(image of Buzz Aldrin by photo by cliff1066™ via Creative Commons Liscence)

This week we’re going to again shamelessly promote our new student community team’s blog, called The Buzz!  We’ve been doing good work there, and would love it if you joined to get the regular updates through your email.  If you’re logged in to the OpenLab, you can do that here.  Share it with friends, comment, be a part!

Here are a few excerpts from our most discussed posts:

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Anyone else sick of these MTA fare and toll hikes?!

“”I don’t know about anyone else, but I for one am sick of this! It seems like just yesterday tokens cost $1.50.  Boy, look how far we’ve come. Now, twenty five cents more, may not seem like a much, but when you make multiple trips along with having other expenses, such as bills and tuition, it sure does add up to a lot.

Oh, how I miss the days of high school, when we were given free metro cards. Now, looking back, I realize what a life saver those things were. What really pisses me off, though, is the fact that you now have to pay an extra dollar to buy a new metro card. Oh, but wait, the MTA was “gracious” enough, to let us exchange our expired, or worn out cards, for a free new one. Um…thanks guys?”

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Sleepless Nights Can Shut Down Your Genes

“Your genes get a beating every week you deprive yourself of sleep, so as Professor Colin Smith was saying, to those who experience less than 6 hours of sleep every single day for a longer period of time that can lead to a weaker immune system since your genes aren’t producing any protein and damaged tissues aren’t being replaced. It can also lead to obesity since it affects your metabolism as well as raise stress levels tremendously

So guys don’t deprive yourself of sleep. The next time your mom or whomever yells at you to get out of bed, just tell show them this article, then hop right back into bed and, get all cozy and hug yourself to sleep… because you know that’s not awkward at all… Remember a rested you means a happier you.”

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Finding a Faculty Mentor; That’s What they Get Paid for

(image by tedeytan via Creative Commons)

This week!  Featuring a new tutorial and a quick, idiosyncratic moment from an OL class!

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Featured Tutorial:  Social

Social is a new plug-in on the OL, taking over for the moment as our primary Twitter and Facebook broadcasting plug-in.  While Twitter Tools (which is being updated) is a more robust option, offering url shortening, category exclusion, and other options.  The benefits of Social are ease of use (Twitter Tools takes some setting up), and overall lightness.

Once Twitter Tools is updated, the two plug-ins will work together, and the tutorial will be expanded.  For now, If you’re interested in a simple way to send your posts to Twitter or Facebook, Social may just be the plug-in for you.

You can find more about this here.  Enjoy!

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FEATURED SITE:  IND1112 Engineering Drawing I

There’s a number of interesting things going on over at Professor Nakamura’s course site, but maybe none so much as his attendance policy, which involves having students post comments to mark their own attendance.  What struck us is not just the novelty of the approach, but also the rapport that even such a simple interaction can create between students and a professor.  As here:

There’s something about this that’s very revealing and very charming.  Maybe not a big deal, just a Professor taking attendance, but a nice example of the warm, informal interaction that takes place in our classrooms every day.

(image by wyntuition via Creative Commons Liscence)

Some of us are returning from a weekend in Miami Beach, and are desperately disappointed in the weather, emphasis on work, and lack of neon in Brooklyn.  Alas, one must return to real life eventually.  And this week, we want to feature a couple of tips regarding how to manage spam for your OpenLab sites.

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FEATURED TIP:  MANAGING SPAM

As you probably know, there are a lot of spammers and spambots out there.  And they’re very keen to get their message or (more likely) link onto public sites like the OpenLab.  Most are obvious, and are actually typed by humans.  Like this one:

Basically anyone who praises a site without specifically mentioning what the site was about, usually is a spammer.  They can be freely marked as spam.

What you may not know, however, is that the OpenLab has a plug-in called Akismet which is designed to track and pull all non-human spam into a spam folder.  This works just like your email junk folder or spam folder, mostly by recognizing content-less, link-heavy spam bots, like this:

Because of Akismet, you don’t have to worry about going through and marking off the vast majority of spam that comes to the system.  However, there are two things you can do to help keep the system running smoothly.

First, you can delete the spam that’s in your spam folder.  You can do that by visiting COMMENTS>SPAM>EMPTY SPAM

In addition, you can change the Akismet settings so that the whole thing is periodically cleaned out.  You can do that at PLUGINS>AKISMET CONFIGURATION and then checking the box that says “Auto-delete spam submitted on posts more than a month old.”

