What You're Doing, Where We're Going
Created by Quantitative Reasoning Fellow, Yoonhee Kang, as a part of the Math Department’s Quantitative Reasoning (QR) program, this site features many great resources on QR and offers a space where those interested in QR can share and discuss ideas. The site is well-designed, and contains information on QR, workshops for students, posts on QR in everyday life and various professions, and videos about QR. Take a look!
We have a couple of events coming up featuring our student community team we’d like to let you know about!
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CUE CONFERENCE
First, our team will be presenting at the CUNY CUE conference on May 8th. The conference starts at 9 am at City College, and you can register here. Our team will be presenting at 3:15 in Room SH 210.
Engaging a College Community through Open Digital Technologies: City Tech’s OpenLab
Jill Belli, Konyca Francis, Scott Henkle, Andrew McKinney, Mandy Mei, Jody Rosen, Brianna Vasquez, Bree Zuckerman, New York City College of Technology
The OpenLab is an open online space where members can work together, experiment, and innovate. We will share compelling uses of the platform and discuss the possibilities such technologies create for teaching, learning, and collaboration in an open Digital CUNY.
You can find out more about the conference here.
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HONORS AND EMERGING SCHOLARS POSTER PRESENTATION
We’ll also be presenting at the Honors and Emerging Scholars Poster Presentation, scheduled for Wednesday, May 6, 2015 from 11-4 PM and Thursday, May 7, 2015 from 10-3 PM (The awards ceremony is scheduled to start at 12:30 PM on May 7th). The poster presentation will take place in the Atrium First and Ground Floors. The awards ceremony  will take place in the atrium amphitheater.
We hope you can attend one or both of these events!
Words Have Lives is a companion to the course Developmental Writing. While it focuses on material being discussed in class, it can nonetheless be helpful to any students who may have questions about the writing process. The site offers many resources, from help with essay grammar, structure, and strategy, to specific resources offered at City Tech, such as the Learning Center where students can go for help with their writing. It is also well-structured and designed, and makes great use of image and video!
Irene’s Iarochevitch’s excellent portfolio is well-designed and structured, highlighting her work in a number of courses through video, photographs, and writing. The portfolio focuses on her ambitious senior thesis project, or “culmination project,” for which she is building a laser harp, an electronic musical instrument. Her portfolio was also discovered by another harp-maker, who left a comment with some suggestions for the harp. It’s always great to see these kinds of interactions on the OpenLab, where student work can indeed attract an audience that reaches beyond the classroom!
This project was created by students in Prof. Laura Westengard’s course, ENG 3407: Gothic Literature and Visual Culture. Students have posted photographs, video, and written about numerous Gothic sites in New York City, analyzing them through the theories and concepts they’ve been learning in class. For those interested in taking their own spooky tour, the students created a Google Map that includes all the locations on the site. Check it out, but as they warn, enter at your own risk!
The annual City Tech Literary Arts Festival Approaches!
City Tech will host its 34th Annual Literary Arts Festival on Thursday, March 26th, at 5:30 p.m., in the Voorhees Theater. The poet Dinaw Mengestu will be this year’s guest speaker. The event is free and open to the public. Do go!
The CST Colloquium site is well-organized and has many great features. Their events calendar page and events widget in the site footer make it easy to find out about upcoming colloquium talks. They link to the slides for past talks so visitors can catch up on anything they missed. There’s also an easy way to subscribe to the group’s email list, and a submissions page for talk proposals. Take a look!
We’re excited to be presenting at Tech Day @ City Tech on Wednesday, March 18! We’ll be in room G-604, from 11:45am-12:45pm.
For our interactive session, “City Tech’s OpenLab: Enhancing the College Experience through Open Digital Technologies,” we’ll be exploring the sites below as a way of thinking through how to enhance the college experience (in the classroom, in our community, and among peers).
ENG 2426: Science Fiction
There’s a lot happening on Prof. Jill Belli’s Science Fiction course site, which is well-structured so it’s easy to explore and access specific information and resources. The site is very active, with frequent student posts and interaction in the comments sections. There are also some great discussions generated in the Class Discussion Posts, where conversation is extended beyond class time. You can tell from reading through any of these comment threads that students are very engaged with the material they’re studying, as well as their classmates’ ideas. Each week the class votes on which student post they think should be featured on the site, and the winner is chosen as the People’s Choice Post of the week. We also love that the course avatar (pictured above) was created by a student in the class, Andrew Dutt.
FIRST YEAR LEARNING COMMUNITY: ”The Art of Food” HMGT1203/1204 & ARTH1100
“The Art of Food” is an exciting learning community between Professor Garcelon’s Culinary I, Professor Jacus’s Baking & Pastry I, and Professor Cheng’s History of Photography courses.  In their course, their students explore whether or not it’s possible to appreciate food like a work of art and how food can be viewed in terms of aesthetic categories like beauty and taste.  The course site is very dynamic and very well-structured with great multimedia assignments from photographing food texture to blogging about Civil War soldier’s diets and foods that would be impossible to live without!  Take a look and enjoy!
#TheGuide
#TheGuide project, organized by Professor Karen Goodlad in the Hospitality Management department and Professor Laura Westengard in the English department, and created by their students, offers the OpenLab community a friendly neighborhood guide to local resources ranging from information about college skills, to tours of Brooklyn Bridge Park, to where to find the best local grub! This site is very well-organized and makes good use of widgets in the right-hand sidebar. Just check out all of those great categories! This site is a great example of how collaborative work done on the OpenLab can benefit the entire City Tech community.
The Buzz
The Buzz is the blog for our excellent group of student bloggers, who are writing on a wide variety of topics, including fashion, food, NYC events and activities, and more. This semester the group also includes a few photobloggers who will be posting and writing about their photographs. There are new posts nearly every day, as well as an active comments section. Check it out, and leave a comment!
Biological Sciences Department
The Biological Sciences Department has created an excellent site on the OpenLab, which is full of resources, news, and helpful information. It’s well-structured so that everything is easy to find, both on the home page, and in the top menu. They also have a helpful feed of upcoming departmental events and deadlines in the sidebar. Take a look!
The Biological Sciences Department has created an excellent site on the OpenLab, which is full of resources, news, and helpful information. It’s well-structured so that everything is easy to find, both on the home page, and in the top menu. They also have a helpful feed of upcoming departmental events and deadlines in the sidebar. Take a look!
Prof. Jill Belli’s Science Fiction course site has a lot happening, and is well-structured so it’s easy to explore and access specific information and resources. The site is very active, with frequent student posts and interaction in the comments sections. There are also some great discussions generated in the Class Discussion Posts, where conversation is extended beyond class time. You can tell from reading through any of these comment threads that students are very engaged with the material they’re studying, as well as their classmates’ ideas. Each week the class votes on which student post they think should be featured on the site, and the winner is chosen as the People’s Choice Post of the week. We also love that the course avatar (pictured above) was created by a student in the class, Andrew Dutt.
The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.
