Community&Collaboration – Page 7

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

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: Typography Design III COMD 2427, Brooklyn Historical Society

name of project site on background of mosaic of student-created posters, This week we’re spotlighting the Typography Design III COMD 2427: Brooklyn Historical Society site. This project site showcases posters created and designed by City Tech students as part of an assignment in Professor John De Santis’ typography design class. The assignment aims to simulate a professional scenario where the student is the designer and the Brooklyn Historical Society is the client. Similar to what this may look like in the real world, students are asked to complete a creative brief, conduct research about their client and their client’s needs, to brainstorm multiple ideas for their design concept before choosing one to refine, to give and receive design critique with peers, and finally to finalize their poster based on feedback before giving a final presentation to the class outlining their final concept as related to their research and design choices. In addition to helping students develop their typography skills, this assignment aims to equip students with professional skills like client research conceptualization.

In addition to showcasing high quality student work, the Brooklyn Historical Society project site demonstrates a unique use of the OpenLab. The project site houses posters created by students across 6 sections of the same course, and is used in conjunction with private, individual course sites. This structure offers students a private space and closed community with which to develop their posters, while also creating a public-facing site to share completed work. In the same vein as the structure of the assignment, this use of the OpenLab also seems to simulate the professional environment design students may be walking into upon graduation.

To learn more about how Professor De Santis uses the OpenLab and his philosophy and intentions behind doing so, check out Pedagogy Profiles, a new blog series created by the OpenLab Community Team that aims to highlight and provoke discussion around the pedagogy of educators here at City Tech. Our first post features Professor De Santis!

In the Spotlight: Pedagogy Profiles

colorful geometric abstract painting — Source: stock.tookapic.com

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: Ink Club

Logo for Ink Club This week we’re spotlighting the Ink Club, an expanding group of student-illustrators and -artists who are growing community around their love of the craft of storytelling. Accepting students of all levels and experience, the Ink Club offers support and opportunities to collaborate for students who want to develop and hone their craft. Specifically they hold weekly meetings, offer portfolio-building and professional development opportunities (including a visit with the full-service animation company Titmouse, evidenced by image below), and house a curated a set of resources on their site.

View this post on Instagram

Thanks so much to @titmouseinc for letting Ink Club into their home! It was really a wonderful experience and great insight for us all. #comdinkclub @comd_citytech

A post shared by Ink Club (@citytechink) on Mar 23, 2018 at 11:13am PDT

Recently, the group has been working on an anthology zine, a book of illustrations and short comics arranged around the theme of ‘Zodiac’. Copies of the zine will be printed for contributing members and sold at future events to raise funds for and share the work of the group. Relatedly, the group tabled this past weekend at the MoCCA Fest (Manhattan’s largest independent comics, cartoon and animation festival), where they showcased their anthology and the members sold pieces of their artwork.

View this post on Instagram

IT HAS BEGUN! Stop by F210! #moccafest #citytechink #getit @comd_citytech @soi128

A post shared by Ink Club (@citytechink) on Apr 7, 2018 at 9:03am PDT

Interested? Drop by or get in touch. The group “typically meet[s] every Thursday, at 12:45-2:15pm, in room Namm 1122.” Or, if you have questions, contact them (citytechinkclub [at] gmail [dot] com).

Just a fan? View their gallery, subscribe to their site (click ‘Join Now’ under the avatar or profile image on their OpenLab profile and/or follow them on social media (Instagram, Facebook).

In the Spotlight: The Buzz

Logo for the Buzz This week we’re spotlighting The Buzz, our student community team. These City Tech students blog weekly about their experiences at City Tech and beyond. Through their stories, they share challenges and lessons-learned as they navigate the world, and the micro-worlds of peer fashion, life-family balance, the diverse world of tea, the converging past and present of the theater district, gentrifying neighborhoods and change, life after City Tech, approaching the future with intentionality, and finding support in difficult times. Learn more about the topics they tackle in the tag cloud on the homepage.

Group shot of our Student Community Team. — “Meet the Queens of The Buzz”. Left to Right: Robine, Cherishe, Genny, Sam, Pebbles, Sabrina, Brianna. Image & Quote by: Student Blogger Nefertiti ‘Neffi’ Francis

As you’ll read in their bios, each blogger brings their own experiences and unique flavor to their writing and the selection of stories they tell: Sabrina brings life and analysis to the City’s architecture, while Neffi offers advice and strategies for success, for example. The group has also tackled topics together by identifying a common writing theme for the week or month. In the past, the team took on the challenge of unpacking topics like what the practice of writing means to them. This week, the all-girl cast is celebrating Women’s History Month with posts honoring the important women and positions on feminism that they admire and aspire to embody.

Through their posts (so far!), these women have acknowledged the important work of a range of women spanning history – from Beyonce and Michelle Obama to Sojourner Truth and Coretta Scott King (coming soon!). What I have found to be particularly powerful are the connections and comparisons the writers make between culturally well-known women, like the Women of Wakanda and those listed above, and the less-well-known-but-ever-important women who have held their lives, families and communities together over generations, including their mothers, grandmothers, aunties, sisters and friends. As in the preceding weeks, this week’s posts promise to pack a stimulating and intellectual punch – be sure to tune in!

Want to get alerts when they post? Receive email updates by joining their site as a member (click ‘Join Now’ under the avatar on their profile page) and/or follow them on Twitter (@CityTechOpenLab).

Want to become (or recommend a student to become) a blogger? The Buzz is hiring for next year! Be on the lookout for the hiring call – coming in a few weeks!

In the Spotlight: Opening Gateways

Opening gateways logo and imtro post about the project This 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:

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.
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.
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).

