Roughly a year ago, the primordial nebula of A&S administrators, designers, podcasters, videographers, instructional designers, software developers, and help desk support workers was tasked with coming up a name to reidentify and unify our staff. Prospective names came and went. Finally, it was decided - the Hive. As you may have heard from some of our podcasts, the Hive is A&S' newly unified team of both creative and technical services which provides the College with support on web and print media projects, public relations, and computing and information services. We are organized into 13 structured, yet fluid teams. We are a higher education-multimedia-information-technology-powerhouse.
The name "Hive" conjurs up images of bees, obviously, but entomology aside, there are connotations of busy-ness, work, and the idea of many collaborating to solve common problems. This certainly describes the atmosphere of the Hive. We are indeed busy (our media teams have created approximately 200 videos and 100 podcasts just this year alone!), and often times more than one of our teams are in constant communication with each other, working to resolve what ever issue we are tasked with. We are a creative and technical solutions factory of sorts.
Not only do we come from varied disciplines and backgrounds, we also travel the globe to bring back new knowledge and cultural experiences to benefit the Hive. Recently we have had a handful of student workers and staff travel abroad. Help Desk team member Josiah Hanna currently is participating in computer science research in Paris, France. Lead podcaster Cheyenne Hohman and student photographer Dana Rogers recently traveled to Shangai, China to document the Appalachian Culture Symposium & Student Summit with A&S professors Frank X Walker and Michelle Sizemore. Check out some photos of their visit to Wenzhou here. A&S Web Team students Nicole Sand and Eric Grucza recently traveled to Seville, Spain and Osaka, Japan, respectively. Amelia Stevens, one of our videographers spent the winter session studying in France and has some awesome video blogs from her trip. You can click on the names of the Hive students to read their travelblogs.
As you can see, we're all over the globe. Returning from these trips, we share stories and experiences, learning from one another, bringing different cultural perspectives into the Hive.
Over the past year as we have continue to organize ourselves, we have added new members and seen the depature of some of our most talented student workers. We have completed a countless number of projects and even lended our services to other UK organizations. As we have branded ourselves "the Hive", each person's work and contributions help to form our identity, even though our services and skills are diverse, we remain connected.
Since our unification, staff meetings became somewhat of a logistical challenge. Luckily, The University of Kentucky Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments (Vis Center) has an excellent theater in the Davis Marksbury Building. Each month we come together to share current goings-on of the Hive, to celebrate our hard work, and to implement new iniatives. To acquiant all members of the Hive with each other, one team per meeting introduces themselves and presents their work to the rest of us. So far, the Art & Design team, the Application Develpment and Research Computation team, and the Web Services team have all created a prezi that describes the nature of their workflow and processes to the rest us. Their names link to the presentations, I encourage you to give them a look and get to know us at the Hive!
Part of my job as a social media coordinator is making sure that the digital public knows about all the awesome things we do at the Hive. I'll be tweeting with the hashtag #ASHIVE for all things Hive-related, so you can always search for it and join the conversations on our Twitter page.