This week, weâre spotlighting the City Tech Literary Arts Festivalâs OpenLab site. The Literary Arts Festival is âa yearly celebration of literary accomplishments among City Techâs students, staff, faculty, and community.â The Festival features both a writing competition and a featured writer who is invited to speak.
But, equally important, City Tech students can and should submit their own work! The deadline for submitting to the writing competing is March 15, 2019 at 11:59 pm.
The submission categories are: poetry fiction, literary criticism, drama, literary advocacy, and non-fiction. This year, submissions are being accepted directly on the OpenLab site. Want to submit your work? Click here to do so. And make sure to check out some winning entries from 2018 for inspiration!
This week weâre spotlighting the City Tech Libraryâs Open Educational Resources (OER) Copyright Module. The module âcovers copyright basics, gives an overview of creative commons licenses, and offers some best practices for using copyrighted and library licensed materials.â This site is an invaluable resource for faculty teaching OERs specifically and working in open digital spaces more broadly. Bookmark this site or make sure you to keep the link around! Youâll probably want (ummm, need) to consult the material on here more than once. The legal world of copyright is, well, complicated and instructors who teach online, in the open, have to learn to embrace its idiosyncrasies. Thankfully, this Copyright Module makes information easy to take in.
The clean structure of the site is helpful in knowing what you can expect of the module and where different information is located. A static homepage outlines and links out to the different module sections- which, conveniently, are each separate pages that be can navigated to from the main menu. This kind of repetition makes site content less easy to miss.
In order, the module sections are: copyright & fair use; creative commons licenses; library materials; and best practices. The first section on copyright & fair use keeps what could be very dense information concise and bulleted. It also demonstrates multimodal pedagogy by giving readers an alternative of watching a YouTube video on fair use rather than reading the written content. The creative commons licenses section links out to and describes resources for generating creative commons licenses, as well as searching these licenses to find one appropriate to the work at hand.
More generally, the module repeatedly illustrates how to effectively link out to external resources- that is, by annotating them! Consider how the following information is presented on the site: âHere are some FAQs about Creative Commons and the licenses that they offer.â Anyone reading this sentence will understand where theyâll be taken to when they click the link! These kinds of annotations equip the reader with what they need to know to pick and choose which of the links they should click, and what external resources they should take the time to look at. The module is rich with resources- and with links out to additional, external resources-but everything is presented in such a way that makes it easy to digest.
Finally, the module ends with⊠an interactive quiz! The Library makes good use of the WP-Pro-Quiz plugin, which allows you to create and embed quizzes directly into OpenLab sites.
The quiz is posted on the last page of the menu and is set up so that each of the eight quiz questions appear successively, one-at-a-time, only after the preceding question has been answered. Curious about the WP-Pro-Quiz plugin? Want to take the quiz yourself and put your knowledge of fair use and copyright to the test? Visit the site and thank the City Tech librarians!
On February 19, version 1.7.29 of the OpenLab was released. It included a few minor updates for plugins and, as well as a number of new features and some bug fixes.
New Features and Updates
We added a Pronouns field to member profiles, so OpenLab members can now include their preferred pronouns (e.g. she/her/hers) on their profile page.
We also made a change to Portfolio functionality, allowing Discussion, Docs, and Files to be activated on Portfolio Profiles. To activate any of these tools, navigate to your Portfolio Profile > Settings (in the right-hand menu) > Settings (in the sub-menu at the top of the Settings page). You can click the checkboxes for any of these tools you would like to activate.
OpenLab members may notice a new theme and new plugin available for activation on OpenLab sites. The theme is called OpenLab Twenty Thirteen, which is a child theme of Twenty Thirteen. For now the only difference between the two is that activating the theme also automatically activates the plugin, Breadcrumb NavXT, which adds breadcrumb links to pages, making it easier to navigate sites that might have a large number of pages. The plugin may be deactivated if you donât want to use breadcrumbs, but it is only compatible with the OpenLab Twenty Thirteen and OpenLab Twenty Sixteen themes.
The plugin is Mammoth .docx converter, which allows you to more easily copy and paste from Microsoft Word without losing formatting. Something to keep in mind with this plugin is that the more semantic your Word docs are (e.g. use of Heading and paragraph styles), the better the formatting will translate in your posts and pages.
Finally, we made a few accessibility improvements to the settings page for the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. These were incorporated by the plugin developer, so they are included for anyone who uses the latest version of the plugin in the broader WordPress community.
Bug Fixes
We fixed three bugs in this release. One was preventing admins from sending messages to all members of a course, project, or club. Another was causing the accessibility link in the footer to break, and a third fixed a problem where department and major were no longer required fields when editing a member profile.
weâd like to draw your attention once again to our in-house site, Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab. This site operates as a forum where OpenLab community members can ask questions and stimulate discussion related to teaching and learning on the OpenLab and in open digital environments more generally. The site is replete with carefully cullied resources you can draw on in your teaching, from examples of digital pedagogy assignments to provocative readings on the value of multimedia pedagogy and public writing to information on best practices and tips for open digital pedagogy.  The siteâs blogroll is a great place for online discussion on building a curriculum that integrates the OpenLab; each month, our Pedagogy Profiles blog series highlights a different City Tech faculty member who is using the OpenLab in creative ways.
