Category Archives: Community&Collaboration

In the Spotlight: Peer Advisement

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This week we’re spotlighting Peer Advisement, a project site on the OpenLab. The main focus of this group is to increase the retention of female students in engineering technology programs.

Despite their focus, the group proudly offers services and resources that may be of interest to all students at City Tech. For example, on the homepage of the site, the group shares various professional development opportunities – including an invitation to attend an HBO networking event where students will meet with employees from the Engineering, Digital Products, Information Services and Recruiting teams, SHPE NYC STEM Career Summit where students can meet representatives from Accenture, AKF, AT&T, Capital One, Dell, HBO, HueCore, Merck, Microsoft, P&G, Turner Construction, Vimeo, and the Graduate School Fair hosted by City Tech’s Honors Scholars Program. While many of these opportunities are geared towards students in engineering technology programs, they have broader appeal.

In fulfilling the main goal of their mission – to promote female student retention in engineering technology programs – the group has identified peer advisors in a number of departments (see below). These peer advisors are available to support fellow students with department-specific tutoring and/or help students navigate the college to find resources and support. Each participating department has their own group on the OpenLab that is linked from the main Peer Advisement site. By going to their group profile you can learn more about who the peer advisors are, when you can meet with them, and what services they can help you with.

Are you a student in one of the departments who has been looking for support? Navigate to and join their group and get involved!

Are you a student or faculty in a engineering department not represented here? Get in touch with the Peer Advisement group to see how you may become a peer advisor in your department!

Are you a student or faculty member in another program of study interested in replicating this or a similar peer-support model in your department? Reach out to the Peer Advisement group to learn more about how they got started!

In the Spotlight: Undergraduate Research

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This week we’re spotlighting Undergraduate Research, a project site that houses resources for students who want to get involved in doing research while at City Tech and for faculty who want to support and mentor those students. For students, undergraduate research is an opportunity to work on campus between classes, learn more about a subject of interest, improve your resume, earn credit or a stipend, and work closely with a faculty member. Interested? There are a number of different opportunities and programs to peruse that might suit your interests and objectives. For faculty, this is an opportunity for you to pass on your knowledge and skills, engage in shared and mutual discovery with students, to support your professional discipline and apply for grants targeting undergraduate institutions.

The site also contains materials that may be of interest to students and faculty beyond those who specifically want to enter into a mentoring/menteeing research relationship. For example, the Library Research Techniques page – offering advice on how to search, locate and cite other research – could be useful for students and faculty in any class. Additionally, the Mentoring Handbook – including insight on benefits, phases, roles, strategies, tools and more related to mentoring or being a mentee – might be of interest to anyone looking for guidance and suggestions on entering into a mentor/mentee relationship.

Be sure to also check out their blog roll on the homepage – which includes additional resources – such as how you might preserve your work on CUNY Academic Works – and opportunities – like the BMI Conference, SUBMERGE’s marine science festival in Hudson River Park, and opportunities to participate in NSF-funded research like Warm-water Aquatic Ecology.

Check out the site today to learn more and get involved!

In the Spotlight: The Ambassador’s Club

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This week we’re spotlighting The Ambassadors Club, a group that aims “to provide opportunities for student officers to learn and hone leadership skills, with an emphasis on event planning and event management”. The Club accomplishes this by helping to plan and staff events for the HMGT department and around the college, “with the intent of fostering and supporting a welcoming and professional environment”.  

On their site you can learn more about current and previous officers, as well as any upcoming events where you can learn more information about the club and upcoming opportunities where you may be able to represent the club and practice your hospitality management skills! Check out the site to see the list of volunteer opportunities for events in October!

Visit the club site today to join and be eligible to participate!

In the Spotlight: Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab

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This week we’re spotlighting Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab, an in-house site managed by the OpenLab Community Team that’s dedicated to sparking and cultivating discussion, and facilitating the sharing of ideas, materials and practices related to open digital pedagogy (ODP) amongst City Tech faculty and staff.

Not sure what ODP is? In their piece Open Digital Pedagogy = Critical Pedagogy, Jody Rosen, OpenLab Co-Director and English Professor at City Tech, and Maura Smale, City Tech Librarian describe it as follows:

Open digital pedagogy is the use of cost-free, publicly available online tools and platforms by instructors and students for teaching, learning, and communicating in support of educational goals, can, as Kris Shaffer has argued, “facilitate student access to existing knowledge, and empower them to critique it, dismantle it, and create new knowledge.”

