Category: Announcements

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)

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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.

Open Pedagogy Event: Writing and Open Digital Pedagogies
Thursday November 3, 5:30-7:00pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

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

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

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

Join faculty and staff around the college at the next Open Pedagogy event, where we will be partnering with City Tech’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program to discuss writing and open digital pedagogies (which is the support of teaching and learning by using open, online, cost-free, publicly available digital platforms and tools). Together we’ll discuss how to translate the most successful pedagogies which support student learning into the digital world. Emphasis will be placed on writing-to-learn strategies.

City Tech faculty and WAC fellows will share their assignments centered around writing in social media, formal writing and the OpenLab as well as the benefits of low-stakes writing. In doing so, we’ll consider the following questions:

• What challenges have faculty encountered while developing or considering developing writing assignments using open online tools and platforms?
• How can writing-to-learn strategies impact student learning? How can they impact the teaching process?
• How can you (and your students) use the OpenLab to realize the writing assignments you design?
• What does the future of writing assignments and open digital pedagogies look like?

Want to learn more about writing-to-learn strategies and open digital pedagogies? Here are a few short pieces for reference:

• “Open Digital Pedagogy = Critical Pedagogy,” by Jody R. Rosen and Maura A. Smale (2015)
• “Dream Bloggers Invent the University,” by Jason Tougaw (2009)
• “The Challenges of Online Writing Instruction,” by Luca Zamparini (2016)

Open Pedagogy Event: Open Educational Resources at City Tech
Thursday September 22, 5:30-7:00pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

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

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

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

Join faculty and staff around the college at the next Open Pedagogy event, where we will be partnering with the Library to discuss open educational resources (OERs): teaching materials that are free to redistribute, revise, and remix. Together, we’ll deconstruct the nebulous acronym “OER,” and distinguish what makes a resource free and what makes it open. We’ll discuss examples of several homegrown OERs and hear from the City Tech faculty who developed them.

We’ll also share updates on OER initiatives at City Tech and throughout CUNY, considering the following questions:

• What challenges have faculty encountered while developing or considering developing OERs?

• How can OERs impact student learning? How can they impact the teaching process?

• How might OERs support course coordination and fill the gaps in course sequencing?

• How can you use the OpenLab to create and circulate OERs you design?

• What does the future of OERs and curricular materials look like?

Want to learn more about OERs? Here are a few short pieces for reference:

• City Tech Library’s OER Resource Guide

• “What Do We Mean by Open Education?”  (January 16, 2015). Audrey Watters. Hack Education: The History of the Future of Education Technology.

• “Pedagogy, Technology, and the Example of Open Educational Resources.” (November 9, 2015). Robin DeRosa and Scott Robinson. Educause Review.

• “Open Pedagogy in Biology and Political Science.” (June 14, 2016), Cailean Cooney. Open Pedaogy.

• “Into the Open” (August 5, 2016). Karen Cangiolosi, Professor of Biology, Keene State College

*Image credit: opensource.com

Accessibility, Disability, and Open Digital Pedagogy

Thursday, November 12, 2015, 4:30-6:00pm (Faculty Commons, N227)

*Refreshments will be served

(Please share the invitation with colleagues, and RSVP by commenting on this post)

Join faculty and staff around the college at the next Open Pedagogy event, where we will discuss issues of accessibility and disability in online communities and digital spaces. Together, we’ll explore key issues at stake and brainstorm how we, as faculty and staff, might better serve our students and each other by being aware of and competent in best practices. We will start to think through our open digital pedagogy to become more inclusive of all our members as we teach, research, collaborate, and communicate in open digital spaces. We’ll consider the following questions:

• What do accessibility and disability mean and look like in online digital spaces?

• What is universal design?

• What are our responsibilities (ethical, legal, institutional, personal) to consider accessibility and disability, & implement changes to our pedagogy in response?

• “Why is accessibility often treated as an afterthought” (Hoffman 2014)?

• How can we make our work in open digital spaces more accessible?

Want to learn more about issues of accessibility / disability in open digital pedagogies? Here are a few short pieces for reference:

• “Disability, Design, and the Digital Humanities” (George H. Williams, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012)

• Recent special issue of First Monday on “Disability and the Internet” that is hot off the (digital) press, and explores a wide ranges of issues on the topic (September 2015)

• “Increasing Access and Making Practice More Inclusive through Disability Awareness Training” (Carrie E. Rood and Michelle L. Damiani, Academe, September-October 2015)

• “Accessibility” [From The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)]

*Image credit: Disability Symbols (Wikimedia Commons)