The OpenLab participates in a vibrant education-focused community on Twitter, and we invite you to join us! You can follow @CityTechOpenLab.
We can also bring some of that vibrant community here to our Open Pedagogy site to share ideas and expand the conversation. Here are a few recent tweets and twitter threads that offer useful insights as we approach the start of the semester:
About PDFs and accessibility:
If you tweet a flyer image for an event and don't add alt text, blind people won't get the details they need to know to come to the event. But if the alt text simply say "event flyer," they still won't know to come. The alt text needs to give them information to be able to come.
About classrooms and classroom furniture being inaccessible–and finding advocates:
A student I don’t know approached me and told me they were embarrassed to tell me something. They finally admitted that they’d left their second class of the day because there wasn’t a desk they could fit in.
I tell this story for a few reasons:
— The Madwoman in the Classroom (@heymrsbond) August 16, 2022
About college students as adults, not children:
Professors: stop calling your students "kids" – treat them like grownups (since they are, afterall, grownups)
On October 29-30, teachers and researchers from around CUNY came together online for the annual Coordinated Undergraduate Education Conference, this year coupled with the annual Open Educational Resources Showcase. Keynotes from Dr. Robin DeRosa and Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani highlighted issues of equity, access, and open pedagogy for staff and faculty working with OERs at CUNY, and participants shared many resources and ideas between campuses and projects.
The OpenLab team presented on two panels to highlight our ongoing work around access and accessibility in open digital pedagogy. The first panel focused on reflecting on our Open Pedagogy discussion series on the many aspects of access and accessibility in open digital pedagogy from 2019-2020, and Digital Pedagogy Fellow Olivia Wood wrote a great recap of this panel.
The slides for this panel are linked below!
Click image to view slideshow
The second panel, facilitated by Cailean Cooney, OER Coordinator at City Tech, and Elvis Bakaitis, Adjunct Reference Librarian, highlighted discussion between former OER faculty fellows Prof. Colleen Birchett (English) and Prof. Christopher Swift (Humanities), who shared their work developed during and since their OER Fellowship, and OpenLab Digital Pedagogy Fellow Jesse Rice-Evans (me!) who talked about access and OERs beyond zero-textbook-cost courses.
Prof. Birchett shared her OER site from her summer 2019 course “Home Away from Home: Stories from the Diaspora,” an ENGL 2001: Introduction to Literature (Fiction) course, and discussed how she incorporated OER materials and open pedagogy into her course
Prof. Swift discussed his OER site, THE 2280, “History of Theatre,” which uses mapping software and place-based pedagogies to explore the role of New York City theaters with students through the NYC Theater Research Project. He brought up some of the difficulties of place-based learning during distance learning.
I felt it was important to contextualize the choices that faculty and staff make in creating and using OERs to address some issues of inequity in higher education. To address this, I shared selections from my piece “Open Access Pedagogy: A Manifesto,” which is published in full on the Anti-Ableist Composition Collective site.
I pose a politicization of open access that centers the lived experiences of people doing the teaching and learning.The scholars I am centering here (see bibliography) are speaking to a widespread practice of centering access pedagogy—pedagogy that is culturally responsive, flexible, and reimagines “rigor” as intellectual curiosity, critical rhetorical skill-building, and an embrace of non-normative English.
All participants highlighted how OERs and open pedagogy have influenced their teaching, learning, and research. View the slides below!
I am super excited to share our recently published article in the The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. It expresses a blogging assignment that served as a low-stakes activity that encourages students to make sense of the social, emotional and bureaucratic challenges in their transition to college, and simultaneously develops digital literacy.
Philip Kreniske, The HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University
Karen Goodlad, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Jennifer Sears, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
Sandra Cheng, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
