(Image by ‘Mother of User”/Bullpit via Creative Commons)

Welcome back to the school year, first of all, and welcome back to our over 2,600 members!  Shocking to think how we’ve grown in such a short time–and we’re looking forward to another exciting year.

We’ve been terrifically busy over the summer updating and improving the OpenLab.  We’ll have a more comprehensive description of what we’ve done within the next week or so, and in the meantime we hope you like the changes you notice!

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Getting Started on the OpenLab Workshop

Wondering what the OpenLab is all about? Find out how to collaborate with your students and colleagues on the OpenLab in a mixed-level introductory workshop for faculty on Thursday, August 30th, from12:45-2:15pm.  We’ll be announcing the room momentarily.  Please RSVP here and let us know you’re coming!

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Featured Tutorial:   Prezi 

(Image by peapodsquadmom via Creative Commons)

Well, there’s no doubt that it’s back to school time, and we want to remind you first that there are OpenLab workshops this week and next.  The soonest of which are this Wednesday, the 22nd.  There are three that day, on various topics, and you can come to them all or just those in which you have a specific interest.  You can find out more in the image below.  Hope to see you there!

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Featured Tip:  Connecting Existing Sites to New Projects

There are changes all over the OpenLab, and we’ll be giving out a full description in the upcoming weeks, so please look forward to that!  But for right now, we think one critical improvement should be highlighted right away:

Before late August 2012, users could create sites that weren’t connected to a project.  In the process of improving the overall organization of the OpenLab, and to keep all the wonderful work everyone is doing here visible to everyone (when the creator chooses, that is), that had to change:  at this point all sites must  be connected to a project.

We have no doubt that this will improve the structure of our virtual campus, but it does mean that if you created a stand-alone site you’ll need to connect it to a project before it can appear in your “My OpenLab.”  But don’t worry, it’s still there!

To do so, go through the process that you would to create any Project, whether that’s a course, project, or club.   Follow the steps as you would when creating any project (see our help section for assistance on this).  When it comes time to create a site, though, you should see “Add an existing site” as one of your options, as in this screenshot:

NOTE:  this option will not appear if you did not create a stand-alone site–if you don’t see “Use an existing site,” then this tutorial is probably not for you.

In the drop-down (where it says ‘scotttest’) above, you should see your existing stand-alone site.  Click it, follow the rest of the instructions, and you’re done!

As always, contact us with any questions!

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FEATURED PROJECT:  WHAT IS WRITING?

More from the prolific Johanna Rogers!  This week we’re featuring her delightful project: What is Writing?, which offers a funny, witty, and image-driven look at some of the more basic (and some of the most complicated) questions about writing.   Given its visual tendencies, we think it’s probably especially useful for those disciplines where students might be more comfortable or used to visually-driven information.  Which is, of course, exactly the sort of cross-discipline usefulness the OpenLab is designed to facilitate.  But without question it’s useful for all of us here at City Tech, and so thanks Johanna!

(image by kokogiak via creative commons)

Our own Charlie Edwards often refers to the OpenLab team as worker bees, and this month we very much are–the whole OL group, our developers and…well, everyone…are busily working away still on our major August update.  That said, only a couple short items this week…

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Featured Tutorial:  Share This, Redux

Last week we introduced the Share This tutorial–and we promised that this week we would give some explanaition of how its options work.  Well, we did it!  And you can find the full tutorial here.  As always, email us with any questions.

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Featured Blog:  Tributaries

This week’s Featured Bog isn’t here on the OpenLab, but on the CUNY Academic Commons.  It’s George Otte’s most recent contribution to the ongoing discussion about the relationship between technology and pedagogy–in particular the MOOCs (yes, that’s how it sounds–it stands for “massive open online courses”) which have been getting so much press of late.  You can read George’s insightful piece here.

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A Bit of News:  The Digital Library of America

Because we love libraries, and online open materials, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that “The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (on July 26th) announced a $1 million award to support the incorporation and launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a groundbreaking project that seeks to digitize and bring together the contents of our nation’s libraries and archives, and make them freely available to all online.”  You can read more about this project, which is being done jointly with Harvard, here.

(image by en:User:Acrow005 via Creative Commons License)

Big changes are coming, and we’re working away behind the scenes to bring you a new update on the OpenLab.  Keep your eye out over the next few weeks!

Featured Site, and a REQUEST!

This week we’re featuring Theatreworks, the resident theatre company at New York City College of Technology.  They’ve recently created an OpenLab presence, and in addition being excited about them as members, we want to pass along their request: They’re looking for student help building their site!

Remember that if you are a student (or a faculty or staff member, of course), you can always contact the OpenLab Community Team for help with any questions regarding site building.  We’re happy to answer via email, or you can set up a help-session specificially for your group.