The last thing you might want to try, if human-written spam is becoming a bother (and some sites are more attractive than others, for reasons which are sometimes a mystery!), is to utilize another plug-in, called Ajax Edit Comments.  One of that plug-in’s features is a simple Captcha, which will ensure that spammers have to make a bit more effort, and that you will no longer be spammed by first graders.

You can learn more about the Ajax Edit Comments’ other features in this previous tutorial.  We really recommend it for all sites.

That’s all for this week.  As always, contact us with any questions.

(image–and spelling–by OCAL via Creative Commons License)

With all the new courses popping up on the OpenLab at the start of the term, we thought we’d highlight a few promising examples…

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 Architectural Technology (Professor Paul King)

(Image by Don)

Professor King’s Architectural Technology course (which you can find here) features a complex architecture (get it?) involving linking separate areas together into what might be called a course hub.  A number of faculty members have taken this option for structuring their courses, either to help avoid redundancy (one can keep the static material on one site, allowing others to administered by students as needed) or just to give students a place of their own to take pride in.  Plus, it has beautiful student sketches!

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Architecture 1210 DESIGN FOUNDATION II (Professor Valdez)

William Valdez’ Architecture 1210 Design Foundation II course is one of our more robust course sites, replete with pdfs, assignments, examples, tutorials, and a vocabulary archive.  Not all of these sections are populated at this point in the semester, but a lot is already here.  It’s not easy to have a course site this well-planned at the beginning of the term–this is a great example of what is possible when we have time to do it.

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M1275 College Algebra and Trigonometry (Professor Smith)

We love to see students working through problems on the OpenLab, and here on Professor Smith’s Algebra and Trigonometry, we can see students helping each other out, working together and giving advice on a problem.  It’s just great to see this.

We’re happy to feature any course, assignment or project you think is interesting or notable.  Contact us anytime with your recommendations!

(image by thejimmylittle via Creative Commons License)

Welcome back everyone!  While you were away (actually right at the end of last term) the OpenLab passed 4,500 members!  That’s right:  4,500 members!  The community continues to grow, and given the start of school, we can only expect another flood of new users in the next few weeks.  Again, welcome everyone!

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OpenLab Workshops!

The OpenLab community team has been busy in the last weeks of the break offering workshops to faculty planning to use the OL in upcoming courses.  But if you missed those (or you aren’t a faculty member) you’ll have plenty of opportunity to join us for our workshops on various topics throughout the term.  We’ll be posting more about the upcoming schedule in the next days and weeks, but above you can find the schedule for student workshops, and below we have a list of upcoming faculty and staff workshops.  If you’d like to come, please RSVP at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.  But if you can’t RSVP, please stop by anyway.  We’re always glad to have you!

NOTE:  The following are for faculty and staff only.  The student workshops are in the image above. 

February
2/6: 1:30-3:00 (G604) – Getting Started on the OpenLab
2/14 2:30-3:00 (G604) – Getting Started on the OpenLab (brief version)
2/14 3:00-4:30 (G604) – Designing a Course, Project, or Club on the OpenLab

March
3/12: 1:00-2:30 (G604) – Tools, Tips and Tricks for the OpenLab (Experience Required!)

April
4/18: 2:30-4:30 (G604) – Tools, Tips and Tricks for the OpenLab (Experience Required!)

May
5/1: 11:00-11:30 (G604)  Getting Started on the OpenLab
5/1: 11:30-1:00 (G604) Designing a Course, Project, or Club on the OpenLab

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Featured Tip:  Help!

(image by tsaiproject via Creative Commons)

This is a “tip” mostly for our new users of the OpenLab:  we (meaning the community team) are always here to help you.  Many many answers can be found in our help section, which is accessible from any page of the OpenLab:

In addition, as we say all the time but want to say again, feel free to email us anytime!

 

(image by David Berkowitz www.marketersstudio.com via Creative Commons)

Well, it’s finally happened–the term is coming to an end, and we’re all looking forward to a much deserved break.  We’re looking back on this term with a special fondness already–this is the term the OpenLab really entered a more mature phase, and we have to say we’re watching it grow up with a singular happiness.  This is the term that we reached 4000 users, the term we saw it reach more than 300 courses and 800 projects, and the term when we saw more and more users taking the OpenLab and making it theirs.  These are just a small sampling of the highlights from the term: 

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Featured Site:  Writing Acros the Curriculum (originally posted September 10th)

We want to highlight the presence of Writing Across the Curriculum on the OpenLab, and to encourage everyone who teaches and deals with writing in their courses to have a look at the resources being collected here.  You can check out their upcoming workshops and activities here.  And welcome to the new fellows!

