Dynamic Subspace

Category: Pedagogy

  • How to Modify 3/8″ Threaded Bolt-On Caster Wheels to Fit Unthreaded 7/16″ Mount Points on Home Hospital Bed

    home hospital bed with messy sheets

    If you have a home hospital bed that needs to be relocated easily but can’t find unthreaded caster wheels, this guide might be helpful to you.

    The problem that I recently encountered was a very heavy home hospital bed that needed to be moved around easily without being dragged around on a new floor. The particular bed that I was dealing with was manufactured by Thill, Inc in the USA. It is at least 30 years old and exceedingly heavy.

    thill manufacturer label on steel frame of bed

    It sits on four feet capped with glued-in plastic inserts with 7/16″ holes. Judging by late model home hospital beds, there are caster wheels that lock into these holes. Unfortunately, I couldn’t source four of them within the tight time frame that I was needing to make this bed mobile.

    ruler showing mount point is 7/16"

    I knew that I could get threaded bolt-on casters with non-marking rubber wheels from Rural King in Waycross, Georgia. However, those caster wheels’ bolts were 3/8″ threaded. I needed a way to make those bolts larger and secure on the bed. I thought of how to build a sleeve that would increase the bolt’s diameter but not be easily compressed with use. I had just finished drinking a canned Starbucks Espresso when I imagined how I could use its aluminum can to build a sleeve.

    unopened starbucks espresso and cream drink

    My plan was to cut some of these aluminum cans into sheets that I could wrap around the 3/8″ bolt to increase its size to 7/16″ when it was pushed into the mount point on each foot of the bed. Any aluminum can would work, but I had a the Starbucks cans on-hand, so that’s what I used.

    drawing of sheet of aluminum being wrapped around caster mounting bolt

    Using a razor, I cut the top and bottom of each can off. Then, I carefully cut down the height of the can to create a sheet of aluminum. Then, I used tin snips to cut the sheets of the needed length and width to match the bolts on the caster wheels.

    cut up aluminum cans with tin snips and ruler on 12" board

    This is approximately what each sheet looked like, but I used ones with cleaner edges for the final assembly.

    sheet of aluminum can

    I tightly rolled the aluminum sheet around the bolt. Holding it in place with my fingers, I pushed the bolt into the mounting point. If it slid in too easily, I used a longer sheet of aluminum to bulk it up before trying again. The goal was to install the caster wheel securely so that it wouldn’t wobble or fall out if the bed were lifted off the floor.

    rolled sheet of aluminum

    Once the four caster wheels were installed, the bed could be easily wheeled around on the floor with minimal effort–far easier than trying to lift or drag its heavy mass!

    caster wheel installed on hospital bed

  • CUNY Graduate Center Classroom for Interactive Technology and Pedagogy I

    panoramic view of a seminar style classroom from a corner opposite the door, two chalkboards, overhead projector, tv in back

    Last night, I stuck around after my first co-taught Interactive Technology and Pedagogy I class at the CUNY Graduate Center. The class went very well. Students demonstrated that they had done the reading and some brought deep perspectives from their disciplines to bear on our first discussion on technology and media.

    Thankfully, there were no classes afterwards, because after everyone cleared out, I used the classroom to meet with a City Tech student over Zoom for her Individualized Study of ENG3790 Information Architecture.

  • Fallback to Debian 12 Bookworm

    While I’m keeping Debian 13 Trixie on my media center computer, I’ve decided to fallback to Debian 12 Bookworm on my laptop and workstation. The more that I used Trixie on those machines, the more I realized some things that I relied on just weren’t working right. Once that software gets updated, I’ll try Trixie again, but for now, especially while I’m frantically getting things ready for classes to begin next Tuesday, I’ll rely on tried-and-true Bookworm.