But more on Theaterworks! Theaterworks is composed of students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members. Founded in 1974, Theatreworks has been recognized in the media and theater circles for its commitment to professionalism in performance, technology and the advancement of multicultural casting and crews in plays, videos, musicals, dance and other events. This unique approach to theatre has given Theatreworks citywide recognition and an audience from the greater New York area. Theatreworks is now performing in the state-of-the-art Voorhees Theatre, where a haunted hotel, the Gravesend Inn, has opened each October to hundreds of spectators for over 13 years. Each spring semester a resident group is hosted on campus to work with the Theatreworks students. Student technicians receive valuable training by participating in the lighting, sound, costume, video, publicity and scenery crews for performances each year. Theatreworks alumni can be found in the professional theater, in television and concert venues, and working with many theater-related companies in their respective communities. For further information about Theatreworks, call Professor Chip Scott in the Entertainment Technology Office in the Voorhees Building, room V 205, at 718.260.5590 or email cscott@citytech.cuny.edu

FEATURED PLUG-IN:  SHARE THIS

This week we’re also featuring the plug-in “Share This,” which adds the social media bar above to all posts and pages, allowing your followers, members or readers to easily share things that they like.  You can even click the green “Share” button in the bar and then choose multiple platforms to share with simultaneously (that is, you can share with twitter and facebook with one click).

You can find out more about configuration on our tutorials page, but it may be our simplest plug-in yet:  go to plug-ins in the left-hand column of your dashboard, activate the “Share This” plug-in, and what you see above will appear!

That’s all for this week.  Have a great one, and as always contact us with any questions!

(Image by petesimon via Creative Commons)

This week we’ve continued our Twitter Tools tutorial (say that five times fast), and concentrated on the various options settings, and you can find it here.  As a reminder for those of you who might have missed last week’s installment, Twitter Tools is a way of integrating Twitter and your OpenLab site (or any WordPress site), so that your posts can be tweeted automatically as soon as you publish them.  It also gives you a great deal of flexibility:  you can set it to exclude certain categories, and our present installation comes with url shortening and a hashtag creator.  After working with it to create these tutorials, we’ve decided that once it’s set up (a semi-complicated process), it’s pretty great.  If you haven’t already, check out part 1 here.

Featured Twitter Acct:  Ours!

We’ve mentioned this before, but be sure to follow our own twitter account @CityTechOpenLab where, for example, you can find such delights as the video above, tweeted by our own Libby Clarke, who you can follow @monstress.  Or these delightful pictures from @brooklynhistory!

Featured Site:  SEEK Ink:  An Artist’s Journal

Image by Tynesha Frazier.  

Though we’ve already been featuring it in our “In The Spotlight” section of our homepage, we wanted to make sure that all OpenRoad members who might not be visiting our site over the summer got a change to see this wonderful addition to the OpenLab.  Great work here!

(Image by Todd Barnard via Creative Commons)

This week we thought we’d dedicate ourselves to figuring out one of our new plug-in suites, called Twitter Tools, and that led us to thinking about the wonders of twitter, etc.  So this an all Twitter This Week in The OpenLab…

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First, A Brief Aside…

Of course, the bulk of our time was spent 1) looking for that hilarious picture above, 2) wasting a lot of time on twitter and, then, 3) figuring out how to use the plug-in so we could explain it here.  For those of you who mostly fumble your way through these things–which is what I do–in a fury of googling until you find something that looks like a solution to your question (in this case “How Do I Set Up Twitter Tools?”), you probably know that semi-complicated plug-ins like this one can be one of the more problematic things to figure out.  The problem is (at least) two-fold:  1) plug-ins break and/or go unsupported and/or 2) they are updated so rapidly that tutorials can’t always keep up.  In this case, my problem was the second:  though I found a nice little helper with my problem here, I also found that several of the steps had changed on both the plug-in set up page and on twitter’s end.  So something very small and obvious (changing one setting from ‘read-only’ to ‘read and write,’ which doesn’t work the way it did when my helper wrote their notes), caused us more trouble than we’d like to admit.

Of course by now we should realize this, but like we said, we mostly fumble our way toward solutions.  And the fact that we usually can is one of the nicer thing about wordpress based systems like ours, and the community that supports them.  But there’s another important point we’d want to make here:  we will do everything we can to consistently update the tutorials we’ve written for The Open Road, but when something doesn’t work the way you’d expect, it could be because something’s changed, and we’d be thrilled if you’d contact us to let us know what you’ve noticed.

