About
Casual enough to be interesting, professional enough to communicate fundamentals. Last updated 12.2010.
JAG-wire.net is one in the collection of websites that comprise Jeff Ginger's web presence. He logs many of his academic and social-psychology conundrums here, keeps a record of credentials, and showcases work from friends, colleagues and admired persons around the web and in print.
- For a more visual and expressive impression of Jeff go explore his artistic website, JAG85.com.
- His pre-dissertation PhD research as well and some cool community technology projects can be found in Community Informatics Projects Sandbox.
- His old sociology research and masters work was about exploring identity and power inequalities through the Facebook Project.
Personal
Jeff Ginger (ginger@illinois.edu) is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A native of the Chicago suburbs, Jeff traveled to Champaign in 2002 with an interest in art, computers and helping people, the beginnings of what would emerge to be an interdisciplinary trek through several academic programs where he fostered his love for sociology, teaching and design as well as disdain for abstract computer science. Jeff benefits from a technical multimedia and social science background, accented by teaching and organizational leadership, and is perhaps most well-known for his activist research on Facebook.com. His current studies revolve around social & community informatics, deciphering the discourse and effects of the digital divide and Web2.0, critical and creative digital literacy, human-computer interactions (HCI) and the design of supportive technologies for research and information access. After finishing his field exams this past spring he is in the process of integrating several of these areas of scholarship and practice into his dissertation proposal.
Jeff also occasionally makes websites, pretends to be an artist, records fun noises, and likes to teach.
Facebook | 
Google 
YouTube | 
Twitter
About the REAL Me
This will probably sound dorky and dramatic, but that's me, so...
I find that one of the coolest questions you can ask someone is "Who are you?"
Some people define who they are by their studies, their jobs, their friends, their physical characteristics, or perhaps just their name. But we get to have a say in who we are, right? I don't want to be just a name or a job.
So who am I?
Others often describe me as enthusiastic and intense. People make me happy and I’m definitely an extrovert. I try to be compassionate and generally intend to make a difference in the world (though my activism has subsided a bit these days). I find value in creation and connection, see leadership as service, and like to meet new people. It’s pretty important to me to be active and I generally workout or play sports every day. I get excited about building stuff - be it a relationship, environment or physical (or virtual?) thing. When presented with problems I feel I should do something about them, even if it means just listening - I'm pretty incapable of apathy. Actions speak very loudly to me and positivity is probably my favorite trait, I do my best to embody it.
Oh, and life is way too important to take seriously. Most of what I describe above is an ideal, I'm always a work-in-progress. I definitely have an inner child who is convinced the world is a playground.
Assertiveness is awesome and life is too short. Take risks and jump into things that scare you - true character, integrity and wisdom comes from a lot of mistakes, experiments and diversity of experience.
What I'm Really Good At
Being friendly, enthusiastic and intense
Hosting events that don't involve booze
Generating ideas/talk
Knowing people in the UIUC bubble world
Web design
What I'm Sort of Good At
Volleyball, skating, canoeing, rock climbing, caving, stuff outdoors
Graphic design, web development, art, advertising, photography
Recording music/video, multimedia production and editing
Leadership, teaching
Technician engineer stuff
Social science research (multimethod!)
Cooking and housekeeping
Having turbulent experience in the romantic world
Board and party games
Computer and console games
Singing badly
Public speaking
Legos
Revealing overconfidence through writing too many items on this list?
History
JAG-wire was created in 2007 by Jeff Ginger as a collected representation of his best academic, professional, and creative work. JAG-wire currently serves as the personal-professional front to Jeff's scholarly side. The precursor and basis of JAG-wire, JAG85.com, was started in 1999 in Jeff's first and only formal web design class in high school. Since then JAG85 has undergone countless evolutions and is currently past its 6th generation. Beginning in 2002 Jeff began to include web sites for organizations as a part of JAG85 until it reached its present day state of laying host to over two dozen (mostly archived) academic, organization, and personal web sites.