OpenLab is one of these these “cost-free, publicly available online tools and platforms” that faculty (as well as staff, students, and alumni) at City Tech can use to support their teaching, learning and community-building efforts; and the Open Pedagogy site aims to support their endeavors.d

With this in mind, the site houses a number of different resources aimed to support your work on the OpenLab (and other open digital spaces):

On the Resources page you can find writings penned by City Tech faculty and beyond on topics related ODP such as writing, multimedia pedagogy, annotation, open educational resources, specific assignment ideas, and copyright and attribution. As you’ll notice, not all of these topics are specific to open digital pedagogy, but the resources we provide offer insight into how these practices (around writing or annotation, for example) morph, expand or change in open digital learning contexts. Have something to contribute? Have a question you’d like to discuss with the community? After joining the site, you’re welcome to post and share – and we strongly encourage you to do so!

Pedagogy Profiles is an opportunity to hear more about other faculty’s experiences using and incorporating the OpenLab into their classrooms – how did they get started using the platform, what have they learned along the way, and how do they incorporate it now. Each month we highlight a different faculty member – this month, its Professor Jackie Blain in the English Department. Check out Prof. Blain’s Pedagogy Profile here!

We also host two Open Pedagogy events per semester that touch on various topics related to Open Digital Pedagogy. Our first of the Fall 2018 semester is coming up soon – Thursday Sept 27th @ 4:30p in the Faculty Commons (Namm 227) – and will focus on using open digital pedagogy in gateway courses (Learn more and RSVP). These events are a great opportunity to connect and have face-to-face conversations with other faculty and staff at City Tech about pedagogy and more. Light refreshments are served, and part-time faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation.

We hope your find these resources helpful in your (continued) use of the platform, and we hope to see you at our upcoming event on September 27th!

In the Spotlight: MTEC 3175, Experimental Game Design & Development

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Site header image for MTEC 3175, Experimental Game Design & DevelopmentThis week we’re spotlighting Professor Boisvert’s fall entertainment technology course, MTEC 3175, Experimental Game Design & Development. This course is a “hands-on studio” where students explore various complexities of gameplay development and design through creating prototypes. In short, the course touches on technical game construction, to aesthetics and design (character development, level design), to user experience and more. This course provides a useful case study for thinking about how to use the OpenLab to support your course and student learning, as well as demonstrating the interesting coursework available at our College of Technology.

Integrating Environments

In the context of this course, the OpenLab is one among a suite of “environments” where students in the course will be creating, sharing and engaging course material, broadly speaking; in addition they’ll use GitHub, Slack, Steam and a personal Game Journal. Each of these environments offers a different set of possibilities – for example, GitHub is good for storing, sharing and co-editing files while Slack is good for centralizing communication; Steam is a platform that offers easy access to the latest video games and a community, while a personal journal allows space for personal reflection and the development of ideas. Integrating these separate environments is specific to each course, but could be a useful way of organizing course work and may also be useful in introducing students to platforms they may come to depend on later in their careers.

Blogging

In this context, the OpenLab is a centralizing and public environment where visitors can learn more about the course by accessing course materials provided by Professor Boisvert and by reading through students’ critical reflections via the blog on the homepage. As in other courses, Professor Boisvert uses the blog for low-stakes, reflective and critical thinking writing by students. This third blog post assignment, asks students to re-analyze a game they enjoyed as a child. Explained in another way, this assignment asks students to revisit and think (more) critically about something they know a lot about already. This is specific and useful pedagogical decision that aims get students writing and couch the anxiety that can accompany that practice by asking them to write about something that they explicitly already know a lot about. This is a useful trick many faculty use that not only gets students more comfortable with writing, but also, through sharing experiences, helps students get to know one another and build up a classroom and college community.

Menu Structure / Organizing Site Content

This course site is a good example of a clean, straightforward site design that allows visitors to the site, including students, to easily find the information they’re looking for. Building a site that is more-or-less intuitive and easy for visitors to navigate is one of the challenges of building a site on the OpenLab. Professor Boisvert’s site achieves this through one top-level, navigation menu. By ‘top-level’, I mean that Professor Boisvert doesn’t use any drop down menus. Instead, each menu item opens up to a page where students can find all of the readings or assignments for the course, can read through the syllabus, or find all resources provided by Professor Boisvert. Alternatively, drop-down menus may make a new page for each weekly batch of readings or each separate assignment. Drop-down menus seem appealing at first, but from a user standpoint, they can make the site more difficult to navigate. For one, this means students are going to a different place to find course materials each week, which could get confusing, and it can be easier to end up on the wrong page (reading next week’s readings, for example). Second, drop-down menus bury, hide, and/or conceal information in second- and third-level menu items – a visitor must notice there is a drop-down menu and navigate through it to find the information they are looking for, rather than clicking through to one page for everything. Third, though our sites are responsive (meaning they work on mobile devices) long drop-down menus, or ones with 3 or even 4 levels can run off the screen, rendering them invisible to the visitor trying to access course information and materials.

