Jody R. Rosen – Page 3 – Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab

EcoFest 2022 – TODAY!

New York City College of Technology presents EcoFest 2022 Conference: IT'S TIME TO TAKE ACTION! CRISIS
April 28, 2022
8 AM - 5 PM
Register Here [QR code linked to Zoom registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__ed4gDXVRF6G732_oHKFEw]

The OpenLab is a great place to host a website for an event, taking advantage of its openness to make it available to members of your group both inside and outside of City Tech and the public in general.

Today’s EcoFest 2022 Conference is a great example of this. You’ve probably seen the EcoFest site pop up in the Projects section of the OpenLab. If you want to learn more, attend their conference today! Please also share with students, colleagues, and friends!

Here’s what the conference organizers shared to welcome everyone to the EcoFest conference today:

Greetings City Tech community,

EcoFest has been the College’s Earth Day-centered event for the past 7 years. It is an opportunity for faculty, staff, and students to celebrate environmental successes and educate each other concerning the huge challenges we face.

The theme of this year’s EcoFest Conference is Crisis: It’s Time to Take Action. The event will have a hybrid format: there will be live panels and presentations in the Academic Building lobby and theater, and it will be shared synchronously as a Zoom webinar. Last year’s conference had 140 viewers and more than 50 participants. We are planning on even more viewers for EcoFest 2022. The conference schedule is designed so the panels coincide with the times college courses are taking place. Faculty are encouraged to bring their classes. Join us in person in the New Academic Complex Theater or, if you cannot attend live, join via Zoom webinar (registration required). See the full schedule or download the full schedule.

We look forward to seeing you on the 28th!

Thank you,
City Tech Campus Sustainability Council

Today! Open Pedagogy: Ungrading, Pt 2

Reminder: You’re invited to join the OpenLab team for an Open Pedagogy event TODAY!

Looking forward to seeing you there. Here are the details:

Topic: Open Pedagogy: Ungrading Pt. 2
Date: Mar 31, 2022
Time: 4:00-5:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register and join via Zoom

Last semester, we met to discuss ungrading! This is part two of a series of Open Pedagogy workshops the OpenLab Community Team is developing to address inequity in assessment and anti-racist pedagogies. For this event, we’ll be joined by co-authors of a recent article from the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy titled “Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading” to hear about practical strategies for implementing ungrading into classroom settings.

From the co-authors:

Our article suggests that grading systems in higher education settings are part of a larger network of surveillance technologies that students and faculty are subjected to and/or enact, reflective of schooling’s place in a “carceral continuum” (Shedd) premised on anti-Blackness and colonialism. We do not believe that grading is something that can be made more fair, just, or anti-racist. To resist surveillance in higher education is to embrace the end of grading. After an overview of these contexts and assertions, we offer a series of reflections, tracing juxtaposing moments where we individually or collectively taught, learned, and/or organized outside/against grading systems.

Questions for discussion:

Traditional models of education treat instructor and student as adversarial. Instructors often replicate harmful authoritarian structures by embracing institutional surveillance practices and assumptions, including that students are cheating and must be observed at all times, adopting the role of disciplinarian by reporting student misbehavior to the institution. How do we shift this culture of authoritarianism so common in educators?
Last time we talked about different motivations for learning; what new perspectives do we have on this from discussing ungrading with these scholars?How can we adjust our focus to the intrinsic versus extrinsic values of teaching and learning?
Why are we talking about ungrading as the OpenLab team? What does this have to do with open digital pedagogy?

Readings:

Resisting Surveillance, Practicing/Imagining the End of Grading by Marianne Madoré, Anna Zeemont, Joaly Burgos, Jane Guskin, Hailey Lam, and Andréa Stella

Ungrading, Part 2

Circular oculus with patterned glass and surround from the Fulton Center Subway Station — “Fulton Center Subway Station Oculus” by John Cunniff via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Announcing this semester’s Open Pedagogy event, a new installment of the Ungrading conversation we began last semester! More details coming soon…

Topic: Ungrading, Part 2

Date: March 31, 2022

Time: 4:00-5:00pm

Where: Zoom (link in the soon-to-come details)

For whom: Open to anyone interested in rethinking grading!

With the semester underway

Today we are launching Swipp Email Insights so we are doing pretty good!! What about you guys? #new #email #marketing #customers #solution #happywednesday — Photo by Getswipp

We’re two weeks in to the Spring 2021 semester. Each semester so far has been so different, with Spring 2020 allowing for faculty and students to get to know each other and the courses before the switch to remote, and Fall 2020 imposing the obstacle of starting the semester without any in-person experience for the vast majority of courses.

What’s different about Spring 2021? We’re hopefully learning more and finding ways to foster teaching and learning using digital tools, kindness, and patience. But we’ve also used up much or most of our energy reserves.