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FEATURED TUTORIAL:  TWITTER TOOLS

The bulk of what we’ve done on The Open Road this week is the aformentioned tutorial, which you can find here.  Twitter Tools is a way of integrating Twitter and your OpenLab site (or any WordPress site), so that your posts can appear as tweets automatically (and, if you like, vice versa).  It also gives you a great deal of flexibility: you can set it to exclude certain categories, and our present installation comes with url shortening and a hashtag creator (if you don’t know what those are or why you’d need them, you’ll want first to brush up ‘What’s Twitter?’  The tutorial presumes you’re already familiar with Twitter, just to save space and time).

As you can see, this is part one of two on the plug-in: the set-up process is a bit complicated and so we’ve concentrated one tutorial on just that.  Next week we’ll have a second part, dealing with the options, how to set up the url shortening, etc.

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Lastly, we just wanted to share the work of Mark Smith, which we came across while working our way through Twitter related images.  And these really are Twitter-made:  This one shows “connections among the Twitter users who recently tweeted the word USAToday when queried on August 11, 2011, scaled by numbers of followers (with outliers thresholded). Connections created when users reply, mention or follow one another.”  You can see a larger version here.

According to his website, “Smith’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many “groups” in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see:http://delicious.com/marc_smith/Paper). Smith’s goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles.”  We think they’re pretty spiffy too.

(Image by Andrew Dunn via Creative Commons)

Happy Summer, officially!  Apparently Stonehendge is the place to be for the official end of this long, cold, brutal winter.  Or, to be more accurate, this short, unusually mild and often unseasonably warm winter.  Either way, we’re happy it’s here.

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Featured Tutorial:  An Introduction to HTML for wordpress.com (and openlab!) Users

More than once here on the OpenLab we’ve mentioned using the HTML tab to make specific changes, embed certain media (like YouTube video), etc.  That’s the tab that turns this:

Into this:

We know that just thinking about HTML makes some users shake in their boots, and the beauty of wordpress is most users don’t have to use it if they don’t want to.  But it’s also very simple, as far as code goes, and having a bit of background knowledge about what it means specifically for a wordpress system like ours is a great idea, and will reduce the intimidation.  There’s a simple overview here that you might like to check out.  It was written for wordpress.com sites, but will be largely applicable to the OpenLab as well.

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Featured Course:  Interactive Animation

This week we’re featuring Professor Garnier’s Interactive Animation course.  If you’re teaching graphics or animation, there’s a lot that’s great on this site, including a good number of tutorials.  And here’s a fine example.

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A Tip:  Hiding Sites and Projects

(Image by ZeWrestler via Creative Commons)

We’ve noticed a number of faculty have started working on fall courses and summer session courses.  And that’s great, and very encouraged, and as always we’re happy to help with technical and pedagogical questions.   It occurred to us that some faculty (especially if you’ve never been to one of our glorious workshops) might not know that courses can remain hidden until needed.

If you don’t want to show sites that are still ‘under construction,’ it’s good to remember, and easy to forget, that the ‘profile’ and ‘site’ side of your course have separate privacy controls.  It’s important we keep it that way:  many groups and classes choose to make the profile private–available only to their members–and make the site their ‘public face.’   But in the meantime, when you’re working on your course or project and aren’t yet ready to make it public, you can keep everything private by changing the settings in two places.

The first one is on the profile side, under Admin>Settings>Privacy Options.  Here you want to be sure ‘This is a hidden group’ is clicked.

And the second is on the dashboard of your site.  Here you want to go to Settings>Privacy and be sure that ‘I would like (my site) to be visible only to admins.’

Once you have those set, no one will see your site or project/course profile but you.  And don’t forget to uncheck those when the day comes, or you’ll be sending people to a site they can’t find!

As always, contact us with any questions.

(Image by Michael Baird via Creative Commons)

It’s June, and so maybe this image is a happy elephant seal father and his elephant seal child or maybe it’s a couple of happy elephant seal graduates.  Or maybe they aren’t happy.  In any case, they’re certainly letting off steam!

Just two quick things this week…

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The Kahn Academy

We’re always looking for online resources to share, and realized the other day that we haven’t yet shared The Kahn Academy, an incredible project creating and collecting video lessons on a wide variety of topics, from math and science to economics to the humanities.     You’re free to use any of these for your educational purposes and, because the videos are all hosted on YouTube, they’re easily embedded on The Openlab.   Just click the “watch on YouTube” button near the lower right, circled here:

Once you’ve done that, just follow the embedding YouTube video instructions found here on The OpenLab.  And a lot of people are working very hard on these videos–please give credit where credit is due!

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Featured Tutorial:   Embedding YouTube Videos

As we were typing the above, we realized that somehow we haven’t yet featured a YouTube embedding tutorial here on The Open Road.  We’ve dealt with it in other places on The OpenLab, but want to make sure it’s here.  It’s about the easiest thing besides typing on the OpenLab, but do note that if you’re used to other wordpress installations, including wordpress.com, there might be a very slight difference, so be sure to have a look.