Openlab Launch: An Unqualified Success!
Last week was the OpenLab launch. It was a beautiful event, really. Many members of our community were there, and many new faces came too. And there were balloons!
First came our wonderful opening speakers—all members of our CityTech community–including our own Maura Smale:
(twitter images via @lwaltzer)
After that, keynote speaker Jim Groom gave an engaging, accessible, and above all enthusiastic talk that combined, in no particular order, references to the 2pac Shakur ‘hologram’ at Cochella a few weeks ago, My Little Pony, Emo versus Punk, the future of 3-D printing and their effect on lost legos, vulgarity and systems of measurement, college writing and, above all, open, community-based digital platforms like our own OpenLab.
In fact, Jim says everything we could say (and includes his presentations slides) much more eloquently on his own blog, which you should follow and can check out here.
Among all of his provocative comments, the one that sticks with me the most was something like “don’t think of it as an academic project, think of it as a community project.” A nice reminder that the OpenLab isn’t just a place for our classes, but a place to engage with our friends, our community, and the wider world. Much much thanks again to Jim Groom for coming, and to everyone who was there.
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Tutorial: Image resizing
(Image by Inkaroad via Creative Commons)
A few weeks back we posted an image resizing tutorial here on the OpenLab. While that was a simple solution, it came with an interesting problem: each time an image is resized, it creates a copy of that image in the files for the site, which means that while we were hoping to avoid hitting the size limits for courses and clubs and projects, resizing actually brings one closer to it. We’re looking into alternative solutions, but for the time being it’s surely a good idea to resize images before posting them to your site, and to do so using a third party application like Photoshop, Gimp, or one of the many simpler and easier online freeware applications like PicMonkey. We’ve posted some information on how to do that in an addendum to our original tutorial. You can find that here.
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And finally: keep an eye out here for opportunities for a coming announcement for students to work with us on the OpenLab; there are workshops on Wednesday and Thursday of this week; you can find out more about that here; have a wonderful week; and contact us with any questions!
The launch party was indeed fabulous. I am sure the City Tech Community was not aware of Open Lab and all it’s possibilities. I am not a “tech” person and I am very impressed with Open Lab. I love the fact that it is in living color. Bb is now so dull in comparison. I think my students are going to be surprised at how much they can do and share on the Open Lab.