In the Spotlight: The Gowanus Project

Black and white photo of Gowanus Canal and some surrounding built environment. This week we’re spotlighting The Gowanus Project. This project explores the neighborhood and the history of its namesake, the Gowanus Canal, from four angles: arts and community, community and displacement, green infrastructure, and public space. Each section has curated images, an outline, an annotated bibliography and a podcast. Together, the visitor is taken on a multisensory adventure of the neighborhood that explores the past and present of the neighborhood, and the main contentions forming its future.

This project is the culmination of a semester-long inquiry into the Gowanus Canal led by Professors Nora Almeida and Amira Joelson for their LIB/Arch 2205 course. Over the course of the semester, students became ‘experts’ on the canal and its history through readings, podcasts, documentaries, and site visits. They digested their growing knowledge of the canal through written site reports summarizing their visits, and snapping photos and sketching out specific features of the surrounding built environment.

On a technical level, this project is an excellent example of how to transform coursework into a publically interesting and useful project. For those of us who use the OpenLab, at the end of the semester our course sites are often full of interesting insights from our students. However, the content remains organized for a classroom audience. In some cases, this works – allowing another outside visitor to review and maybe even take your course. Nora and Amira’s approach to using the OpenLab for this course offers an alternative. By reorganizing the content on your site, or creating a separate project site as Nora and Amira did in this case, you can configure students’ insights in a way that is more legible to an external audience.

This project also makes an important pedagogical pivot worth noting; using the OpenLab, it reworks traditional ‘learning’ relationships and re-situates students in the domain of public knowledge. In our classrooms, students are often situated as ‘the learners’ – those who take in information. This project, however, uses the OpenLab to also situate students as the knowers, and as the producers, curators, and sharers of knowledge. In many ways, this re-situating represents an important potentiality of open digital pedagogy and what can be achieved on the OpenLab, and we encourage you to consider if this is a value you can achieve in your courses as well.

In the Spotlight: CUNY and the UN: A Partnership

Multiple flags representing different countries flying at full mast. — Profile picture for the site.

This week we’re spotlight the CUNY and the UN: A Partnership project site. This site represents the year-long efforts of two City Tech faculty in mathematics – Professor Marianna Bonanome and Professor Samar ElHitti – in forming “a partnership that can propel progress toward the global education goal (SDG4) between CUNY, the country’s largest public university and the UN”. More specifically, their aim was to “[build] an understanding within the CUNY student population of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, SDG$, and [seed] a movement of informed youth advocates in local, national and international education spaces.” Through conversations with the Paris GEM Report team at UNESCO, the CUNY Youth Ambassador (CYA) role was formed.

The yearly-appointed CYA plays a critical role in spreading awareness about the sustainable development goals and is invited to attend the UN Youth Assembly.

Interested in being the CYA next year or learning more about what the role entails?

On their project site, you can read about this year’s CYA, Farjana Shati, and her experiences at the UN Youth Assembly and as a CYA more generally.

Curious about how Professors Bonanome and ElHitti developed their relationship with the UN and proposed this project?

Read their story on the site and/or in their op-ed for PassBlue, “an independent, women-led digital publication offering in-depth journalism on the US-UN relationship and its effects on urgent global matters”.

For more questions about the project, visit their easily-navigable site today!

In the Spotlight: Request a Workshop!

Tools on a blue wall in a workshop. — Image Source: pixabay.com

This week we’re spotlighting a renewed form of support – customized workshops for faculty, staff, or students in your departments, offices, and other stakeholder groups at City Tech. In contrast to the general offerings we’ve done in the past, these targeted workshops will be designed specifically for your group. In designing your workshop, the OpenLab Community Team will work directly with you to ensure your group’s needs are met. Please note that workshops are accepted on a rolling basis, so get your requests in early if you want to have the workshop this semester.

Request a workshop today by completing the form on this page.

In the Spotlight: English Composition 1 (Eng 1101 LC22/CD322)

This week we’re spotlighting Professor Sarah Schmerler’s English 1101: English Composition 1 class. This course is one half of a learning community, wherein she shares the same students with math professor Grazyna Niezgoda. The objective of the learning community, and common theme between the two courses, is to help students learn how to solve complicated problems by breaking a problem down into smaller, simpler steps. Likewise, Professor Schmerler’s syllabus suggests the class objectives are also further broken down into smaller goals such as using writing as a process of discovery and practice of critical thinking, building skills around drafting, revising and research, and fostering a personal writing style and process. This style of breaking a whole down into manageable parts is also a theme in the way Professor Schmerler has designed her course site. Wondering what materials you’ll need for this course? See the ‘Materials/Supplies’ item in her main menu. Similar questions can be asked about assignments, course policies, paper formatting and more. This results in quick and easy navigation of the course site both for her students and other visitors.

In addition to using the course site to organize course-related materials, Professor Schmerler also holds class discussions on informal topics generated by her students. So far, there is a discussion of the sometimes difficult task of figuring out what to wear each day, and a critical discussion of the pros and cons of Pineapple Pizza. These activities help students practice writing in an informal and low-stakes way, and likely supports them in translating their thoughts, opinions and perspectives into writing that is legible to others; in other words, facilitating the process of fostering a personal writing style.

The last aspect of Professor Schmerler’s course site that I’ll highlight is the use of the course blogroll to share resources with students (i.e. on semicolons, on active vs passive voice, on possessives). These resources are no doubt of use to the students in her course, but also may be of use to other students on the OpenLab and at City Tech more broadly. Thus, housing her course on the OpenLab rather than on a closed or private platform increases the potential impact of her course and its materials.

View the resources, join the discussion and learn more about Professor Schmerler’s course by visiting her course site today!

Category: Community&Collaboration