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Featured Blog Post:  WordPress in education, meet the free software community. And vice versa. (originally posted September 19th)

This post isn’t on the OpenLab, but it was written by our own Boone Gorges, who has been invaluable to our own Openlab, the CUNY Academic Commons, and just about every digital pedagogical platform around.  In this post, he outlines some things you might not know, particularly if you’re new to WordPress Installations like ours (a bit of a simplified definition of the OpenLab, but for the purposes of Boone’s blog entry, it’ll work).  But more than the outlining, he makes a strong case that platforms like ours, and the “WPedu” users  who help develop and use and improve them day after day, are doing important, important work:

“…impressive innovations can be found all over the WPedu world. The innovation is motivated by the love of the work, and by principles: education should be open, individuals should control their data and their online identities, software should be free as in speech. These are the very same principles that are close to the hearts of free software enthusiasts.”

You can read more of Boone’s blog post here. 

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Featured Course:  Interaction Design (originally posted September 25th)

Today we’re featuring Professor Amelia Marzec’s Interaction Design course.  A simple, robust course, featuring plenty of examples of student work (including the snazzy flowchart above, by the cleverly named Noitatidem group, which includes Ian, Remy, Rosa).  In addition, Professor Marzec has readings and videos posted to her page, and in general seems to be humming along very nicely.  An exemplary course site, if you’re looking for one.

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Featured Assignment:  The Blue Caves of New York (originally posted October 1st)

The first of our featured student works comes from Mark Noonan’s The Place Where We Dwell: Reading and Writing About NYC.  This nice bit of writing by Shaquill Houston made us very happy… here’s an excerpt:

“The Blue Caves of the city: left and right you see the cave walls of gray and brown rusty rods of steel; above you see the cave’s roof of blue splinted wood; if you have a keen eye, you might even be able to see the mysterious glass stalactite. I call them mysterious because they start glowing at special times of day and you don’t see them under all blue caves. Don’t be ashamed if your blue cave doesn’t have the mysterious glass stalactite.”Your blue cave?”, Yeah “your blue cave”.Why are you puzzled? You’ve seen these caves around all around the city. They aren’t anomalies; they’re abnormally- normal. These caves should not be foreign to you unless you’re new to the city. Only under that condition I’ll cut you some slack but under any other condition shame on you. The “smart guys” like to give everything a scientific name so maybe you know them by their scientific name: scaffolding. My childhood began in one of the blue caves, specifically the blue cavern that was located at 122^nd street between Park & Lexington Avenue. I place emphasis on the word because these caves don’t stick around forever, though it may be hard to believe at times.”

Can you guess what the blue caves are?  You can read more here!

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 Featured Site:   Adventures in Modern College Writing (originally posted November 20th)

This week we thought we’d bring to your attention Thomas Wilk’s ENG 1101 Composition I courses, which you can find here and here and here.  They’re notable mostly because the site has a nice use of student examples of both strong work and things that could use improvement.  And you see here that he is drawing specific examples from student work in order to give tips that he thinks will be useful to the whole course.  Which serves as a reminder that the OpenLab is at its best, really, when the one on one communication between instructors and students is opened up, and all students start to benefit from advice given to any other.

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FEATURED COURSE: Peer-Led Team Learning Club (originally published December 4th)

This week we’re featuring the site for the Peer-Led Team Learning Club, whose mission is “To promote and disseminate the Peer-Led Team Learning model by assisting students to succeed in their studies through peer-led workshops, informing faculty of the model, sharing success and opportunities for Peer Leaders, and creating a community of practice among peer leaders.”

Practically speaking, we’re highlighting this site because we think it really does a great job identifying a need, responding to that need, and using the OpenLab to its fullest.  In that sense it reminds us of the Brooklyn College rideshare site that was created for students who needed rides after Hurricane Sandy:  not flashy, but specific to a specific need.  And conceived of and created by students!

While simple (and imageless), the site is much more than just the display of written and visual information, and each of its pages is distinct and useful.  It uses a number of tools (including Google forms, about which more in a second), and thus offers a number of ways for users to engage with the site creators.

