August 21, 2019 1:00-3:00 PM in G603

This year, we’re highlighting accessibility best practices on the web, specifically working on the OpenLab! This includes usability, providing content in multiple formats (text, audio, video, etc.), and providing descriptions for users using screen readers, among many other strategies. We’ll be running our Open Pedagogy series on this theme all year, so please join us for these more discussion-based events!

For these Open Hours (8/21/19), participants will have the chance to work on developing their own courses and projects, but we’ll also be talking through some simple accessibility protocols to incorporate into your OpenLab sites. 

Defining Access

Scholars in disability studies and pedagogy center a broad definition of access: instead of requiring that students disclose access needs to an on-campus disability services office, scholars recommend integrating accessibility in the syllabus and day-to-day classroom management. 

Accessible Syllabus provides a bounty of possible strategies to practice inclusive learning, including some alternatives to traditional deadlines, developing grading contracts with students, and offering students resources in the form of an inclusive learning statement. 

The OpenLab team is committed to sharing best practices in sharing and collaborating in digital spaces, and has developed a Summary of Accessibility on the OpenLab. It’s important to remember that when we share content on the OpenLab, we don’t want to create additional barriers for students.

Digital Access

The web offers formal options for including content, including posting audio or video versions of lectures and announcements, allowing users to modify colors and font sizes to accommodate low-vision needs, and other options for making use of multimedia formats. However, it’s important to also include transcripts and/or captions alongside multimedia formats in order to best serve users with different kinds of access needs. 

Even simple choices, like including hyperlinks in the course syllabus or on the homepage, can help demonstrate a commitment to interactive and independent engagement with site content by allowing students to visit linked sites at their own pace rather than listing blurbs for resources directly on the syllabus. The OpenLab’s Help section offers additional support for reading ease and accessibility when composing in digital spaces. 

Accessible Syllabus includes an in-depth list of strategies for making text on your site user-friendly, including recommendations for “thinking about learning disabilities that affect reading, such as dyslexia” as well as simple measures to improve readability, including using bold typeface to highlight important information.  

City Tech’s Library has also incorporated a focus on accessibility into the professional development faculty members participate in to develop open educational resources. The materials gathered for the Introduction to Accessibility Module that specific group are useful to anyone developing materials to share on the OpenLab. 

What is access? group activity

When thinking of the terms “access/ability” or “accommodations,” what comes to mind?

Jot down a few terms/examples.

Share with a partner, then share with the group!

What common ideas about accessibility do we share? Where do our ideas diverge?

Resources:

Accessible Syllabus

Summary of Accessibility on the OpenLab

Reading Ease and Accessibility

Introduction to Accessibility: A Module for OER Faculty

Thursday, February 22, 2018, 5:30-7:30pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

*Refreshments will be served. (Thanks to the Faculty Commons for its generous support of this event!)

*Part-time City Tech faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.

*Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues at City Tech and beyond!

Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event, where we’ll be discussing accessibility in open digital pedagogy. This is a follow-up event to Accessibility, Disability, and Open Digital Pedagogy held in Fall 2015 and we’re excited to extend the conversation about how designing the college experience with accessibility in mind benefits our communities. We’ll learn from one another about how standards and accommodations vary across the disciplines. Our discussion will focus on universal design and how it can be incorporated into our pedagogy, mentorship, and administrative work on campus and beyond.

We’ll consider the following questions:

• What is universal design, and how does foregrounding it help to address accessibility without tokenizing or stigmatizing disability?
• How does reframing accessibility as an ethical and pedagogical imperative open up new possibilities for universal design?
• What are the disciplinary challenges and pedagogical benefits of universal design?
• What opportunities does digital pedagogy offer for universal design and accessibility efforts?

