Gregory Fulkerson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Sociology
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Dr. Fulkerson is, likewise, playing multiple roles in this project, exploring ways to improve both the teaching and research experiences of social media and big data in general, while bringing these new research opportunities to the social sciences. As a teacher, he is exploring ways to integrate big data and social media in his research methods, environmental sociology, and rural sociology courses. This involves assignments that engage undergraduates in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of social media and big data. As a researcher, Dr. Fulkerson is studying social media containing moral claims about the safety and risk of hydraulic fracturing. In addition, he is evaluating different software for data collection and analysis, and sharing results through professional presentations and future publications with scholarly communities, including the ASA and the CIT.
Diana Moseman
Instructional Designer/Programmer TLTC
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Ms. Moseman is developing software to support this project. Currently she has written a Twitter data capture program that accesses the Twitter pubic API. This software is being used to create large datasets of Tweets an various search terms of interest to the research team. Her expertise in programming, data manipulation, and the use of technology in undergraduate instruction enables her to develop powerful useful applications for this project.
James Greenberg (Retired Faculty)
Director, Teaching, Learning and Technology Center (TLTC)
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Mr. Greenberg is critical to the success of this project as the technology support person and Campus Champion. He has considerable technical experience with creating and analyzing data using computer technology. His 33 years of experience supporting technology in the teaching and learning environment makes him an idea support person. In addition, he is familiar with the emerging technologies being proposed and is clearly capable of assisting the faculty researchers in using these technologies.
Dr. Harry Pence, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Dr Pence is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Chemistry Emeritus and has been teaching in higher education for more than 46 years. Dr. Pence has published and presented widely on various emerging technologies and their impact on education. Among some of his many contributions to SUNY, Dr. Pence is a founder and past chair of the SUNY Faculty Access to Computing Technologies committee, co-founder of the SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies, and long-time member of the SUNY Student Computing Access Program. His role in this project is to advise the team on emerging technologies in the big data environment.
Brett Heindl, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Political Science
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Dr. Heindl is focusing on the synergy that results from synthesizing scholarly research with related coursework. The positive results of this can draw students into the process of formulating research projects, gathering data appropriate to the research question, and analyzing the data and reflecting on possible methodological improvements, while simultaneously generating results that have scholarly value. Here, Dr. Heindl's research into the moral and ethical content of public policy debates over social media meshes well with his course offerings on immigration, US foreign policy, and religious politics. Dr. Heindl is planning on presenting findings on students' critical consumption of social media and its implications for deliberative democracy.
Tim Ploss
Instructional Designer
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Mr. Ploss is the instructional designer who first saw the potential of Open SUNY as the vehicle for cooperation between our Big Data researchers and the CCR's supercomputing environment. Since facilitating that partnership, Mr. Ploss has been integral in evaluating tools and making the Hub environment accessible and useful to our undergraduate students. He plays the vital roles of the visionary and sounding board for this project.
Achim Koeddermann, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Env. Sciences
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Associate Professor Achim Koeddermann holds a PhD from Mainz University in Philosophy, with Law and Comparaticstic, dissertation in interpretation theory. His background in philosophy, with an emphasis on the philosophy and ethics of science, technology, and engineering, is combined with a past career as corporate planner for ZDF, German largest TV Network (developed information system, worked with GFK data analysis, viewer shares). At Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz, he co-founded the interdisciplinary center for Environment as Administrator for Science and Technology policy. Lately, after chairing Philosophy, his task as acting director of Environmental Sciences was to bring Social Sciences, Natural Sciences and the Humanities together. His scholarly publications have been as much interdisciplinary as disciplinary, especially insofar as he worked to bring philosophy of technology into the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies (past NEH grant at Penn State). Recent work in developing a track for the study of applied philosophy (focus on interdisciplinary work, media ethics, environmental ethics, bio- and medical ethics) has influenced a focus on science, policy and applied philosophy. As a Fellow he is currently working with Social Scientists at the Utica Institute for Small Cities and Rural Studies on the establishment of a civil society in Upstate New York and in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) via social networks. Goal is to identify, document and establish a theoretical foundation for the understanding of the factors that contribute to social, cultural and economic change.
William Wilkerson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Dr. Wilkerson is serving as assessment coordinator for this project. He serves as chair of Oneonta's Academic Program Assessment Committee (since 2009) and was recently co-chair of SUNY Oneonta's Middle States Work group on assessment of student learning and institutional effectiveness. In 2008, he served as moderator for the Program Assessment Track of the American Political Science Association's Teaching and Learning Conference. As a teacher, Wilkerson is exploring ways to engage undergraduates in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of social media and big data. He also serves as Associate Editor for Teaching Innovation of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.
Brian M. Lowe, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Sociology
SUNY Oneonta
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Project Role
- Dr. Lowe will serve four roles in the project. Firstly, he will serve as the Project Director for the SUNY Oneonta team members, which also entails coordinating efforts at Oneonta with the UB partners. Secondly, Lowe will be directly addressing in his courses (Senior Seminar and Social Movements) the examination of claims and strategies utilized by individual actors, organizations and governmental bodies in specific controversies that will be examined by students through Big Data analysis. Thirdly, Lowe will participate in the evaluation of both software and the evaluation of the IT environment housed at UB for undergraduate instruction at SUNY Oneonta, and will serve as a primary contact person for that purpose. Finally, Lowe will participate in disseminating some of the project findings at joint presentations at the Conference on Information Technology (CIT) and the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Dr. Lowe has recently published in the fields of the sociology of morality (in H itlin and Vaisey, eds, 2010) and the "moral vocabularies" approach will be integral to the textual analyses of the different substantive case studies utilized in this project. Lowe's work on representation (in Smith and Mitchell, eds. 2012; in Hediger, ed. , 2013) will also be used in analyzing these substantive issues.