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Happy holidays, everyone, and enjoy the break!

Welcome to Our Student Community Team!

We are delighted to present the newest members of the OpenLab!  Our Student Community Builders will be helping us with student outreach, student help, and student training.  Our Student Bloggers will be writing on various topics–giving advice to City Tech students, rating places to each around campus, even discussing pop-culture.  From left to right in the picture we have Ruchoma Kaganoff, Zam Mozumder, Shawn Brumell, Patricia Jade Persaud, and Amber Vinson.  Welcome!

You’ll be hearing more from them in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s let a few of  them introduce themselves:

Hi, I’m Ruchoma! I’m finishing up my second semester in the nursing program. I love the program for its challenging professors, super classmates, and of course the field of nursing itself. I don’t really have much free time between my own school work, tutoring first semester nursing students, and extracurricular activities that include the Open Lab, writing a health column for the New Tech Times, and my position as contributing editor for the honor’s newsletter. I grew up in Chicago, but I like it here in Brooklyn almost as much. I like to think that I still retained my Midwestern cordiality and openness. I look forward to meeting all of you on Open Lab!

Hey, my name is Zam Mozumder. I was born in Bangladesh but I left as a young child and was brought up in Brooklyn. This is my first year in City Tech and I’m majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. One personal thing about me that I’d like to share is that I like to lead my team. I’m the oldest child in my family and I like to set a great example for my younger brother and sister. I love to help them and teach them about things so they can understand and achieve their goals in life and I hope to continue helping people as the days go on.

I’m Shawn Brumell, born and raised in New York.  I’m currently in my 3rd year at City Tech, and majoring in Graphics Arts Production Management. After interning at the the design agency, C4 Technologies, I plan to pursue a career in web and editorial design, once I graduate.

My name is Patricia Jade Persaud. I am an Advertising & Communication Design major, a junior at City Tech. I enjoy experiencing art in every form. I enjoy sketching, designing, writing and yoga. I’m currently exploring my artistic skills and working on a few personal and academic projects. My favorite holiday is daylight savings

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Featured Event: Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab kick-off!

The OpenLab Community Team invites you to come launch the Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab project. To kick off our project, our inaugural meeting will be a chance to meet each other face-to-face at an end-of-semester wine-and-cheese gathering. We can celebrate the semester about to close and brainstorm about next semester’s activities, including more exchanges on the Open Pedagogy site, as well as virtual and on-site discussions, workshops, and other programmed events.

When: Tuesday, 12/11, 4:00-6:00pm
Where: Faculty Commons, N227
Who: All Faculty and Staff interested in Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab
RSVP: openlab@citytech.cuny.edu, or reply here with a comment

If you haven’t already joined the Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab project, find out more about it on the project’s profile.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday!

Last week’s CUNY IT Conference was a great success.  At least one member of the OpenLab team declared, in an utterly unbaised way, that the OpenLab “ruled!”  We’d like to thank everyone who came to see our presentation, and we’re grateful we got the chance to hear all the other presentations about the exciting things going on at CUNY.  Thanks everyone!

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FEATURED COURSE: Peer-Led Team Learning Club

This week we’re featuring the site for the Peer-Led Team Learning Club, whose mission is “To promote and disseminate the Peer-Led Team Learning model by assisting students to succeed in their studies through peer-led workshops, informing faculty of the model, sharing success and opportunities for Peer Leaders, and creating a community of practice among peer leaders.”

Practically speaking, we’re highlighting this site because we think it really does a great job identifying a need, responding to that need, and using the OpenLab to its fullest.  In that sense it reminds us of the Brooklyn College rideshare site that was created for students who needed rides after Hurricane Sandy:  not flashy, but specific to a specific need.  And conceived of and created by students!

While simple (and imageless), the site is much more than just the display of written and visual information, and each of its pages is distinct and useful.  It uses a number of tools (including Google forms, about which more in a second), and thus offers a number of ways for users to engage with the site creators.

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FEATURED TUTORIAL:  Embedding a Google Form

What we saw in the above site is the use of Google forms, which can be embedded directly onto OpenLab pages.  While there are other ways to create forms on WordPress sites, this is one of the simplest.  To embed a google form, go to your Google Drive and click CREATE>FORM

Then you’ll see this:

To our mind this is a bit clunky, but you can learn to navigate it pretty easily.  What Google calls “Questions” can be anything you want–anything you want a response to.  Here, as you can see, our first “Question” is “First Name.”  You add items by clicking ADD ITEM in the upper left, and you change the text by clicking the edit/pencil button to the right of the question.  There are a number of types of “Questions, including dropdowns, etc.