Follow along with the course this semester to see how student’s ideas develop, and what games they end up developing through this studio!

In the Spotlight: 25,000+ Members!

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Balloons

Image Source: Victor

At the start of this semester, the OpenLab hit a new milestone, reaching 25,000 members (with hundreds more joining since then)! Not too shabby! We,the OpenLab Team, believe this is a moment worth celebrating, and are excited for the opportunity to highlight your accomplishments over the past seven years.

Since the OpenLab was launched in Fall 2011, OpenLab members have:

  • Created (and taught!) approximately 2,067 courses;
  • Built (no, curated!) approximately 6,020 e-Portfolios;
  • Developed (and grown!) approximately 114 clubs, both for faculty/ staff and students;
  • Started (and cultivated!) approximately 2,406 projects;

It’s been quite a ride. Congratulations all!

We would like to thank the City Tech community for your ongoing support of and participation in the OpenLab. It’s called a “lab,” because it’s designed to be a space where faculty, students, staff, and alumni can experiment, collaborate, share, and innovate. The OpenLab is a perpetual work in progress and you all have built the content that improves, challenges and grows City Tech’s unique, open-source digital platform. Thank you!

*Stay tuned for a forthcoming retrospective on the OpenLab: a series of posts this semester, exploring in detail how the OpenLab as grown and changed since its launch, as well as various milestones along the way.

Summer Greetings from the OpenLab!

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Street art found in NYC; NYC New York Brooklyn Street Art Urban Graffiti

Image Source: Nikon D3200

Greetings from the OpenLab and congratulations to all on the closing of another successful academic year!

While our weekly “Spotlight” blog series will go on hiatus for the season, we wanted to remind you of the sites we featured this past year and encourage you to check them out if you haven’t already done so.

Spring 2018 Spotlight Posts

Fall 2017 Spotlight Posts

We also spotlighted two new initiatives of the OpenLab this year…

…and improved our practices and built out our documentation around ongoing initiatives:

In addition to reviewing these posts from this past year, you can find a full curated list of all sites that have been spotlighted in our *new* Spotlight Archive. This archive offers visitors 3 curated lists to help them sort through the posts:

  1. For everyone (By type of site – course, project, club, portfolio)
  2. For faculty/staff
  3. For students

As always, we also encourage you to check out our in-house sites:

The OpenLab Community Team will continue to offer email support over the summer – please contact us with questions or concerns.

We are also beginning to post our fall programming. August workshops for Faculty/Staff have been posted – RSVP & mark your calendars! We will be in touch as we get more events and workshops on our calendar.

Wishing you all a very happy summer!

The OpenLab Community Team

In the Spotlight: OER for Africana Folklore (Part 3 of 3)

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Header image for Africana Folklore class.As the final post of our 3-part series on OERs, this week we’re spotlighting Professor Javiela Evangelista’s OER for Africana Folklore: Afr1130. As mentioned the last two weeks, the general description of OERs seems straightforward – open and freely accessible educational resources. However in practice OERs are more ambiguous. This series aims to highlight some key features of OERs by spotlighting a few OERs being built by City Tech Faculty.

While the last two weeks have focused on clarity and organization (Part 1), and flexibility (Part 2), what Professor Evangelista’s site highlights is that multimedia materials are often an important part of OERs.

In general, teaching and learning with multimedia has been shown to increase comprehension and retention (i.e. Aloraini, 2012). In Africana Folklore, Professor Evangelista pairs a video, or a few, with a set of readings each week. These are not only intended to supplement, but are an important part of the course material. They fill in gaps in understanding and bring new information to the fore, while also reinforcing other material assigned that week.

The consistent use of videos in her course is more pronounced in the context of the class field trip to Democracy Now!, and its related assignment. Democracy Now! is an independent media outlet that highlights social justice stories and news that are too often overlooked or misreported by mainstream media outlets. In the related assignment, Professor Evangelista asks students to compare independent and mainstream media outlets and to think about how and why they represent similar issues differently, and to what end.

This field trip and assignment draw a contemporary parallel to the ways in which Africana Folklore “highlights the survival of African descendant people (and their stories) by way of oral, material and customary traditions”. To what extent are independent media outlets deploying similar strategies toward similar goals?

