Category: OpenLab News

(Image by Nikchick via Creative Commons)

As the term starts its inevitable wind-down, just a few reminders this week, and a best wishes for the upcoming break!

____________________

OpenLab Launch Update

As mentioned before, the official coming out party for the OpenLab will take place on the 19th of April.  We’re terribly excited to have as our guest Jim Groom, a pioneer in instructional technology, with a “specific focus on curricula, pedagogical and technologically enhanced projects.”  That means–in less acedmic-speak–he’s a leader in creating and using digital academic platforms like the OpenLab.  And he’s a great speaker!   And there will be snacks!

______________________

Featured Assignment

Earlier in March, Sandra Chang offered her students an interesting discussion topic concerning an issue that’s dear to us all–the question of copywright and ownership of online materials.   You can read the whole post here, but of particular interest is an article on photography and tumblr, which deals with how easy it is to share images on the internet.

Tumblr’s “reblog” function, which allows a user’s followers to repost a particular entry to their own Tumblr page, offers photographers a certain level of feedback on their images because they can track who likes their work and where it is shared. Reblogging makes Tumblr an “interesting social gauge of what the public is interested in,” says Weinberg.

Reblogging can also make photographers a bit queasy, however, because once an image is reblogged they essentially lose control of how and where their work is displayed. A particular entry can easily bounce around from Tumblr to Tumblr as users reblog it. Sacha Lecca, a Rolling Stone photo editor who maintains his own Tumblr, recently posted photographs he took on the set of amusic video shoot for The Strokes. The images were picked up by Tumblr blogs set up by Strokes fans, and from there his post “blew up,” he says, and was widely reblogged.

With Tumblr, he says, he is “embracing what has changed about photography. . . . The trade-off [of relinquishing control] is that it allows people who wouldn’t normally see my work to see it, and that’s all that’s really important to me. It may not be necessarily how I want my work to be seen, but at least they’re seeing it and appreciating it for some reason.” One of Pfluger’s images has more than 2,000 reblogs and comments.

These are critical questions for artists in the digital age, but their also critical for student and faculty users of the OpenLab, especially when we post our work, presentations, powerpoints, etc, in a public setting.  And don’t forget to check out Dr. Chang’s student comments!

_____________________

This Week’s Tutorial:  Google Maps Plug-in

Our Google Maps plug-in allows users to embed google maps into posts and pages.   If you’ve used wordpress in other settings before (wordpress.com, for example), you’ll want to look through this tutorial because the embedding process might be a little different than you’re used to.  A little different, but very simple.  You can learn more and see the tutorial here.  And as always, contact us with any questions!

Image by Steve Velo via Creative Commons.

This week we’d like to start by mentioning that our very own Elizabeth Alsop, OpenLab Community Team Member and all around wonder, has accepted a tenure track position in the great state of Kentucky (doubtless singlehandedly causing Kentucky’s ongoing NCAA tournament success).  We’re terribly sorry to have her leave us, but are also excessively proud of her.   Congratulations, Elizabeth!

________________________

Upcoming Workshops

Just as a reminder, there is an evening OpenLab workshop for students on Wednesday of this week (the 28th).   It will be held at 6pm in 540A in the Library.  Hope to see you there.  Please RSVP to be sure to have a spot.

________________________

Featured Assignment:  The OpenLab Investigates The OpenLab

We very much encourage you to follow the assignment Matt Gold has given his Introduction to Poetry Class.  Not only is it an interesting project in its own right, but you soon might find yourself involved:  Professor Gold’s students will explore other class sites and will leave comments on posts and pages they find interesting.  If you are a student or professor, please write back–we love to see dialogue between courses on the OpenLab, it’s one of the key unique elements of our platform.

________________________

Featured Tutorial:  The Rotating Gallery

The Rotating Gallery is a simple plug in that allows a user to have a (you guessed it!) rotating gallery of images appear in one of the sidebars of their site.  Each time a visitor refreshes or visits a new page, the image will change, giving them an appealing overall sense of the site activity.  Here’s a screenshot of the final result:

MORE THAN 2000 USERS!

We here at the OpenLab promised ourselves we wouldn’t brag every week anymore about how quickly our community is growing, but we need this week to take a second to celebrate our latest milestone:  As of this writing, there are 2,094 active members of the OpenLab!  We couldn’t be prouder of the way the CityTech Community has so quickly coalesced behind the OpenLab, and we look forward to meeting our next thousand members, and the thousand after that, and the thousand after that…

__________________

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

As we mentioned a week or so ago, there are a full slate of OpenLab workshops scheduled for the rest of this term.  There are workshops for faculty and for students, and the workshops address a variety of subjects, from getting started to more advanced issues.  Check out the posters around the campus and just above for more information, and contact us to sign-up.