Once you’ve finished your form, click SAVE in the upper right.  To embed it onto an OpenLab site, then click EMBED which you can find under MORE ACTIONS:

Copy the code that pops up into your post or page, hit publish, and voila!  A form is born!

As always, contact us with any questions!

(image by BUNYAMIN NAJMI via Creative Commons license)

4000!

Last week, on the 21st of November at 10:36 am to be exact, the OpenLab officially welcomed our 4,000th student member.  We’re simply thrilled, want to have a party, danced a while in our seats, etc.  And then we went on Thanksgiving break, ate too much, etc.  But now we celebrate, here on the OpenLab, the growth of our little site into a large, vibrant, and wonderful community.  Much thanks to all of you who are members, and congratulations to all.

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Upcoming Event:  11th Annual CUNY IT Conference

As we said last week,  the 11th Annual CUNY IT Conference is coming, and the OpenLab will be there!  We’ll be presenting the following at 9:30 am on Friday morning:

The OpenLab and Its Community: Fostering a Place to Learn, Work and Share
City Tech’s OpenLab is an open source digital platform for teaching, learning and collaboration for students, faculty and staff to use for courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios. Built by and for the City Tech community using BuddyPress and WordPress softwares, the OpenLab is a thriving online space. This presentation highlights best practices in managing, maintaining and expanding the OpenLab, and showcases how its use extends the classroom, conference room and student lounge into the virtual realm.

All your favorite City Tech OpenLab folk will be there.  Attendance is free, but you do have to register.  You can find out more information and register here.

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You Might Also Be Interested In These Other Sessions…

OpenLab folk are all over the CUNY IT Conference.  Here are a few of their presentations.  Come to one, come to all!

(2:15 Thursday)

The Online Journal System: Implications for Scholarly Publishing in CUNY

A dozen CUNY journals are being published using the Open Journal Systems (OJS). The Urban Library Journal has migrated from print and subscription-based to an open access, online-only journal through OJS. The change has increased visibility of the title and streamlined the process of publishing. Learn about the system back-end, how to produce an issue and how to archive issues using OJS. Implications for journal publishing in an online-only environment will be discussed.

Monica Berger, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

The CUNY Hybrid Initiative Site: An Open Resource for Hybrid Teaching and Learning

The CUNY Hybrid Initiative site is designed to be an open resource for everyone from new professors contemplating online teaching to students wanting to get the most out of their online learning experience. The resources and tools presented on the site are a culmination of ideas, suggestions and best practices from the colleges that participated in the CUNY Hybrid Initiative. In this session, members of the site’s editorial and design team will show how users might make use of the information in their online or partially online classrooms.

Karen Lundstrem, Director of Instructional Technology & the Technology Enhancement Centers (iTEC), New York City College of Technology
Maria Pagano, Associate Professor of Psychology, New York City College of Technology

(9:30 am Friday)

An Open Access Repository for CUNY: Why We Need It and How You Could Use It

CUNY’s University Faculty Senate recently voted to create an open access institutional repository (IR), which would allow faculty and staff to share scholarly writings, instructional materials, college documents and more. This session will provide an overview of open access, IRs and emerging best practices, as well as a report on possibilities for and progress toward a CUNY IR. Come learn why IRs are important and share how you might use an IR.

Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor, English, New York City College of Technology / Director, CUNY Academic Commons

 (1:00 pm Friday)

Open Ecosystems: Community-focused Development and the CUNY Academic Commons

The CUNY Academic Commons team will discuss its efforts to create a development workflow that is potentially more agile, rapid, responsive and community-focused than traditional client-services models. The open nature of Commons development, its active participation in free software communities and its communication strategies aim to create  transparent workflows that involve robust user engagement. This presentation uses several recent case studies to argue the advantages of such a model of open platform development within the university.