With all of this in mind, we want to ask:

How are you doing?
What support do you need?
What’s something that’s working that you can share as inspiration?

No pressure to share, but if you want to, please feel free to share some thoughts in the comments here.

Spring 2021 Support

Jane from Central New York, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The OpenLab team is here to help you through this semester! Here are a few of our resources to help you through:

The Open Road offers OpenLab news, the full archive of what we’ve spotlighted, our support schedule for open hours and one-on-one appointments, information about how to request a workshop, and a link out to OpenLab screencasts.

Two really helpful modules, Teaching with the OpenLab, and The OpenLab for Students, can help instructors and students get asynchronous support for teaching and learning on the OpenLab.

Our email support offers anyone the opportunity to write in to get help with a specific question.

Finally, we hope you find a little comfort with our Comforting Content for COVID Coping. Sometimes we tweet comforting images or video from our Twitter account, @CityTechOpenLab, using the #ComfortingContent hashtag.

Is there topic in open pedagogy you’d like to see us address here on Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab? Let us know here in the comments or by getting in touch directly!

What’s working?

cheering panda saying yay! — “yay! panda” by Rakka, via Flickr

With the end of the semester is in sight, but before we all scatter to our virtual summer spaces, the OpenLab team wants to hear from you about what worked in this distance-learning semester. What’s something that you found useful, that you want to keep in the upcoming online Summer or Fall semester? What’s something that you have incorporated into your pedagogy that you’ll continue to do–or not do–into the foreseeable future? Leave a comment–short or longer–to share your brilliance with the OpenLab community.

Does this make you think about what’s not working? Save that thought and add it to the What’s not working? conversation instead.

If you have ideas that you want more help with, either from a pedagogical angle or a technical one, please check out our expanded Help materials, contact our team via email (OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu) or contact form, or participate in our virtual office hours.

Yay for all!

What’s not working?

orange lit sphere on black background — “Spinning” by Miranda Wood, via Flickr

With the end of the semester is in sight, but before we all scatter to our virtual summer spaces, the OpenLab team wants to hear from you about what didn’t work so well this semester. Maybe you realized something that works so well in person doesn’t convert so well in this distance education context. Maybe a new tool doesn’t work the way you need it to. Maybe you see things clearly now, or can’t puzzle out what didn’t work. Share a thought in the comments–as long or as short as you want–to add a voice to our conversation about what needs improvement, rethinking, or what we need to drop altogether–or be sure not to drop again.

Have something that worked really well? Share in in the What’s working conversation instead!

Don’t forget–there are places to publish your teaching fails. Your comment here could be the start of something very productive for an even larger audience!

OpenLab at the Living Lab General Education Seminar

Coloured board game playing figures — PublicDomainPictures.net

The OpenLab grew up alongside the Living Lab General Education Seminar, and the success of both is thanks in part to a commitment to high-impact educational practices and open pedagogy.

The OpenLab team is collaborating today with the Living Lab General Education Seminar to get creative and think about ways of engaging students in the Intercultural Knowledge gen ed student learning outcome through open digital tools, using a game-based approach.

Interested in learning more? Check out our slides!

Commons in a Box OpenLab at NYC Digital Humanities Week

Did you ever show friends or colleagues City Tech’s OpenLab, only to have them ask, “How can I have an OpenLab at my school/institution/organization?!”

The answer is Commons in a Box OpenLab!

Please share information about the NYCDH Week workshop introducing CBOX OpenLab, tomorrow, 2/7, at the CUNY Graduate Center:

Commons In A Box OpenLab: A Commons for Open Learning

RSVP

UPDATE: Slides from the 2/7 workshop

This workshop introduces Commons In A Box OpenLab: free, open source software that enables anyone to create a commons space specifically designed for open learning, where students, faculty, and staff can collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and share their work openly with one another and the world.

Funded by a generous grant from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, the project brings together Commons In A Box (CBOX; http://commonsinabox.org/) — the software that powers NYCDH — and City Tech’s OpenLab platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/). The result is a teaching-focused version of CBOX that provides a powerful and flexible alternative to costly proprietary systems, and is already being adopted at CUNY and beyond.

We will begin by introducing CBOX OpenLab and demonstrating its features and functionality, using examples drawn from City Tech’s OpenLab and BMCC’s new installation. We will then engage participants in group discussion of how they might use (or are already using) CBOX OpenLab, and the benefits and challenges of open learning.

Equipment: Laptops helpful, but not required

More CUNY IT: CBOX OpenLab

Some of City Tech’s OpenLab team is joining forces with some of the team growing BMCC’s OpenLab to showcase Commons in a Box OpenLab at the CUNY IT Conference today, 12/6, at 1pm: “Building Open Pedagogical Communities with Commons in a Box OpenLab.” We hope you can join us or check out our slides.

Author: Jody R. Rosen