In conjunction with this site, our OpenLab team hosts Open Pedagogy Events, organized around particular themes and concerns related to teaching in open digital environments and more specifically with teaching on the OpenLab. This Thursday (2/21) weâre hosting our first Open Pedagogy event of the semester, Curating Student Work in ePortfolios. The event will be held in the Faculty Commons (N227) from 4:30-6:00pm. Refreshments will be served (thanks to the Provostâs Office for its generous support of this event!). Visit the event posting for more information and to RSVP! We hope to see you there! We also have a follow-up workshop that will look more closely at how to integrate curation into your use of the OpenLab (RSVP here!). Part-time faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for participation in the event and/or workshop.
As always, we encourage you to join the site, follow along and participate in the conversation!
When enrolling at City Tech, freshmen and transfer students can choose to participate in learning communities. As noted in the First Year Learning Communities (FYLC) OpenLab Site, FYLCs are âtwo or more courses with the same students enrolled, linked with an interdisciplinary theme, providing an innovative way for students to learn and form bonds with the college.â In these courses, students receive support from peer mentors and faculty in navigating college life and approaching academic work.FYLC faculty have used the OpenLab to bolster the FYLC experience, creating course sites to support interdisciplinary learning/ teaching. Â However, settling on site architecture that fruitfully connects multiple courses is not always easy. It is quite a different task from creating a discipline-specific, Â individual course or project site. A good starting point in designing a FYLC site might be to look at and draw inspiration from previous FYLCs.
Now you might ask:
How can I find past FYLC sites to use as models in my own work?
Good question! As part of a growing âbadgingâ effort to identify different types of courses on the OpenLab, the OpenLab has now has created âFYLC Badgesâ that indicate when a course  is a FYLC.
Look for these badges to identify FYLC!
These badges are also searchable. From the homepage, click on the magnifying glass in the upper right, and select courses.
On the Search page, all of the filters may be set to your interests, except âSelect Typeâ; for that field youâll want to select âFirst Year Learning Communityâ. This will pull up any and all FYLC that match the other filters you set.
Last semester, the OpenLab hit an impressing milestone, welcoming its 25,000th member at the start of the fall. This term, the OpenLab reached an even more impressive 28,000 members: we continue our retrospective series here, looking back at how the OpenLab has grown and evolved since its inception in 2011. This growth was made possible by the many City Tech partners and stakeholders who participate in the platform, and push the site in new and exciting directions. A few shout-outs to some of our partners:
Faculty and staff have been building OER course sites on the OpenLab and have an OER Fellowship project site to coordinate their efforts. OER courses are identifiable through an OER badge, which appears on the avatar of the course or project. Courses and projects with an OER badge can also be searched for in course and project directories. You can read more about OER badges in our help section.
Students and faculty have been working together on math problems from the open source math homework site, WeBWorK, on the OpenLab WeBWorK site, developed as a part of the Title V grant, âOpening Gateways to Completion: Open Digital Pedagogies for Student Success in STEM.â Â The site will be released publicly as a WordPress plugin at the end of the project.
The OpenLab has partnered with Commons in a Box, to produce an open platform for teaching and learning that anyone can use. Commons in a Box OpenLab recently launched, and greatly extends the public reach of the work we do here at City Tech.
As part of the HSI-STEM Digital Pathways grant, led by the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), in partnership with City Tech and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and to support students enrolled in STEM courses- especially computer science and digital media arts and technology -BMCC will be one of the first institutions to use Commons in a Box OpenLab beginning in Spring 2019.
The OpenLab has been collaborating with Student Life & Development, on its programming and shared goals of student engagement and the student experience. Weâve run workshops in partnership with them (such as for Presenting Yourself Online and Clubs) Finally, the OpenLab has collaborated with FYLC and STEM Success to support student advancement.
Each new OpenLab initiative and partner has expanded the possibilities of what work can be curated, showcased, collaborated on and discussed on the platform. Weâre excited to see much more of this work unfold in the future. There are, of course, many more OpenLab collaborators than could be named in this brief post. Â Letâs keep the conversation going-reply to this post in a comment, and briefly describe OpenLab your site/ project (donât forget to give us the link!). You are building the OpenLab, and weâd love to highlight your work!
On January 17, version 1.7.28 of the OpenLab was released. It included updates for all themes and plugins, as well as for WordPress and BuddyPress, the software that powers the OpenLab. The release also included a number of new features and plugins, as well as some bug fixes.
Block Editor / Gutenberg
Gutenberg, or the block editor, is the new editor for WordPress posts and pages, which marks a significant change from the editor weâve been using on the OpenLab. To ease the transition, we kept the usual âclassic editorâ as the default, but site admins have the option to choose which editor to enable on their sites, and site members can also choose which editor to use on the level of individual posts.
Starting at the end of this summer (2019), we will enable the block editor as the default, while still allowing members to use the classic editor if they prefer.
