It’s still a few weeks away, but the City Tech Library is already getting ready for International Open Access Week. Please save the date for two great faculty workshops we have planned:
Using Open Educational Materials in Your Courses
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
3:30-5:00pm
Rm A543, City Tech Library (Atrium Building)
High-quality open access curricular materials are increasingly available online, and can provide an alternative to traditionally-published, high-priced textbooks. In this workshop we’ll discuss strategies for incorporating freely-available open access and public domain resources into your courses. Bring your syllabus or assignment and we will work together to add resources to your course website on Blackboard, the City Tech OpenLab, or other online platforms.
Coffee & cookies will be served.
Open Access Happy Hour: Your Rights as an Author
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
5:30-7:00pm
Rm A632, Faculty Lounge (Atrium Building)
You know what you write, but do you know your rights? Copyright is a bundle of rights that apply to work you produce in any medium. How can you choose a publisher and negotiate your contracts to make the most of your rights as a scholar, researcher, author, and creator? Come enjoy wine & cheese with your colleagues and learn how to preserve your rights to reproduce, distribute, and display the work you create.
Welcome to Location Nation
Where are you right now? Who knows it? If you’re like most people, chances are you occasionally broadcast your current geographic location using social media and the internet. But you may also be interested to learn that many companies have access to your location because of the devices you carry and technologies you use.
Let’s start with the easy stuff. Which of these technologies have you used to let people know where you are?
– Facebook
– Twitter
– Google
– FourSquare
– Gowalla
– Another service
Some of these services give you the opportunity to identify your location as one of several features, like Facebook or Twitter. Others are essentially location games, like FourSquare and Gowalla: you sign up for the service and “check-in” to various locations as you move through your daily routine. There’s an element of competition, too, because you earn badges (and somewhat silly titles like Mayor of your local coffee shop!) and can rack up points to knock other people off the top spot.
Sounds harmless, right?
A group of Dutch software engineers didn’t think so. Last year they created a website to pull together all of the locational messages from Twitter and Foursquare. They called it Please Rob Me, and for the few weeks the site was live it displayed a running list of updates from people who used those services to highlight the dangers of constantly broadcasting your location.
The site’s creators pulled the plug after a short while, once they’d raised awareness on this important privacy issue. For more information, take a look at their article on Oversharing and Location Awareness on the Center for Democracy and Technology website.
And what about your devices?
You may have seen an article in the New York Times last month about the locational data that our cellphones collect. A German politician petitioned his cellphone service provider to get his own data, and resulting information is surprisingly detailed. All cellphone companies do this to accurately bill us for the services we use, but what about other ways of using this information, like marketing and advertising? When is the privacy line crossed?
For more information about locational privacy, read this excellent whitepaper on the issues by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Photo credit: Calsidyrose
Choose Privacy Week begins today!
This week is Choose Privacy Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and designed to raise awareness about privacy and our freedom to read, search, and learn.
Here at the City Tech Library we’ll be blogging all week about all kinds of privacy-related topics: how to protect our privacy, strategies for making sure we only reveal the information we want to reveal, and lots of other privacy issues we face today.
To kick things off, here’s a list of organizations and people who are participating in the conversation around privacy, as well as videos of folks like authors Cory Doctorow and Clay Shirky and organizations like Google and the ALA discussing various privacy concerns.
Feel free to add your favorite privacy-related links in our comments, below.
Photoshop Workshop for Faculty
Faculty, come to a workshop in the City Tech Library! Are you interested in creating graphics for your class? Would you like to learn how to resize your digital photographs? This workshop will focus on the basics of Adobe Photoshop. Participants will have a better understanding of the toolbar, layers, cropping, image filters, text, special effects, and more.
Date: Wednesday, April 13th
Time: 1 – 2 pm
Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. All workshops are held in our small classroom (Rm A441) on the 4th Fl. of the City Tech Library, Atrium, unless otherwise noted. RSVP is strongly suggested to Prof. Maura Smale, msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 718-260-5748.
