Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event, where weâll be discussing copyright and attribution in open digital pedagogy. Working with and amongst our students and colleagues via digital pedagogy raises exciting possibilities for sharing, remixing and evolving the pedagogical work of the university. In addition, it raises important questions about intellectual property, scholarship, pedagogy, and the nature of digital communication. During this event, weâll have a discussion about how to best cultivate an ethic of sharing and reuse while creating a community around attribution.
Our conversation will be guided by the following questions:
What is a Creative Commons license and how does it differ from traditional copyright?
What are the ethics of sharing and using the materials we produce as a community of scholars and educators?
What does Creative Commons and open licensing mean for our pedagogical practices?
How do we communicate to our students that their work is also intellectual property, to which the ethics of copyright, attribution and sharing apply?
Want to learn more about copyright and attribution in ODP? Here are a few short pieces for reference:
Lawson, Konrad, M. âCiting Syllabi.âThe Chronicle of Higher Education: ProfHacker, August 21, 2014.
ACERT, Hunterâs Center for Teaching and Learning, is pleased to host three CUNY colleagues whose work embodies the spirit of openness in scholarship and teaching. âOpenâ is a multivalent and emerging concept in scholarship and teaching. Openness, in this sense might point to: authorsâ protection of readersâ right to share work via a Creative Commons license; Web 2.0 affordances that invite readers to comment or annotate critical texts; teachersâ 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 & Womenâs 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 âdigital theater for history and social justice,â see Shellyâs 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 âunique recreations and reinterpretationsâ that âmake pre-existing art more accessible to the public.â For more of Michaelâs antic and thought-provoking work, see his blog.
Open to the CUNY community. Wine and cheese reception to follow.
On Thursday March 23 we convened with faculty and staff from City Tech and across CUNY to discuss âMultimedia Pedagogy Across the Disciplinesâ. This conversation focused on a broad conception of multimedia that spanned the digital and material, the textual and textured – and the remixing across these perceived boundaries. Though a challenging approach, we were committed to using a definition of multimedia that reflected the diversity of mediums that our college of technology engages – from images, sound and video to materials used for physical construction, 3-D printing and makerspaces.
With this in mind, we began the eveningâs conversation with two questions:
What does âmultimediaâ mean in your discipline?
What does it mean to âcomposeâ or âmakeâ in your discipline.
In the process of discussing a variety of mediums and approaches to composition, which ranged from stories, images, tables and maps, to dental x-rays and cavity fillings, we also discussed data and its relationship to multimedia representation. In the social sciences, multimedia representations of data might be used to construct an argument or compel a reader to engage with oneâs argument, whereas in dental hygiene these representations of data might be used to explain to a patient the state of their dental health. In government, one attendant discussed the importance of multimedia representations of data in deciphering truth and fact from lies, especially in this political climate.
Next, Andy Mckinney of the OpenLab team, shared some interesting examples of how different courses were engaging multimedia pedagogy in their courses. These examples, listed below, show the range of how multimedia pedagogy can manifest – from curating, archiving and preserving digital or content, to promoting and sharing a digitized representation of a material project.
Center for Performative Design and Engineering Technology: This Center uses the OL to introduce the City Tech community to their not-yet-built building. OL and multimedia technologies enable the Center to show themselves to the world before they are in the physical world, and moreover, to share a number of resources – modules and tutorials – with the community.
Fuse Lab: Though the project ended in 2015, their OL site operates as a multimedia archive that preserves the work of the NSF grant funded project indefinitely, and allows it to continue to share its range of resources with a larger community.
Serious Change through Play: This site highlights the work of their Community Diversity Workshops wherein they ask students to use legos to rethink their relationship to the City Tech community and its expansive diversity while building strategies for communicating across these interconnected communities. Learn more about their play-centered approach in their Nucleus article.
Being in Brooklyn: This 3-year-old course site is a great example of a student-generated multimedia project (incorporating maps, video, audio, images and text) that both engaged students in re-presenting the material environment through digital technologies and (thus) has a lasting public presence.
Laser Harp Journal: A part of a studentâs ePortfolio, this blog entry documents the studentâs physical construction and testing of a harp that elicits sound through the use of layers. Not only is her documentation on the OL multimedia, but the actual harp required wood, metal, electronics and a computer hook-up, and LASERS.
Phil Kreniske, also of the OpenLab, also highlighted the work of members of our student blogging team on The Buzz. All of these students use at least a combination of images and text in their weekly posts. Phil used this as a segway into discussing the importance of understanding the multimedia forms of communication students use with one another in both formal and informal spaces today, and the significance of trying to find ways of incorporating this understanding into our classes and assignments. He himself has aimed to accomplish this through a âScavenger Huntâ activity wherein he asks his psychology students to take and reflect on photos that represent an important concept discussed in class.
