The Open Road

(image by Jonny Goldstein via creative commons license)

After a bit of a delay, our student blogging team is back in action!  That led us to think that it is high time we highlight some student blogs from around the OpenLab.

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Shawn Bremmell

Shawn is one of our OpenLab Student Community Team bloggers.  His newest post is called “Tuition Fees Are No More.”  Here’s an excerpt:

“Ever wish that you could attend college for free? Prepare to jump for joy, because you might be getting your wish! Well, that is if a proposed legislation, called Tuition Free-NY, is passed. The potential legislation, would offer students free tuition at New York’s public colleges. Sound appealing so far? Don’t get too excited just yet, for there is a catch. In exchange for free tuition, you must volunteer for 250 hours of community service, during your college years. And if that isn’t hard enough, you are not allowed to relocate outside of New York once you graduate, for at least 5 years.

“With Tuition Free-NY, college grads would get a chance to start out with lower student debt, which is at a all time high this year. Assemblyman James Skoufis, whose sponsoring the legislation, hopes that this will keep students in the state, and not have NYC lose it’s intellect and income..”

You can read more of Shawn’s post here!

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Jenny Wang

Jenny is a student in Jennifer Sears’ Advanced Career Writing Class.  She recently wrote a blog post about her class trip to the AGIA gallery:

“The trip to the AIGA gallery was amazing. It was very inspiring to see so many beautiful creations. Each design had its own meaning and history by the designers which captured many attentions. Three designers and designs that were very inspiring to me while I was exploring the AIGA gallery were Milton Glaser, Mirko Llic and Christopher Brand.

“Milton Glaser’s design of the Crackpot Party and the Republican logo were very artistic. The democrats are represented by a tea pot yet, has a crack within it. The quote “we don’t hold water” states that the democrats will not take orders from other systems. The republican’s logo was very imaginative because of the shape of the design, it consist of the word “NO” which forms itself into the structure of an elephant. Both works contains the colors of the American flag and three stars representing America and its pride.”

You can read more of Jenny’s blog post here!

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Maura Smale

We know we said we would feature student blogging, but we thought we’d also point you to our own Maura Smale’s blog, which you can find at the ACRLog.  Here’s an excerpt:

“It seems like every year one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more. Read more? But I’m a librarian, I read all the time, right?

“Over the 7 years that I’ve been a librarian I’ve heard that misconception all too often upon meeting new people. “Oh, you’re a librarian? You must read all the time/love to read/spend your days reading!” Of course the context of that statement ultimately determines my response (and I am always polite, even when slightly exasperated), but in truth the answers are no, yes, no. Of course I love to read, as I always have, even before I was a librarian. But the amount of long-form, focused reading that I typically do during my workday is very, very small. Not that other forms of reading don’t matter — I can usually keep up with my work-related RSS feed and the newspaper, and like most office workers I read many many MANY emails each day. But sit down in my office with a book? Not often…”

You can read more of Maura’s writing here!

That’s it for this week!  As always, you can contact us anytime with any questions.

(image by Axel Kristinsson via creative commons license)

Welcome to this week’s This Week!  We’re going with the pretense that spring is on the way.  At least for a few days.  This week a tool, a course, and a plug-in.  Enjoy!

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Featured Tool:  Blogging Grading Rubric

From the department of simple yet very very useful, we bring you Jill Belli’s blogging grading rubric, which is clear, concise, and gives students (and probably the professor) a sense of what is required and valued when blogging.  And as you know, students often aren’t sure exactly what is required in this somewhat unfamiliar, possibly less formal, still potentially thoughtful, short form.  And often professors new to the OpenLab aren’t all that sure either.  So do take some guidance from Jill, give her some credit, and say thanks and hi on the elevator.

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Featured Course:  Vampires!

(image by Misiocytka via creative commons license)

There are courses that are of interest only to the people in the field, and there are courses that people all over are going to want to take a look at.  Laura Westengard’s Vampires class falls into that latter category, and we’re thrilled that it’s open and available to the public here on the OL.  With readings, assignments, and student reflection on the subject, it’s a fine growing repository of all things vampire.