  • CUNY Graduate Center ID Picked Up, Teaching There and City Tech This Fall

    front entrance of the cuny graduate center, multi-story building with stone facade and columns rising from the sidewalk to the second floor

    I visited the CUNY Graduate Center on 5th Avenue in Manhattan to get an adjunct faculty ID made, because I’ll be co-teaching Interactive Technology and Pedagogy I: History and Theory (ITCP 70010) this fall. This course is part of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (ITP) Certificate Program, which when offered the opportunity to contribute to this program, I jumped at! It is aligned with some of the work that I do in the Professional and Technical Writing Program at City Tech, which involves using technology for communicating and learning about the history of digital technologies, and it is a kindred program with the learning to teach with technology aspects of the Brittain Fellowship at Georgia Tech. I’m excited to work with the program’s graduate students beginning in a couple of weeks.

  • Generative AI for College Students Series: Beware Hallucinations and Falsehoods

    an anthropomorphic cat as a professor in a business suit lecturing in front of a classroom with a chalkboard behind him
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Please keep in mind that new technology like Generative AI (Gen AI) shouldn’t simply make your thinking or work easier, much less take the place of the uniquely singular abilities of human beings to grow cognitively, think creatively, or evaluate critically. If you use Gen AI to simply avoid work, you are doing it wrong. Instead, using Gen AI in the spirit of Douglas Engelbart’s “augmenting human intelligence” and Donna Haraway’s configuration of the cyborg point the way to beneficial heightening of human possibility instead of harmful erasure of the cognitive distinctions of humanity. If you use Gen AI, use it wisely and use it well. This post is the seventh in this series.

    In the realm of science fiction, the concept of cyborgs–beings that blend human and machine—often explores the tension between human intelligence and technological advancement. Today, as students increasingly rely on generative AI tools to assist with writing, they are, in a sense, becoming cyborgs of the academic world. These tools can produce coherent, polished text, but they also carry significant risks. One of the most concerning issues is the tendency of AI to “hallucinate,” or generate information that is entirely fabricated, made-up, or misleading. This phenomenon is not just a glitch; it’s a fundamental limitation of how these tools operate.

    Generative AI works by predicting and reassembling language patterns from vast datasets, often drawn from the internet. While the internet is a rich source of information, it is also a breeding ground for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and outright falsehoods. When AI tools process this data, they don’t distinguish between fact and fiction. They simply mimic the patterns they find. The result is responses that may look authoritative and well-written but are, in reality, partly or entirely inaccurate.

    Gen AI presents its responses without qualification or equivocation. The potentially wrong, made-up information in a given response is presented as if it were irrefutable.

    Consider a student working on a research paper about climate change. They prompt an AI tool to provide a summary of recent findings. The AI responds with a polished paragraph that includes specific statistics and citations. The problem? Some of those statistics might be fabricated, and the citations could refer to nonexistent studies. The student, unaware of the fabrication, incorporates this information into their paper, potentially spreading misinformation.

    This issue is reminiscent of the theme of unreliable narration in science fiction. In works like Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, reality itself is unstable, and characters must navigate a world where information is constantly shifting and misleading. Similarly, students using AI tools must navigate a landscape where the line between truth and fiction is increasingly blurred. The AI, like the narrator in Dick’s novel, presents a version of reality that may not correspond to actual facts.

    To avoid falling into this trap, students must approach AI-generated information with skepticism. They should verify any claims made by the AI by cross-referencing with credible sources. In other words, they must act as human fact-checkers, ensuring that the information they use is accurate. This process requires a critical eye and a willingness to question even the most plausible-sounding responses. Reading Gen AI responses with a healthy dose of skepticism and engaging in research written by authorities in those fields will help students verify those responses while gaining information literacy and research skills.

    The cyborg student, armed with both human critical thinking and the power of AI, must learn to use these tools responsibly. By doing so, they can harness the benefits of AI while avoiding the pitfalls of misinformation. The bottom line is Gen AI is a good tool that can work with text in various ways–especially text that you supply it with, but it shouldn’t be relied on as a knowledge base as it isn’t designed to be a reference in the same way as an encyclopedia, database, or textbook is.