Suggested Readings:

• “Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities” Published 4 June 2017, by Hampus Sethfors, https://axesslab.com/accessibility-according-to-pwd
• “What is the difference between accessible, usable, and universal design?” https://www.washington.edu/doit/what-difference-between-accessible-usable-and-universal-design
• “Universal Design in Education: Principles and Applications,” https://www.washington.edu/doit/universal-design-education-principles-and-applications
• George H. Williams, “Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities”

OpenLab Help Documentation on Accessibility:

• Making Your Work Accessible (The OpenLab)
• Reading Ease and Accessibility (The OpenLab)

Join us for an accessibility-athon!

This event will have a follow-up workshop, where we’ll teach and implement practical strategies for making your OpenLab sites and content accessible. Stay tuned for more details!

Thursday, October 26, 2017, 5:30-7:30pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

*Refreshments will be served. (Thanks to the Faculty Commons for its generous support of this event!) 

*Part-time City Tech faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.

*Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues!

Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event, where we’ll be discussing teaching and learning with annotation. This event is a follow-up to our Spring 2017 Open Pedagogy event on annotating texts in open digital pedagogy, and we’re excited to continue the conversation about how annotating digital texts can impact student learning and the teaching process. Our discussion will focus on how to increase engagement with the resources we build and share on the OpenLab. We’ll cover rationales and strategies for annotation, how its process and impact changes when moving from analog to digital annotation tools, and how it can foster collaboration.

This is a follow-up event to Annotating Texts in Open Digital Pedagogy, held in February 2017. Read the Recap here.

This event has a follow-up workshop, Annotating Text on the OpenLab, where we’ll teach you, among other things, how to use the Hypothes.is plugin. This workshop will be held on Thursday 11/2 from 2:30-4:00pm in Rm G604 (RSVP).

We’ll Consider the following questions:

• How can the use of digital annotation tools change the teaching and learning process?
• How can we use annotation to increase engagement with the resources we build and share on the OpenLab?
• What are some of the challenges of annotating different media, and what are creative solutions for these cases?
• How does working individually, publicly, and socially change the way we view annotation and its functions?

Suggested Readings:

• A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students. Ed Elizabeth Mays. Rebus Open Textbooks.
• Collaborative Annotations You May Want to Join. Maha Bali, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 12, 2017.
• How Do You Annotate in Your Class? Less Skallerup Bessette, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 11, 2015
• Strategies to Help Students ‘Go Deep’ When Reading Digitally. Katrina Schwartz, KQED News – Mind/Shift. October 16, 2016
• Purposeful Annotation: A “Close Reading” Strategy that Makes Sense to My Students. Dave Stuat Jr. October, 2014. www.davestuartjr.com

ACERT, Hunter’s Center for Teaching and Learning, is pleased to host three CUNY colleagues whose work embodies the spirit of openness in scholarship and teaching. “Open” is a multivalent and emerging concept in scholarship and teaching. Openness, in this sense might point to: authors’ protection of readers’ right to share work via a Creative Commons license; Web 2.0 affordances that invite readers to comment or annotate critical texts; teachers’ creation of free course materials to replace expensive textbooks and thus make education more accessible for economically burdened students.

Our three speakers engage this broad topic in distinct but overlapping ways:

• Shelly Eversley (English & Women’s Studies, Baruch College) is co-founder of Equality Archive, a free/open, peer-reviewed encyclopedic resource on the history of sex and gender equality in the United States. For a fuller introduction to this inspiring “digital theater for history and social justice,” see Shelly’s video.
• Matthew K. Gold (English &  Digital Humanities, CUNY GC) will talk about Manifold Scholarship, a Mellon-funded collaboration the University of Minnesota Press in partnership with the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the CUNY GC and Cast Iron Coding. Manifold is an intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly works that seeks to transform scholarly publications into living digital works. For more on Manifold, check out the beta version of the platform and see this introduction by Matt and his co-principal investigator, Doug Armato.
• Michael Smith (Communications Technology, York College) is a web artist and open education advocate who will talk about his collaborations with cultural institutions, like the Tate Museum and the New York Public Library. In these collaborations, Michael has produced GIF animations from art objects and archival images that, in his words, are “unique recreations and reinterpretations” that “make pre-existing art more accessible to the public.” For more of Michael’s antic and thought-provoking work, see his blog.