 _____________________

WEEKLY TUTORIAL:  CONTACT FORM 7

Contact Form 7 is way of allowing visitors and users to contact you that is simple yet flexible (in wordpress that usually means there’s a simple set-up for people who want simple, and complexity for people who want complexity).  On the OpenLab, this plug-in is probably most useful to clubs and projects, particularly those who have visitors from outside the CityTech OpenLab community.  Here’s a screenshot of the final result:

We’re a little late this week, since we spent the weekend at the AWP conference in Chicago, which was wonderful and which had us thinking (again) about teaching and writing and technology, particularly creative writing, but really any writing, and then…

______________________

Announcing the Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy!

Speaking of teaching and digital platforms, the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the Graduate Center has released the first issue of JiTP, its new online journal.  It’s just grand:  a nice blend between the theoretical and the practical.  If you’re looking for ways to think about teaching with digital platforms, or just looking for good ideas for classes, it’s something to watch.  It’s particularly great to see the section ‘Teaching Fails.’  A great title and great concept.  This issue, Bill Kules writes about a particularly ineffective assignment, and what can be learned from it… and our own Charlie Edwards and Matt Gold are involved!

_______________

This Week’s Tutorial

This week, we’re featuring WP Polls, a site that allows a course, club or project to ask a question or questions of members or students.  The poll have as many answers as you like, can appear in a sidebar, post or page.  The tutorial is here.  And as always, email us if you have any questions!

Announcing our Upcoming Workshops!

All through the rest of the term the OpenLab team will be offering workshops for faculty, staff and students.  Whether you’re thinking of ways to improve your course management, just getting started, or would like to explore a topic of your own choosing, we’ll be here to meet your needs.  More information will follow, but the first of these workshops will be:

Working with Courses on the OpenLab (FOR FACULTY)  Tuesday, March 6. 11:30am – 12:45pm. A540 (in the library)

Thinking about teaching a course on the OpenLab? Already using the OpenLab for your courses? Bring your questions to these mixed-level sessions. You will need an account on the OpenLab, and your syllabus. Workshops are open to all City Tech faculty and staff. Part-time faculty are eligible to receive a small stipend.

What is the OpenLab?  (FOR STUDENTS):  Thursday, March 8th, 1:00pm – 2:15pm, A540 (in the library)

Please RSVP to OpenLab@citytech.cuny.edu. Please specify workshop date(s), and we’ll see you then!

__________________

Featured Course:  ENG 2003: Introduction to Poetry

In most of our recent entries we’ve focused on the course site–today we’d like to highlight those project management tools you can find on your Course/Club/Project Profile page.  This can be a valuable place for students and/or members to work collaboratively on a particular document, or have a discussion that you might want to distinguish in some way from what is going on on the course/group/project site:  a project or club might use the Site for more public-facing announcements, etc, and use these discussion boards on the Profile page for in-group discussion.  Privacy settings are all customizable, so it’s easy to do.

And just as an example, one of our favorites, Professor Jody Rosen’s on-going glossary project, which one suspects gives students a great sense of accomplishment by the term’s end, and which you can see here.

____________________

(image by Andrew Mertz, licensed via creative commons)

Weekly Tutorial:  WP-Latex

We mentioned last week that Jonas Reitz, a professor of Math here at CityTech, was helping us out with a tutorial for the WP-Latex plug-in, which allows teachers and students to write mathematical formulas directly into OpenLab comments, posts or pages.  You can find that tutorial here.

The plug-in presumes you know LaTeX, and as such is most useful to the mathematically inclined among us, but in the interest of intellectual curiosity, there is a useful tutorial/summary here.  In addition, Jonas has kindly allowed us to link to an assignment in his Calc II class which includes some basics, like fractions, radicals, and integrals.  You can find that here.  And if you’re trying to write LaTeX code, you’ll find that a tester is an invaluable too.  You can find a good one here.   Thanks to Jonas for all these resources!

(Image by KitAy licensed via Creative Commons )

Greetings from Cleveland!  Some of us are scattering around the less clement parts of the country for various non-cuny winter breaks, and I for one am happy to be watching the OpenLab from inside.

Before we begin this week’s installment, special thanks to those clubs whose members we talked to at the CityTech Club Fair last week.  If we can get all that talent and all those interests growing and on display here on the OpenLab, I think everyone inside and outside CityTech will see even more clearly what an exceptional place this school is.  Contact us for help setting up your Club site, and thanks for having us!

________________

Featured Course:  MAT 1275, College Algebra and Trigonometry

Jonas Reitz is having his students write equations and work in LaTeX, which allows students and professors to write formulas directly into OpenLab comments, posts or pages.  We’ll have a tutorial up on that plugin soon, but have a look here for a wonderful example of an effective use of an online platform that all professors can utilitze:  not only are Jonas’ students learning valuable skills, we also see that Jonas is taking fulll advantage of the OpenLab’s transparency (between students, between professor and students).  By asking students to think about and write possible exam questions, he’s giving students an active role in reflecting on their learning and even shaping their own course of study.  All of which, of course, we love to see on this open platform.