Matthew K. Gold, Director, CUNY Academic Commons, New York City College of Technology and Graduate Center
Boone Gorges, Lead Developer and Director of Research Projects, CUNY Academic Commons

The Writing Studies Tree: An Interactive Composition and Rhetoric Archive

The Writing Studies Tree (WST), writingstudiestree.org, is a crowd-sourced database developed at CUNY to study disciplinary growth by tracing relationships among scholars and institutions. Combining a fixed data structure with open editing privileges, the WST aggregates small data entry efforts into scalable network visualizations, thereby positioning users as active participants in disciplinary history and knowledge-making. We will discuss the process of creating the site, demonstrate its key features and suggest pedagogical and research applications.

Jill Belli, Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology

What’s Price Got To Do with It? Open Access Course Materials at CUNY

Despite dramatic changes in how educational content is created and accessed, textbook publishers appear reluctant to change their existing pricing models. Recent years have seen the proliferation of Open Access (OA) curricular materials, yet while a clear demand exists for these materials from budget-constrained students and colleges, wide adoption has lagged. How might CUNY create its own infrastructure to coordinate and share the intellectual and pedagogical OA resources that exist at various colleges?

Johannah Rodgers, Assistant Professor, English, New York City College of Technology
Maura A. Smale, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

(2:15 Friday)

From Data Mining to Mobile App Development: Digital Scholarship across the Disciplines

In spring of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center inaugurated a new grant program aimed at fostering cutting-edge digital projects by graduate students. In this session, representatives from the ten winning grant proposals will provide overviews of their projects and discuss their progress so far. Funded projects include a range of disciplines, including Musicology, English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, History and Computer Science, and incorporate a range of methodologies from text mining to data visualization to mobile app development.

Jill Belli, Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology
Matthew K. Gold, Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives, Graduate Center

A Cloud-based Tutorial System Integrated with a Center for Performative Design

City Tech received a National Science Foundation grant to create and develop a Center for Performative Design. This center, housed in shared visualization, computation and fabrication facilities, will offer students the ability to work together in teams, problem-solving like engineers, architects and industrial designers. It will feature a cloud-based tutorial system using modern social media and game-based learning assessment approaches. Presenters will discuss its development and how it will be integrated with the physical laboratories.

Iem Heng, Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering Technology, New York City College of Technology
Anne Leonhardt, Assistant Professor, Architectural Technology, New York City College of Technology
John McCullough, Assistant Professor, Entertainment Technology, New York City College of Technology
David B. Smith, Chair, Entertainment Technology, New York City College of Technology

Gaming across the Curriculum

This workshop will provide a fun, hands-on introduction to the principles of game-based learning. The session will begin with examples of learning games designed and tested by CUNY faculty across multiple disciplines and continue with “What’s Your Game Plan?,” a game designed by members of the CUNY Games Network to help educators brainstorm learning games for their students. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore the fundamentals of game-based learning and educational game design.

Maura A. Smale, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

(image is in the public domain.  retrieved form Wikimedia Commons)

We put up a Thanksgiving picture last week, we know.  But we’re putting up another one today, because we have turkey on the brain.  A few quick things.

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Featured Tip:  Changing URLs (Permalinks)

Occasionally we change the title of a page (especially from default pages) rather than deleting it and creating a new one.  There’s often a good reason for doing that–the problem is that it can result in a url that’s different from the title of your page (as in the image above).  This is because the url is based on the original title.  But never fear!  You can change the title of any page, and change the URL as well.   Simply go to the page or post in question, and click EDIT just below the title.  As here:

Once you do, you’ll see this:

You can change the URL, hit okay, and you’re done!  Do note that you can adjust the default settings for your permalinks as well, if you like.  You can find a set of options, or even create a custom default, by going to SETTINGS>PERMALINKS in the left hand dashboard menu. 

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Upcoming Event:  CUNY IT Conference

We will almost certainly remind you of this next week, but it’s going to come up quick after the break, so we’re going to mention it here as well.  The 11th Annual CUNY IT Conference is coming, and the OpenLab will be there!  We’ll be presenting on Friday morning.

Attendance is free, but you do have to register.  You can find out more information and register here.

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Featured Site:   Adventures in Modern College Writing

This week we thought we’d bring to your attention Thomas Wilk’s ENG 1101 Composition I courses, which you can find here and here and here.  They’re notable mostly because the site has a nice use of student examples of both strong work and things that could use improvement.  And you see here that he is drawing specific examples from student work in order to give tips that he thinks will be useful to the whole course.  Which serves as a reminder that the OpenLab is at its best, really, when the one on one communication between instructors and students is opened up, and all students start to benefit from advice given to any other.

That’s all for this week.  Have a wonderful break!