Moreover, the field trip and assignment conveys lessons of media literacy without saying as much. This seems like an important opportunity for critical reflection on the use of videos as course material, as well as how students may use videos to supplement their independent learning at home. This drives home an important lesson inherent in multimedia pedagogy – for use in your OERs or otherwise – and of this time period in history: that it’s not just about the incorporation of multimedia text into our teaching and learning, but also the critical and responsible approach with which we do so.

For more on multimedia pedagogy from the OpenLab, check out our Spring 2017 Event on the topic (includes external readings), and read the recap, which includes additional examples of multimedia pedagogy on the OpenLab and around CUNY.

This concludes our 3-part series of OERs.

  • Did you miss our first two weeks? Learn more about how organization and clarity (Part 1), and flexibility (Part 2) factor in when building an OER. Part 1 also includes and overview of OERs in general and at City Tech.
  • To browse more OERs on the OpenLab, or learn more to create your own, check out City Tech’s OER Fellowship project site. This site includes external readings, information about the fellowship, and a link to each OER made through this fellowship.

In the Spotlight: Pedagogy Profiles

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This week we’re spotlighting a new blog series on the OpenLab, Pedagogy Profiles. Pedagogy Profiles is an OpenLab blog series that highlights our educators here at City Tech. Each month we’ll feature different faculty members who will share the diverse and creative ways they are using the OpenLab to support their pedagogy.

Through a series of questions, educators are asked to reflect on their experiences using the OpenLab to support a range of pedagogy-related activities, from supporting a specific course to coordinating curriculum within a learning community. In their responses, educators discuss specific affordances of the OpenLab and the kind of course structure and culture they’ve been able to realize by integrating the OpenLab into their practice.

Through this series, we hope to give educators a chance to reflect on their pedagogy in a public arena, and to engage other educators in critical and transformative dialogue about teaching and learning. Our hope for Pedagogy Profiles is that it will further enrich the ongoing conversations around pedagogy already taking place at City Tech and across CUNY.

This series is hosted on one of our in-house sites, Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab. This site serves as forum where the City Tech community can ask questions, stimulate discussion, and share teaching materials, resources, and ideas related to teaching and learning on the OpenLab.

To view our latest featured profile, look in the blog or sidebar on our homepage. You can also review past posts by visiting our Archive.

Want to nominate a colleague or professor to be featured? Contact us today!

In the Spotlight: Opening Gateways

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Opening gateways logo and imtro post about the projectThis week we’re spotlighting the Opening Gateways project site. Opening Gateways is a 5-year, $3.2 million grant funded1 project collaboration with BMCC that “supports student success in mathematics courses that serve as gateways to STEM disciplines”. As in other disciplines, gateway courses leading to STEM fields have critical implications for the college and life trajectories of students. As the team points out in their Project Abstract, “repeated failure [can] deflect students from their chosen major [or] delay or even end their journey to a degree”.

The Opening Gateways project takes a three-pronged approach to addressing this challenge:

  1. Open-source Digital Technologies: WebWork and the OpenLab are open-source platforms for teaching, learning and collaborating. WebWork replaces the ‘email professor with question’ button, and instead sends students to a platform where they can get help from not only the professor but other students – in their class and more. The OpenLab team is working on integrating WebWork into their WordPress-based and BuddyPress-based platform, and then will share the code broadly as open source and available. The OpenLab will also support the OERs and courses among City Tech faculty.
  2. Open Educational Resources: Participating faculty will or have assembled open educational resources on specific mathematical topics. These OERs are open, publically available and free, and serve as a good alternative to (sometimes prohibitively) costly textbooks. See those created in 2016/2017.
  3. Active Learning Pedagogies. A pedagogical intervention in the form of a faculty seminar where a cohort will be introduced to a variety of active learning techniques, and the technologies involved in supporting this project. Each seminar at City Tech has a corresponding site on the Openlab.

The project tracks their progress each year – see Year 1 and Year 2.

As noted earlier, this project aims to support student success in STEM gateway courses. The challenges to success in these gateway courses, are true of other degree paths.

Opening Gateways uses a multi-tiered approach that involves faculty training, technological development of a collaborative digital learning environment, and the creation of support resources for students to resolving these challenges.

How can you imagine better supporting student success in gateway course for your degree path?

Let’s Discuss!: Join us on this Thursday, March 22nd, from 5:30pm – 7:00pm in the Faculty Commons (N227) for an Open Pedagogy event titled, “Gateway Courses in Open Digital Pedagogy” that will continue this conversation. Light refreshments will be served, and part-time faculty will be eligible for a stipend (Event info and/or RSVP).

UPDATE: In anticipation of the impending snowstorm, we’re postponing this event. We’ll work on rescheduling and will let you know when this event is back on our calendar.

1Funded by the US Dept of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions program (Title V).