You can learn more about the block editor on WordPress.orgâs Gutenberg site, where you can also try it out, and find links to more advanced resources. If youâd prefer to watch a video, WP Tavern has posted a quick introductory video.
New Features
1. More options for member roles
One of the new features included in this release is the ability for admins to choose the default roles for members on the profile and site when they join a course, project, or club. For example, if you want members to receive email notifications and have your site included in their âMy OpenLabâ page, but not allow most members to post on the site, you can now set such combinations of profile and site roles when you first create the site, or edit the roles in Settings for existing groups.
2. First Year Learning Community badge
Another new addition in this release is a badge for First Year Learning Communities (FYLC), similar to the Open Education Resources (OER) badge. Courses with an FYLC badge can also be searched for in the courses directory. You can read more about FYLC badges in our help section.
3. Anthologize improvements
As part of our improvements to the Anthologize plugin, the latest update adds âauthorâ as an option when searching for posts to add to an Anthologize project.
4. Improved formatting on Settings pages
We cleaned up a few small formatting inconsistencies in the Settings > Settings section of course, project, club, and portfolio profiles. These changes are likely not noticeable to most of our members, but nonetheless improve the appearance of these pages.
New Plugins
We added two new plugins in this release.
1. Shortcodes Ultimate provides more than 50 shortcodes that can be used in the post or page editor to add different kinds of functionality and visual elements, such as dropcaps, accordions, tabs, sliders, and more, to posts and pages. You can preview the available shortcodes on the plugin site.
2. Search and Filter allows you to add advanced options for searching and filtering posts on your site, such as the ability to allow people to filter posts by tags within particular categories, and more.
Bug Fixes
There were a number of bug fixes included in this release.
1. There was a problem with email notifications causing daily notifications to not be sent out properly in some groups with more than 300 members. This has been fixed.
2. There was another email notifications bug fixed that was preventing weekly and daily digest notifications from being sent.
3. We fixed an issue in the OpenLab Twenty Sixteen theme, that was causing the bottom horizontal borders of dropdown menus to extend a little farther to the left than they should.
4. We fixed a bug causing faculty and staff offices to appear as options along with departments, for students creating ePortfolios. The offices no longer appear.
5. There was a bug causing the required fields of âmajorâ for students and âdepartment/officeâ for faculty and staff to no longer be required when creating an account. This has been fixed.
Happy New Year and welcome back! As you all are sinking back into your semesterly routines, we want to take a moment to highlight the different ways weâre here to support and engage you this semester.
Spring 2019 Office Hours
Meet with a member of the OpenLab Community Team for face-to- face support.
Below is a list of workshops we are offering this spring for students.Note that our first workshops begin this week! This semester, for the first time, weâve created an option for students to RSVP to workshops. This can also be done by clicking the links below. Expect an email reminder from us a few days before the event.
We have help(ful) documentation on the OpenLab that offers step-by-step guides for everything from getting started, to thinking about specific plugins that build out the functionality of your sites and portfolios.
We encourage you to become members of our in-house sites (you can do so by visiting the profiles of each site). These sites will keep you up-to-date with all things âOpenLabâ and offer opportunities for deeper investment with City Techâs community.
Learn more about the OpenLab, including workshops, events, community, and support opportunities on The Open Road. (Profile)
Share and discuss resources about open digital pedagogy with other City Tech and CUNY-wide staff and faculty on Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab. (Profile)
Spring 2019 Open Pedagogy Events – Faculty and Staff
As in semesters past, we will have two Open Pedagogy events in Spring 2019. The dates are set for Thursday February 21 and Thursday April 4 – from 4:30pm to 6:00pm in the Faculty Commons (N227). Learn more here.
We hope to see you around soon! Wishing you all a happy semester!
Version 1.7.76 of the OpenLab was released on December 17. This release was small, but did include some important new features and a bug fix.
Features
We added the ability to disable and enable Discussion, Docs, and Files on the profile page of any Course, Project, or Club. If you donât use any of these tools you can now disable them, and they can always be enabled again if you decide to use them. By default these tools are enabled for new Courses, Projects, and Clubs, but they can be disabled in Profile > Settings > Settings, in the Discussion, Docs, and Files Settings section.
Two additional improvements to the Anthologize plugin were also included in this release. When editing a project, you are now able to view more details about each page and post, including categories, tags, and author, as youâre choosing them to add to a project. In addition, when exporting a project to save as a pdf or other file type, the author is now generated automatically from all post and page authors included in that project.
Bug Fix
We fixed a printing-related issue causing the OpenLab footer to overlap with content on a page or post when printing from an OpenLab site.
Greetings from the OpenLab and congratulations to all on the closing of another successful semester!
While our weekly âSpotlightâ blog series will go on hiatus until the Spring semester, we wanted to remind you of the sites we featured this past semester and encourage you to check them out if you havenât already done so.
In addition to reviewing these posts from this past semester, you can find a full curated list of all sites that have been spotlighted in our Spotlight Archive. This archive offers visitors 3 curated lists to help them sort through the posts:
For everyone (By type of site â course, project, club, portfolio)
