Hi everyone,

I hope you and yours are staying healthy. Looking forward to our first online synchronous class meeting via Zoom at 9 am tomorrow. Please see Prof Montgomery’s post about how to join the meeting.

A sure way to contact us, your instructors, is via email: JMontgomery@citytech.cuny.edu for Prof. Montgomery and ALeonard@citytech.cuny.edu for Prof. Leonard. We will make every effort to respond within 1 working day; up to 2 days over the weekend and Spring Recess. We still keep office hours: Prof. Montgomery from 1:30-3:30 on Thursdays and Prof. Leonard from 10-noon on Tuesdays. Also by appointment.  This can happen via phone or video call; email in advance to schedule.

To prepare for distance learning, please make sure you have access to your college email and the email address you indicated on the sign-in sheet on the first day of class, the OpenLab,  and zoom. Course content will be documented and linked here on the OpenLab, and groups will use their project sites to document their work on the group project.

If you need help with building your OpenLab project site, ask us, or contact the Community Team – they are remarkably helpful and quick to respond.

We plan to continue with synchronous video classes on Thursday mornings via Zoom, and we will evaluate your participation based on your attendance in that space as well as regular contributions to this course site and your group project sites. Ideally, you will contribute 4 times per week in the form of a blog post, a substantial comment on someone else’s post, a draft of an assignment, or other evidence you are making progress on the components of the final group project: the research question, outline, annotated bibliography, and multimedia project and presentation.

Your questions are most welcome – please comment on this post or reach out via email. We are new at this online teaching and learning thing. If you’ve taken an online or hybrid class before, please share anything helpful that you think everyone should know in advance.

Everyone,

Professor Leonard and I hope you are all well and safe.

We will meet together via ZOOM for an online class meeting this Thursday at 9:00am. This meeting should be approx. 40 minutes. After the meeting, we will meet with each team individually over the next 3 hours.

Please be prepared for these meetings and email us to confirm you have read this email.

You can use ZOOM on your laptop, home computer, or phone.

Here is the website: https://zoom.us

Accounts can be set up for free with limits on access. For the time being, this should be all that we need.

There is an IOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zoom-cloud-meetings/id546505307

and Android: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/200942759-Getting-Started-with-Android

Here are the details for the ZOOM call:

Topic: LIB/ARCH 2205ID Zoom Meeting
Time: Mar 19, 2020 09:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/427376370

Meeting ID: 427 376 370

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Meeting ID: 427 376 370
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aqSh4ziiF

Please email both Prof. Leonard and me with any questions.

Stay well!

Prof. Montgomery

The New York Public Library has suspended all public events through March. Thursday we will meet in our classroom as usual.  Please come to class prepared to work in groups.

Midterm presentations all looked really good. Please review the assignment guidelines to ensure your presentations include all required elements, and don’t forget to upload your midterm presentation to the Dropbox by Sunday morning.  We formed working groups in class:

Diego, Xhulja, Sergio, Ana

Khady, Megan, Farzana

Leandra, Ronella, Jake, Jake

Connie, Ishwar, Chris, Alex A.

Latia, Alex M., Rafael

This Friday morning, Prof. Montgomery will join Elizabeth Goldstein, president of the Municipal Art Society, in a discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the BQE. The event takes place this Friday 3/6 at 8:30 am in A105. Admission is free, all are welcome, and there are refreshments. RSVP in advance here.

We meet in our classroom on Thursday, March 12. Later that morning we will head as a group for our research visit to the Map Division of the New York Public Library, Schwarzman Building at Bryant Park.

Please upload your presentation to the folder found via this link: https://www.dropbox.com/request/oMOOJfD7YewYkj2GRkRO

Next week everyone will present their midterm case study analysis and research projects. Presentations should be about 7 minutes long; expect about 3 minutes of Q&A as well. We will form working groups and spend some time sketching, so please bring a notebook and pen or pencil for this activity.

Prof. Montgomery showed us the Living in Brooklyn Conference report from 2019. Rafael pointed us to a very useful EPA website on the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site. When I was looking around on the NYC  Department of City Planning’s Environmental Review Process site, I found a 2019 draft Scope of Work for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — only 237 pages long — and contains a lot of contextual information, need for environmental remediation, zoning information, community resources, and more. If you have found other websites or research resources, please share them with everyone in a post on the course blog, or leave a comment below.

Partners for Case Study Analysis & Research Project

Today’s site walk took us from the Smith/9th Street subway stop to tour Heights Woodworking, then to a close view of the Gowanus Canal from the park that fringes the Whole Foods parking lot, over the Third Street Bridge to the waterfront promenade adjacent to the residential housing development at 365 Bond Street.

As we discussed at the beginning of class, the next assignment is the Case Study Analysis and Research Assignment (AKA midterm). Pairs will present their work in class on Thursday, March 5. We will spend time in class on February 27 working on the midterm assignment. For now, pairs should review the assignment guidelines, share the media (photos, videos, audio) they created, and begin communicating about how to complete the tasks of the assignment.

~Profs. Montgomery and Leonard