Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab

On Thursday March 23 we convened with faculty and staff from City Tech and across CUNY to discuss “Multimedia Pedagogy Across the Disciplines”. 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 evening’s conversation with two questions:

1. What does “multimedia” mean in your discipline?
2. What does it mean to “compose” or “make” 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 one’s 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.
• Roboquin: This project site also operates as an archive, housing both the plans for design and construction and travels of their roboquin, properly named RoboQueen. For example, below is a video of RoboQueen at the World Maker Faire.
• 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 student’s ePortfolio, this blog entry documents the student’s 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 “Scavenger Hunt” 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. Baruch’s 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 couldn’t, we hope this post brings you into the discussion – at least partially. Moreover, we’d 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.

On the evening of Thursday February 23 we gathered with faculty and staff from around City Tech and across CUNY to discuss “Annotating Texts in Open Digital Pedagogy”. 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 “Marginalia”, 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 “anyone [had] heard of Hypothesis”. As OpenLab’s own Phil Kreniske noted – this was a, “good segway” 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 Tech’s 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 Monica’s 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:

1. Independent and collective reflection on close reading and annotation of an analog piece can facilitate a grounded, focused conversation on the practice of annotation.
2. 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.
3. 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 OpenLab’s 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.

• • Genius: The Great Gatsby (Chapter 1)
  • Soundcloud: This American Life: #550, 3 Miles
  • Social paper: The Cyborg University as Reproductive Organ of the Cyborg World
  • Comment Press: undead

Thank you to all who were able to join us for this conversation! For those who couldn’t, we hope this post brings you into the discussion – at least partially. Moreover, we’d 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 “MULTIMEDIA IN OPEN DIGITAL PEDAGOGY”. 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. 

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!

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 wasn’t 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 haven’t already, don’t forget to “join” 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:

• “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)

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 CityTech’s 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 we’re 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 haven’t already, don’t forget to “join” Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab to stay in the loop about upcoming events and discussions about open digital pedagogy at City TEch.

For more reading on OERs:

• Check out City Tech Library’s resource guide on OERs
• “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

Or Become an OER Fellow! The call for Spring 2017 fellows will go out October 17, 2016.