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Featured Plug-In:  WTI Like Post

Very few of our plug-ins are simpler than WTI Like Post.  As it’s developers say, “WTI Like Post is a plugin for adding like (thumbs up) and unlike (thumbs down) functionality for wordpress posts/pages. On admin end along with configuration settings, it will show maximum of 10 most liked posts/pages. You can configure these settings to match with your requirements. It also has the option to reset the settings back to default if needed. It comes with a widget to display the most liked posts/pages which you can place in any widget area. It has live updation of like count on the widget if you like or unlike any post/page.”

Just activate the plug-in, and you’ll see the like appear at the bottom of your post.  By default, however, there’s a ‘dislike’ option which you might want to remove, particularly from student work.  The settings for this plug-in are found on the plug-in page of your site dashboard.

Hope you like it. And as always, contact us with any questions!

New OpenLab Tour!

We’ve redone much of our help and support the the last few months (you can find a lot of that here).  More recently, we (well, really the inestimable Bree Zuckerman), redid our introduction to the OpenLab.  If you’re new to the OL, you should check it out–and if you’re already familiar, check it out anyway!  You just might find something you didn’t know!

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Featured Site: Techne

This week we’re featuring Techne, the online version of the annual publication from the Architecture Department.  It features student work from around the department, and they accept student submissions!  Get your work out there!  Submit your work (images or text) by the 14th of March.  You can find out more about it here.

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OpenLab Statistics to January 1st, 2014

As you might know, we keep records of the our growth here on the OpenLab, and we’d like to share our current statistics:

Number of users broken down by students, faculty, staff:

Students: 8706
Faculty: 473
Staff: 92

Number of courses, projects, clubs, portfolios:

Courses: 638
Projects: 1192
Clubs: 53
Portfolios: 1769

Pageviews (for past quarter):

847,351

Average visit duration (for past quarter):

5:34

(Image by Darren Kirby via Creative Commons License)

 9,000 Members!

It might have been a minute since we last spoke, but the OpenLab has not stopped growing:  in the last few weeks we’ve officially passed 9,000 members!   There are now over 600 courses on the platform, and nearly 1,200 projects.  We are so happy to continue to see our community grow and grow!

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Been To A Workshop? Come to Another!

Just as a reminder, the OpenLab team has been hosting workshops all through the month of February.  Now that our beginning workshops have passed, please join us for our more advanced faculty workshops, “Tools, Tips and Tricks” on March 12 (1-2:30) and April 3rd (3:30-5) in room G604.  Faculty/Staff workshops require registration. All part-time faculty are eligible to receive a stipend for workshop participation.

As we wrote, those are faculty-only workshops.  But students, we would love to have you at our workshops as well!  The remaining student workshops are:

W 3/12 3:00-4:00pm
Th 4/3 2:00-3:00pm
Th 5/1 2:00-3:00pm

These are in G604 as well.  And while we’d love for you to contact us to let us know you’re coming, registration is not required.

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Featured Project:  CityTech Printmaking Club

We’re big fans of this new club, the City Tech Print Making Club!  While still under development, the site promises to bring us information about techniques for printmaking, resources for area print making studios, and more!  Join now to learn more about this great club, and click here to find out more about their fun day making valentines.

The OpenLab recently graduated to version 1.4!  Here’s an update on some of our new features. Let us know what you think, either in the comments or by contacting us directly.

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Privacy Notification Changes

You’ll notice that we’ve made some changes to how privacy works.  Actually, privacy changes themselves are made in the exact same way, but we’ve made it much much clearer what those settings are, and what is accessible on sites you visit and/or administer.  Site and project project settings are now indicated in two ways.  First, you can see the setting in the right hand menu:

You’ll see that the notices are split: when the privacy settings for the Profile of your project, club, or course differ from the Site, it’ll be clearly marked. Completely open or private projects, clubs, and courses, will also be clearly marked.

Privacy is also now noted on the profile just below the avatar and description:

We hope these changes clarify the state of your project, club or course, for users and visitors.