We finished the evening off with an example of where we hope multimedia pedagogy can go at City Tech in the future – and where it IS going in the next few months on another CUNY Campus. Baruchâs VOCAT platform, shared by Craig Stone of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the college, is a tool that allows students and faculty to SHARE AND ANNOTATE images and video. Initially conceptualized as a way to help students build presentation skills by reviewing and marking-up videos of themselves presenting, the platform today is expanding to allow for a wide-variety of multimedia assignments, uploads and annotations.
Thank you to all who were able to join us for this conversation! For those who couldnât, we hope this post brings you into the discussion â at least partially. Moreover, weâd like to direct your attention to a set of articles for further reading, found at the bottom of the initial event post. Lastly, we encourage everyone to continue this conversation here on this blog and during future events.
This was our final Open Pedagogy event of the semester, but we encourage you to continue the conversation about this event or Open Pedagogy more broadly by joining and engaging with us through our OpenLab site, Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab.
Join the OpenLab Team, City Tech faculty and staff, and CUNY colleagues at our next Open Pedagogy event where weâll 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. Â
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:
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
On the evening of Thursday February 23 we gathered with faculty and staff from around City Tech and across CUNY to discuss âAnnotating Texts in Open Digital Pedagogyâ. Due to the expanding repertoire of digital technologies and the rising costs of textbooks, there is pressure to use digital texts in classrooms. However, an important question for many educators is whether students can and do engage with digital texts in the same way they can and do with analog texts. This Open Pedagogy event aimed to discuss the challenges and opportunities of annotation with digital texts.
Our evening began with the collective reading of âMarginaliaâ, a poem by Billy Collins (1941) about the plethora of experiences and interactions that take place in and around the margins of texts. This text was used as the basis of a think, pair, share exercise that asked participants first to independently annotate the analog text, and then to collectively reflect on the facility of and approach to annotating texts with the group. Some of the main points discussed were about the intention of annotation – for whom, by whom, in relation to whom, how our relationships, interpretations and annotations of a texts can change over time, and how skillful annotation can offer a reader a sense of ownership and agency relative to the text and in relation to reading and learning more broadly. Towards the end of this conversation, a faculty member from John Jay asked the group if âanyone [had] heard of Hypothesisâ. As OpenLabâs own Phil Kreniske noted – this was a, âgood segwayâ into our conversation about digital texts, which would focus on the digital annotation tool for much of the remainder to the evening.
Monica Berger, Instruction and Reference Librarian of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library and a member of the committee that supports City Tech OER Fellows started us off with an overview of Hypothesis. As Monica began to show us, Hypothesis is a digital tool that allows for individual or collective annotation of a digital text – whether a website or PDF. Monica highlighted the web version of Hypothesis, but also clarified that Hypothesis is available as a Plugin through some WordPress platforms – including City Techâs OpenLab.
Anke Geerstman, a PhD Candidate in the Comparative Literature Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center (also at GC) and Instructor at Baruch College (CUNY) followed Monicaâs introduction with a nuanced conversation about social reading as a pedagogical practice and examples of using Hypothesis with her hybrid course via a course site hosted on Blog@Baruch. Anke demonstrated how she had used Hypothesis to have students collectively annotate and highlight text and to provide students with close edits and feedback on posted writing assignments. Students also used Hypothesis on their own to sign up for class presentations on Greek Theatre. Ultimately, Hypothesis and other digital annotation tools introduce an(other) opportunity to socialize and collectivize the annotation – and more broadly, learning – process.
While we looked at the course site live together, the conversation shifted to thinking about annotation as a skill, and one that hinges on another skill, close reading. There was consensus that while using digital annotation tools has interesting opportunities for online social annotation, there is a learning curve and a need for scaffolding. Our conversation highlights a few things to consider in this process:
Independent and collective reflection on close reading and annotation of an analog piece can facilitate a grounded, focused conversation on the practice of annotation.
When you begin to work with the digital annotation tool, support students in exercising different approaches to annotation and close reading with guiding questions and tips.
Annotation is a hierarchy of summarizing, analyzing and synthesizing; these can also be scaffolded into assignments and exercises throughout the semester.
Another important point, and counterpoint to the social aspect of digital annotation was the consideration of annotation as a personal and reflective activity. Being intentional about what you want students to get out of the activities matters, and should dictate whether you do the assignment digitally or not. That said, Anke pointed out that Hypothesis does have privacy settings, and other digital annotation tools offer varying degrees of privacy as well.
Overall the conversation was very generative, and we ran out of time to even begin the final portion of the event, wherein OpenLabâs own Andy McKinney was going to give the group an overview of a sampling of digital annotation tools. We hope to be able to cover these in future workshops, particularly given the interest in digital annotation and social reading expressed last night.
Thank you to all who were able to join us for this conversation! For those who couldnât, we hope this post brings you into the discussion – at least partially. Moreover, weâd like to direct your attention to a set of articles for further reading, found at the bottom of the initial event post. Lastly, we encourage everyone to continue this conversation here on this blog and during future events.