Open to the CUNY community. Wine and cheese reception to follow.

When: Monday, April 24th, 4-6 p.m.

Where: Chanin Insdorf Screening Room (Hunter West, B126)

Please RSVP here.

Join us on Thursday March 23, 2017, 5:30-7:00pm (Faculty Commons, N227) for a discussion of Multimedia Pedagogy Across the Disciplines

*Refreshments will be served. (Thanks to the Faculty Commons for its generous support of this event!)

*Part-time City Tech faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.

*Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues!

Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event where we’ll be discussing the use of multimedia in open digital pedagogy. Although a large part of teaching and learning online is based in text, open digital pedagogy enables a multitude of multimedia possibilities. Capitalizing on the fact that we are a college of technology, we will utilize an expanded notion of multimedia, broadening the concept to include not just images, sound, and video but also materials used for physical construction, 3-D printing, and makerspaces, in order to showcase and brainstorm new and exciting uses of open digital pedagogy techniques beyond blogging and other types of writing assignments.  

Our conversation will be guided by the following questions:

• How can multimedia enhance student learning? How can they impact the teaching process?
• What challenges have you/faculty encountered while working with multimedia?
• How can you (and your students) use the OpenLab (and/or other open digital tools) to incorporate multimedia into your course?

Want to learn more about multimedia texts in open digital pedagogy? Here are a few short pieces for reference:

• • Using ePortfolio Image Galleries as Digital Storyboards to Visualize Scientific Concepts, Karla Fuller of Guttman Community College, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.
  • I-Lit: An E-Poetry E-Portfolio Exhibit, Daniel Anderson and Emily Shepherd of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy.
  • Locating the Semiotic Power of Multimodality, GlyndaL A. Hull and Mark Evan Nelson of University of California, Berkeley, Written Communication, Vol. 22 No. 2, April 2005 224-261
  • Makerspaces, David M. Rieder and Jessica Elam-Handloff of North Carolina State University

Thursday February 23, 2017, 5:30-7:30pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

*Refreshments will be served. (Thanks to the Faculty Commons for its generous support of this event!)

*Part-time City Tech faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.

*Please RSVP by commenting on this post. Please share this invitation with your colleagues!

Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event where we’ll be discussing annotating texts in open digital pedagogy. There is an increased push to use digital texts and open educational resources to save students money on textbooks (and to save paper!), but using digital texts in the classroom is often perceived as preventing students from fully and critically engaging with a text. Thanks to the development of new digital technologies, it has become easier to annotate texts digitally, and during this Open Pedagogy session, we’ll share a sampling of tools to use for digital annotation, showcase examples of them in action, and discuss best practices for cultivating close reading and conversation in digital spaces.

We’ll consider the following questions:

• What challenges have faculty encountered while working with digital texts (perhaps as opposed to printed or hard copy texts)?
• How can annotating digital texts impact student learning? How can they impact the teaching process?
• How can you (and your students) use the OpenLab (and/or other open digital tools) to annotate texts digitally?
• What does the future of annotating texts and open digital pedagogy look like?

Want to learn more about annotating texts in open digital pedagogy and digital reading more generally? Here are a few short pieces for reference:

• 10 Ways to Annotate With Students, by Jeremy Dean, August 25, 2015.
• Annotate: Whatever Happened to the Web as Annotation System, by Todd Carpenter, April 23, 2013.
• Making Reading Visible: Social Annotation with Lacuna in the Humanities Classroom, by Emily Schneider and Stacy Hartman, JITP, Issue 9, June 16, 2016.
• Building Bridges to Critical Reading in a Digital Context, by Michael Larkin and Donnett Flash of the UCB College Writing Programs, Last Updated:  April 22, 2016.
• Strategies to Help Students ‘Go Deep’ When Reading Digitally, by Katrina Schwartz, October 16, 2016.