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Modifications to Portfolio Settings 

If you’ve used our portfolio system before, you’ve probably noticed that there were differences between the way those worked and our the way our courses, projects, and clubs worked.  In particular, there were differences in the privacy settings, and we’ve adjusted that:  now portfolios have the same grades of privacy as our other projects, including public, private, and hidden options.  In addition, we’ve streamlined the way to invite people to visit your portfolio:  instead of an access list, you can now invite members, or they can join or request membership just like in other projects, courses and clubs.

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Changes to WordPress

WordPress updated over the break to version 3.8 (we’re already on 3.8.1, but that’s a maintenance release).  The changes are mostly cosmetic–you’ll notice that the dashboard looks significantly more “modern” and that widgets are easier to implement (you no longer have to drag them, if you don’t want).  You can learn all about it here.

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New Default Theme

We’ve replaced the default OpenLab theme, going from Twenty Ten to Twenty Eleven (Twenty Ten is still there, though, if it’s your favorite!)

As WordPress tells us:

“The 2011 theme for WordPress is sophisticated, lightweight, and adaptable. Make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background — then go further with available theme options for light or dark color scheme, custom link colors, and three layout choices. Twenty Eleven comes equipped with a Showcase page template that transforms your front page into a showcase to show off your best content, widget support galore (sidebar, three footer areas, and a Showcase page widget area), and a custom “Ephemera” widget to display your Aside, Link, Quote, or Status posts. Included are styles for print and for the admin editor, support for featured images (as custom header images on posts and pages and as large images on featured “sticky” posts), and special styles for six different post formats.”

We hope you like it!  And as always, contact us with any questions.

(image by JD Hancock via creative commons license)

Our system makes it incredibly easy to “clone” a course, bringing all documents, posts and pages created by the site administrator, and most settings to a new and uniquely named site and profile.  You’ll find cloning is now integrated into the OpenLab’s course creation.  You can view step-by-step instructions for how to clone a course in our help section.

 Cloning a course is particularly useful for a few reasons:

• for setting up multiple sections of the same course in a new semester. You can create the framework of your course, then clone it, changing the name of the url to create a new section of the course.
• for creating a new course based on an old one.  When your course is over, you can clone it, creating a new course that doesn’t contain any old student work. This both saves you time and leaves the old coursework accessible to the students who took the course. Keeping student work accessible on the OpenLab is very important: they may need to build on that work in later courses or show it to a potential employer, so please don’t delete it. (If it’s vital that your new students aren’t able to see the old students’ work, you can simply change the privacy settings on the old course to make it available to members only.)  Find more on managing your courses here, or contact us if you have questions.
• for sharing a course framework between teaching partners, or even entire departments. Some departments have expressed a desire to coordinate all sections of a course across the department.  That can also be done via course cloning: once the department has decided on a framework, it can be cloned for each new instructor, simply by changing the administrator of the course (you can find out more about there here).

If you want to copy only certain parts of a course site, however, or to copy material created by users other than yourself, you might want to use the import/export function on our sites.  You can learn more about that here.  Do note that the import/export function only copies course sites:  if most of your course material is on your profile page, you probably are better off using the clone feature.

Remember, for any cloning situation, we’re likely to have solutions. We’d love to discuss  options with you.  Email us anytime at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.

As part of our ongoing effort to move toward more regular updates, the OpenLab recently updated to version 1.3.2.  Here’s an update on some of our new features! Let us know what you think, either in the comments or by contacting us directly.

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New Feature and Widget:  Eportfolio List

We’ve added a feature that makes it possible to gather student eportfolios into a convenient list on your course profile page.  You can enable this under COURSE SETTNGS (as in the above screenshot).  Once enabled, it will gather each member’s eportfolio to populate a convenient list on the right side of your page, as here:

You can also create a similar list on the course site itself.  This does involve a separate step–you can now find a “Portfolio List” widget on the dashboard of your courses.  Here’s what it looks like:

Drag that into your preferred widget area, and you’ll see your list!

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New Feature:  Filters

We’ve also added search functionality to some of our directories.  You’ll now see options (these were previously only used for courses)  for refining your search on our clubs, projects, and people directories.