For more information, view our full list of faculty workshops.
RefWorks Workshop for Faculty
Faculty, come to a workshop in the City Tech Library and learn how to streamline your research with RefWorks, a bibliographic citation management tool available to all City Tech faculty. Import references from online databases, organize your references into folders by topic or project, and generate a bibliography formatted in a variety of citation styles.
Date: Wednesday, April 6th
Time: 1 – 2 pm
Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. All workshops are held in our small classroom (Rm A441) on the 4th Fl. of the City Tech Library, Atrium, unless otherwise noted. RSVP is strongly suggested to Prof. Maura Smale, msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 718-260-5748.
For more information, view our full list of faculty workshops.
Web 2.0 Happy Hour: Ereader Petting Zoo
The City Tech Library, in partnership with the Faculty Commons, is pleased to invite all faculty to this semester’s Web 2.0 Happy Hour. Electronic readers are becoming increasingly popular for reading books, news, articles, and more. How are these devices changing the landscape of reading, and what are the implications for scholars, students, and libraries? Come enjoy wine & cheese with your colleagues, discuss the future of reading, and play with a few of the latest devices.
Date: Tuesday, March 15th
Time: 5:30 – 7 pm
Location: Faculty Lounge, A632
Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. RSVP is strongly suggested to Prof. Maura Smale, msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 718-260-5748.
Faculty Workshop: Good Googling
Faculty, come to a workshop in the City Tech Library and learn about encouraging your students to practice good Googling. There are millions of websites out there on the internet. How can we help students learn to distinguish the good from the bad (or the ugly)? In this workshop we’ll discuss strategies to boost students’ evaluation skills and help them find credible information on the internet.
Date: Wednesday, March 9th
Time: 1 – 2 pm
Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. All workshops are held in our small classroom (Rm A441) on the 4th Fl. of the City Tech Library, Atrium, unless otherwise noted. RSVP is strongly suggested to Prof. Maura Smale, msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 718-260-5748.
For more information, view our full list of faculty workshops.
PubMed Workshop for Faculty
Faculty, come to a workshop in the City Tech Library and learn about using the PubMed database to find biomedical information. In this workshop we’ll provide an overview of PubMed from the National Library of Medicine, including its scope and content (e.g., how it differs from MEDLINE); building a search using keywords, MeSH terms, and other search tools; and accessing full-text articles in PubMed Central and City Tech Library databases.
Date: Wednesday, February 23rd
Time: 1 – 2 pm
Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. All workshops are held in our small classroom (Rm A441) on the 4th Fl. of the City Tech Library, Atrium, unless otherwise noted. RSVP is strongly suggested to Prof. Maura Smale, msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 718-260-5748.
For more information, view our full list of faculty workshop.
Faculty Workshop: Using RefWorks for Citation Management
The City Tech Library, in partnership with the Faculty Commons, is pleased to invite all faculty to a workshop. Streamline your research with RefWorks, a bibliographic citation management tool available to all City Tech faculty. Import references from online databases, organize your references into folders by topic or project, and generate a bibliography formatted in a variety of citation styles.
This workshop will be held on Wednesday, December 1, 1-2 pm in the Library, Rm. A540 (eclassroom). RSVP to Prof. Maura Smale at msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 260-5748.
Faculty Workshop Tomorrow!
The City Tech Library, in partnership with the Faculty Commons, is pleased to invite all faculty to a library workshop. There are millions of websites out there on the internet. How can we help students learn to distinguish the good from the bad (or the ugly)? In this workshop we’ll discuss strategies to boost students’ evaluation skills and help them find credible information on the internet.
This workshop will be held TOMORROW, Wednesday, September 29, 1-2 pm in the Library, Rm. A 441 (small library classroom). RSVP to Prof. Maura Smale at msmale@citytech.cuny.edu or 260-5748.