Our NEXT OPEN PEDAGOGY EVENT is in one month, on THURSDAY MARCH 23RD in the Faculty Commons (N227) from 5:30pm – 7:00pm. That evening we will discuss âMULTIMEDIA IN OPEN DIGITAL PEDAGOGYâ. We hope you can join us!
Light refreshments will be served and part-time City Tech faculty receive a stipend for attending. RSVP coming soon.Â
In the meantime, we encourage you to join Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab by visiting our course profile and check out the materials and discussions taking place on the site!
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 weâll 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, weâll 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.
Weâll 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:
On Thursday night we gathered to engage with questions of Writing Across the Curriculum!
We wondered about:
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?
Writing Fellow Elisa Jane Boyton opened the conversation with a discussion of Writing and Social Media. Boynton shared an exciting assignment where undergraduates told the story of Jane Eyre on Instagram! The assignment intended to create a place for students to engage in alternative and creative storytelling practices, but ended up also inspiring them to engage the material in complex and sophisticated ways.
Rebecca Devers, WAC Co-Coordinator and Assistant Professor of English discussed Using the OpenLab to Bridge Creative Writing and Critical Analysis. Dever’s demonstrated how her students write and then use literary analysis to respond to their classmates fictional narratives on the OpenLab.
Marianna Bonanome, WAC Co-Coordinator and Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, presented her experiences Incorporating Low-Stakes Writing in a STEM Class. Bonanome talked about how although she wasnât trained to incorporate writing, when she did she found that it provided a way for students to interact with course content, connect new concepts with previous knowledge and retain key concepts.
This was our final Open Pedagogy event for the fall and we are planning two more for the spring. So please be in touch with ideas, reach out, stop by our office hours or come to a workshop! And if you havenât already, donât forget to âjoinâ Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab to stay in the loop about upcoming events and discussions about open digital pedagogy at City Tech.
Want to learn more about writing-to-learn strategies and open digital pedagogies? Here are a few short pieces for reference:
Join faculty and staff around the college at the next Open Pedagogy event, where we will be partnering with City Techâs 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 weâll 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, weâll 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:
Last Thursday evening we held the first Open Pedagogy event of the semester, Open Educational Resources at City Tech. The event centered around presentations of self-developed OERs from three of CityTechâs OER Fellows, Ari Maller, David Lee, Sue Brandt, and Andrew Parker, Opening Gateways Co-Director of OER Development. The presentations sparked a lively conversation about the about the joys and challenges OERs present, and the potential they hold for our classrooms here at CityTech.
To recap:
Assistant Professor and City Tech librarian Cailean Cooney opened the event by contrasting open educational resources (OER) with the average amount a college student spends on textbooks a year ($1,200!). As many attendees concurred, textbook fees often prevent students from completing course readings or assignments, or present serious obstacles to doing so. OERs, which are free and openly licensed (public domain, Creative Commons) educational materials that can be used for teaching – as well as learning, research and other purposes – help students circumvent these prohibitive costs when accessing course material. Faculty noted that when they used OERs, as compared to traditional textbooks, students were able to access materials and complete courses more regularly. Presenters also commented on and shared how OERs allowed them to include more interactive elements into their class, including movie and audio clips, as well as allowed them more flexibility than a traditional textbook in terms of crafting the content for their course. Relatedly, Sue Brandt discussed how her OER allowed her to keep course content current in a way that traditional textbooks could not, David Lee discussed using learning management systems in tandem with the OpenLab, while Ari Maller and Andrew Parker highlighted the flexibility of updating assignments year to year to avoid cheating.
The discussion also highlighted OER-related anxieties and challenges. In particular, navigating licensure agreements and WordPress as a technological tool were of utmost of concern. Presenters shared their insights on navigating these domains, while the OpenLab Team chimed in to ensure the group that we are here to answer questions such as these through our workshops, office hours and email support.
Beyond the content of the presentations, OpenLab Community Facilitator Andy McKinney initiated a discussion about the potential for synergies between open pedagogy and OERs with respect to the potential for student-professor collaborations in the creation of OERs. For example, by building a shared resource like a glossary or even a set of test review questions, faculty can use open pedagogy techniques to collaborate with students to build OERs that have value beyond that particular class. This elicited much interest from the group and is something weâre looking forward to discussing more in the future.
All in all, this event was a tremendous success! Thank you to everyone who participated!
We look forward to seeing you at our next Open Pedagogy event with Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) on November 3rd, 5:30-7:00pm in the Faculty Commons (N227). If you havenât already, donât forget to âjoinâ Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab to stay in the loop about upcoming events and discussions about open digital pedagogy at City TEch.
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, weâll deconstruct the nebulous acronym “OER,” and distinguish what makes a resource free and what makes it open. Weâll discuss examples of several homegrown OERs and hear from the City Tech faculty who developed them.
Weâll 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:
teaching materials that are free to redistribute, revise, and remix. Together, weâll deconstruct the nebulous acronym “OER,” and distinguish what makes a resource free and what makes it open. Weâll discuss examples of several homegrown OERs and hear from the City Tech faculty who developed them.