_________________

This Week’s Tutorial

This week we’re taking a break from the plugin tutorials (don’t worry, more are on the way!) to feature a few tips on image re-sizing.  This is important for a few reasons:  first, it’s good practice to keep images as small as needed in order to keep pages loading smoothly and quickly.  Note that most digital cameras and even some phones are likely to take image that are vastly larger than you’re likely to need (unless you’re NASA, then you might feel the need for this).

Second, all OpenLab posts and pages have media upload limits, and this can help you get under those limits.

And third, OpenLab sites themselves have storage limits–if you are running photograph- or image-heavy courses (as we do here in the CityTech AD/GA department, for example) or clubs, you might find yourself approaching that limit unnecessarily.  These tips will help with that, and you can find the tutorial here.  Do note, while all images can be changed later, we can’t recommend enough the importance of editing images when you upload, rather than setting yourself up for the daunting project of going back in to edit when things have gotten out of hand.  If you’d like a member of the OpenLab team to come to your class to discuss these best-practices with students, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Welcome to the second installment of “This Week In OpenLab!”–a weekly post sharing what’s new around our community, as well as ways to make the most of your OpenLab experience.  Be sure to join this project in order to get “This Week in OpenLab” updates via email!

More!  New!  Members!

Nearly 400 people joined the OpenLab this week!   As of this writing, we have 1,416 total members and more than 250 courses, clubs and projects.  Not bad for a project that’s been officially live for just a few weeks.  That’s exciting enough for TWO exclamation points!!

(image by elias via Creative Commons)

_________________________

 Johannah Rodgers:  Second Year Fellow

We’re going to be featuring various members of our community here on This Week In OpenLab, and this week we’d like to introduce you to Johannah Rodgers, one of the tremendous group of Second Year Fellows.  In addition to her work there and teaching writing here at City Tech, she is also currently developing a digital novel on our very own OpenLab.  When this project is ready for release we’ll feature Johannah more fully (particularly around what it’s like to combine this technology with creative writing), but for now you can read a previously published excerpt from Johannah’s DNA:  A Digital Novel here.  And be sure to check out her lovely drawings on her own site!

____________________

Definitions of Poetry

If, like me, you’re always looking for definitions of poetry, Professor Matt Gold’s Introduction to Poetry class has done a lot of the work for you.  If you’re a teacher using the OpenLab, particularly, for the first time, Matt’s courses can provide some of the best models you’ll find.  It’s particularly great to see how the comments aren’t just one way–by commenting and then responding and then commenting again, Matt and his students are continuing key conversations, even when they aren’t in the same room.

______________________

This Week’s Tutorial:  Embedding SlideShare

The SlideShare plugin allows you to embed presentations or documents you’ve uploaded to SlideShare into your posts or pages. Since there are only a few steps involved, I’m including instructions below. But if you’d like help using the plugin — or using SlideShare itself — just let us know.

1. Go to Dashboard > Plugins, and activate the SlideShare plugin.

2. Log in to your SlideShare account or create a new one for free.

3. Find or upload the presentation you want to include on your site. Click on the “Embed” button that appears above the presentation, and then click on “Customize.” You’ll see some code labeled “Shortcode for WordPress.com blogs”: copy that code.

4. Paste the code into the post or page where you would like the SlideShare presentation to appear.  Click publish, and you’re done!

And as always, please join The Open Road to get “This Week in OpenLab” updates via email!

Welcome to the first installment of This Week In OpenLab!  Here you’ll find updates on what’s new around our community, as well as ways to make the most of your OpenLab experience.

New Year, New Members, New Courses!

As the term begins, our OpenLab community is growing at a tremendous pace. We’ve gained more than 50 new members this week alone!  If you’re keeping score at home, this means we now have 1,050 members and more than 210 courses, clubs and projects.

Second Year Fellows Seminar Begins

We’d especially like to welcome the Living Lab Second Year Fellows, a group of City Tech faculty who will spend the semester working in The General Education Seminar, part of the College’s Title V grant-funded initiative A Living Laboratory.

This seminar will concentrate on the second year of the student experience at our college, a critical year for students that focuses on collaborative assignments and projects, and associate degree capstones.

Last Friday, the Fellows had their first meeting, where they shared ideas, discussed teaching and reading, and had a (very wet) scavenger hunt. Though their project is for Second Year Fellow use only, you can follow their adventures here!

Associate Fellows

We would also like to welcome the more than thirty full-time and part-time faculty members who are joining the Living Lab as First Year Associate Fellows. The Associate Fellows will be participating in a series of workshops led by our wonderful First Year Fellows, who have spent the last year working on the first year student experience. You can follow their progress here.