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New Plug-in:  TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 16 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen.

Some of the features added by this plugin

• Support for creating and editing tables.
• More options when inserting lists.
• Search and Replace in the editor.
• Editing in-line css styles.
• Advanced image dialog that offer a lot of options.
• Adding and removing HTML tag attributes.

Included TinyMCE plugins: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Advanced List, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras.

Once enabled, you can go to SETTINGS>TINYMCE Advanced to drag and drop new menu items onto your icon bar.  They’ll appear automatically the next time you make a new post!

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New Plug-In:  Link Manager

As several users have noticed, the link manager was removed from WordPress dashboards with one of their recent updates.  Some users will still see it, under certain circumstances, but on new blogs you’ll have to activate the “link manager” plug-in to use the feature.  We’ve installed it with our recent update.

(image by mkhmarketing via Creative Commons Liscence)

WordPress is constantly updating.  Most of the time the changes are small enough to not warrant mention, or are “back end” updates that our users won’t notice.  But the most recent updates, 3.5 and 3.6, bring some changes and new features we thought we’d point out.  Hope you enjoy them!

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NEW THEME:  Twenty Thirteen

We’ve added a new theme!  Twenty Thirteen.  Apart from its minimalist “flat” look (much like the newest iPhone system) and retro colors, it also has a few features that weren’t available on Twenty Twelve.

• The Home Page template has changed:  the theme is designed to be a simple blog, with no sidebar.  But if you’re attached to sidebars (and why shouldn’t you be), you should note that the “primary widget area” on this theme appears at the bottom of the page, and the “secondary widget area” is your side bar.  Drag widgets there to have them appear on the right side of your pages and posts.
• The page is now “mobile responsive” for optimal use on mobile phones.
• Post now can take various forms:  Standard, Aside, Image, Link, Quote, or Status.  You can find these just below the “publish” box on the right side of your dashboard.  And you can find more about each of these forms here.

And you can find a more detailed write-up about Twenty Thirteen here.

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CUSTOM MENUS

The format for custom menus has changed as well.  The biggest change is an accordion style left hand menu and a vertical layout, with two tabs:  one for editing the menus and one for assigning them locations.  The whole thing functions as it did before, it’s just streamlined for easier use.

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MEDIA UPLOADER

The Media Uploader is drastically different since 3.5.  But it’s also drastically better, and vastly more intuitive. Users probably will have no problem making the switch (who doesn’t love clicking once where you used to have to click three times?) but a few words on the new features.

• The “Add Media” button now says “Add Media” instead of making a distinction between types of media (and, to be truthful, those distinctions didn’t matter anyway!)
• It’s far easier to deal with media now. The media gallery is accessible by a tab next to “insert media,” and clicking on an image will give you options on the right for captions, editing the image, and (very important) changing the image size.  Click “insert” into your post or page, and you’re done.
• Galleries are easier as well (and look nicer). Click “Create Gallery,” click as many images as you like, change the order (drag them around where they appear at the bottom of the gallery or on the next page), and insert them into your post.  The new galleries look much sleeker, eliminating (in most cases) the need for gallery plug-ins.

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OEMBEDS

WordPress has added an oEmbed functionality for SoundCloud, SlideShare and Instagram.  What this means is that you can add items from those services directly to your post by copying and pasting the URL of the file, and YOU DON’T have to use the “share” dialogue box to copy either the iFrame code (which will never work on the OpenLab without a plugin) or the WordPress code. Using oEmbed makes things very easy, but it is a change if you’re used to doing things the old way.

You can check out this list for the complete and up to date sites that WordPress has added to its oEmbed list.

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NO MORE LINKS??

Oh no!  The Links Manager has disappeared from the left hand dashboard menu!  Wordpress believes that users simply don’t use it enough to make it a default part of the navigation.  True or not, we know that quite a few of you depend on that feature for managing your sites and courses.  We will have a plug-in that replaces that function soon.

We hope you like the new updates.  As always, contact us with any questions, any time!

(Thanks to searchenginejournal.com and ostraining.com for help with this post.)