose to respond by researching Native American basket weaving and, during her second visit to the coast, wove a basket from stalks of grass.
Video artists Courtney Kaneshiro, Courtney Mullis and Victoria Rivoire worked on a collaborative video project using editing techniques to weave together images of the ocean tide pools with images from the forest. They also created a unique soundscape to accompany the video.
Students in Anna Fidler’s foundation arts class chose to work with sea water to create dye-effects on fabric. Back on campus, they planned to add a crochet element to the artwork.
Reaching beyond the boundaries of the Corvallis campus provides vital inspiration for novel ways to integrate Oregon landscapes into student creative and community projects, and to provide guided access and practice for building the collaborative relationships so crucial to community work.
As Scott Reed, Vice Provost of University Outreach and Engagement points out with an observation by Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” The Creative Coast and courses like Community Arts Studio offer students an opportunity to see with new eyes and share their inspiration with others.
To tinker is to study. To fail is to be human. To make is to empower.
OSU Extension Service is evolving as the world changes. The Division of Outreach and Engagement (O&E) is on the evolutionary frontline, thanks in part to Charles Robinson’s exploration of cross-college collaborations. One such collaboration explores how the “maker” culture can support OSU’s land grant mission. (You can learn more about another of his collaborations by reading the blog posted January 25 titled: Arts Engagement Inspires Innovative Partnerships.)
This year O&E is once again supporting a two-day maker celebration with a focus on education and engagement. Organized by The CO• (more about the organization in a moment), the event will take place Friday, April 8, and Saturday, April 9. Mark your calendars!
Last year, this free community event brought over 1,000 visitors (including more than 150 K-8 students) to OSU’s Corvallis campus and had more than 45 interactive exhibits, including robotics, 3D printing, costume design and laser etching. This year, as in the past, visitors will come for hands-on demonstrations and insightful discussions. Or, if you’re a maker, a tinkerer, an artist, a builder, an engineer, a craftsperson, a machinist, an innovator, etc., etc., you might like to share your craft with visitors and other makers. If so, here’s a link to exhibitor information. Or volunteer! Volunteers are needed on both days of the event.
“Maker” culture is a popular movement honoring craftsmanship and technology and the sharing of knowledge, skills and resources. The maker events offer the OSU community and the general public the opportunity to collaborate, innovate and create. It also provides a forum for research and teaching the value of hands-on learning in K-20 classrooms.
A new addition to the annual event is the Friday “STEM to STEAM” symposium featuring Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici and five other noteworthy panelists. The free event will be held in the Learning Innovation Center, Room 100, from 4 to 6 p.m. It’s an opportunity to bring together the makers of policies and the makers of objects to examine the challenges and rewards of integrating the Arts – the “A” – into STEM education. More about the panelists can be found at The CO•’s website.
On Saturday, kids and adults alike will enjoy the maker fair with more than 40 exhibitors offering hands-on learning experiences, including an interactive session on making skateboards. The maker fair will be held in the MU ballroom and Student Experience Center plaza.
The CO• is an OSU campus-Corvallis community collaboration that brings together makers from across campus, Corvallis, and the whole state of Oregon to celebrate and share their methods for hands-on learning. From the creative problem-solving skills so crucial to education in the 21st century to the benefits of quick prototyping tools needed to drive an innovative economy, every discipline and every individual has something to learn and something to teach.
“The CO• is also is a concept,” said Charles Robinson, a director of The CO• who also works on special initiatives for O&E, College of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School. “The CO• is the start of a larger conversation around the educational, socioeconomic and cultural benefits of hands-on learning. It’s a gateway for anyone in the Willamette Valley who is interested in learning more about the power of making.”
Do you have a maker talent? Share it with us! (In case you’re shy about sharing, I make mosaic art and stupendous banana bread!)
Because it is humbling and astounding at the same time, I wanted to share The CO•’s Manifesto with you. It will give you a better sense of what’s to come at the April event – and beyond.
The CO• Manifesto
At The CO• we believe that hands-on, creative exploration helps encourage risk taking, cement learning, boost self-confidence, connect individuals and communities, and serve as a guide for understanding our individual and collective place in the world. As a space and a concept, The CO• makes the room necessary for the uncertainty and experimentation of the learning process. This process has many labels such as making, tinkering, exploring, creating, hacking, building, and prototyping. It occurs across various mediums—digital, technological, industrial, domestic, analog, and artistic. However, neither the label nor the tool is the most critical piece of this innovation equation. Rather, it is the time allotted for discovery, the self-directed time spent thinking critically and honing hands-on problem-solving skills, which cultivates innovation. Trying, failing, and trying again is a fundamental component of learning. At The CO• we advocate for an equitable distribution of time devoted to making, tinkering, creating, building, hacking, sharing, questioning, and connecting. We champion the liminal space where such exploration resides and the critical discourse that follows. We must ensure that all engaged in this creative process work through prejudice. Experimentation must be open to all regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, abilities, age, geography, education level, and discipline.
How long have you worked with University Outreach and Engagement? Since 2014.