The New Term:  A Great Time to Update Your Club!

If you’re a club or project administrator, remember that the beginning of the term means a host of new OpenLab users and thus potential new members.   We’ll have a more in-depth post on community-building soon, but in the meantime, please try these simple ways to get and keep members of any project:

• create new comments and posts on your site and discussion forum–nothing indicates activity like new content! Aim to post at least once a week, as we’re doing here at This Week in OpenLab.
• make sure that your club or project profile page shows the name of and a way to contact the administrator of your club or project.
• contact OpenLab members to invite them to join. You can do that on the club or project profile page, and then ‘send invites’ using the right hand navigation.

The Open Road

Check out the first of our tutorials here.  This one is on the KB Gradebook, which is a great plug-in which allows faculty to create a spreadsheet for students to privately access their grades.  If you have questions about anything you see on this page, or would like to suggest an upcoming tutorial, please contact us here.

And as always, please join The Open Road to get “This Week in OpenLab” updates via email!

We’re tremendously excited to welcome you to version 1.0 of the City Tech OpenLab, our unique online virtual campus.  Here, our community members learn and work together, sharing ideas and resources. Welcome back if you’re already a member. And, if you’ve never been here before, we hope you’ll join our adventure.

New members will find this version of the OpenLab responsive and easy to use, and more familiar hands will notice the changes we’ve brought to this update, which include both improvement of previously existing elements and a host of new features. In this post we’ll take you through the most critical changes and new elements.

And here (drumroll please!) are some key features for this version:

Redesigned, Easy-To-Use Homepage

The center of our OpenLab universe, the homepage is the gateway to our community, and it also offers a glance across all of OpenLab. From here you can see what’s really going on. Some of its new features include:

• a redesigned slider-menu: check it for news and updates.  Let us know if there are events or activities you’d like to see us highlight there.
• a new “In The Spotlight” area, highlighting one course, project or club on a rotating basis. And here too, if you have something you’d like to share, email us at OpenLab[at]citytech.cuny.edu.
• a ‘new OpenLab members’ rotating slider.
• redesigned at-a-glance course, club and project activity sections: see all the very latest activity across the OpenLab, as it’s happening.

Site Organization and Navigation

We’ve streamlined the navigation throughout the site, and added new filtering, sorting, and searching features to help you find things more easily. The “My OpenLab” section now provides easy access to all the tools you need to manage your profile, courses, projects, and clubs, and communicate with your friends on the site.

Also note, if you’ve used the OpenLab before you’ll notice that a previously existing section (called ‘Sites’) has been folded into other areas for simplicity. If you’ve already created a site, however, don’t worry — it’s still there! You’ll find it under “My OpenLab”.

ePortfolios

The CityTech ePortfolios system is now hosted on the OpenLab! It is now easy to find in the top navigation menu of the OpenLab home page, and the site features a new template designed specifically for CityTech ePortfolio users. Find out more here.

New Functionality

The OpenLab is chock-full of new functions and tools.

For example, each course, club and project now has a ‘Files’ function which will allow for the easy upload and distribution of all sorts of files: images, readings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, and more! This is in addition to the ‘Docs’ function which allow class and group members to create and collaborate on documents right on the OpenLab.

We’ve also implemented a whole suite of plug-ins. Some of these are primarily aimed at improving teaching and learning, but almost all of them will benefit clubs and projects too. We’re especially excited about the ways in which professors and students (and all members of other clubs and projects) will be able to interact. To highlight a few:

• A gradebook which allows easy excel sheet posting for teachers and lets students to access their own grades electronically and securely.
• A calendar to organize any course, club or project.
• Rotating galleries which will show an overall sense of the course, club or project.
• A way to feature specific post/page/member from your course, club or project.

For more information and tutorials on how to use these tools, visit our ever growing “useful tools” page here on The Open Road!

Help!

One of the largest additions to this version of the site (thanks to Renee McGarry!) is an expansive help section, covering topics from “getting started” to specific questions about changing aspects of your accounts, course sites, and almost everything else. You can find that here. And as always, you can contact us with questions any time.

BuddyPress and WordPress Updates

Major work also went on behind the scenes to upgrade our core software, WordPress and BuddyPress, to the latest versions. This is important for security and to allow us to take advantage of all the features the software offers.

If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice in particular the updates to our WordPress system: a ‘new’ button in the top navigation for easy posting and commenting from the dashboard, a one-button media upload, drag and drop upload options, and more!

The Open Road

Last but not least, don’t forget this site! Here on The Open Road we’ll be celebrating and demonstrating interesting and unique work, and suggesting features and strategies for using the OpenLab that will benefit all our users. Join this project now to be a member, and receive weekly email updates!