The Open Road

Warning:  Do not watch unless you like to see cockroaches being turned into robots!  More on this below!

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REMINDER:  STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES

Last week we mentioned we’re looking for more qualified students to write for our award-winning (or soon to be) student blog, The Buzz.  Those submissions are ongoing, and the deadline isn’t until the 10th, so be sure to get those applications in.  In addition, we want to emphasize that we’d love to hear from faculty:  if you know a student who would be good for the position, please do let us know.

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FEATURED COURSE:  INS AND OUTS OF PHYSICAL COMPUTING

We don’t always know what they’re talking about, but we had a great time looking through the work being done in this course.  Lovely, detailed descriptions of controllers, actuators, and sensors, and exemplary student interaction in the comments.  It’s wonderful to see students who are obviously passionate about the class and what they’re doing in it.  And yes, the site even has links to cockroach dissection, live and onstage, which we have posted at the top of this edition of This Week.  Watch at your own risk.

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FEATURED TIP:  SOUNDCLOUD

A few weeks back we mentioned that we’d added a Soundcloud plugin that would allow you to embed a Soundcloud file.  Well, to be more clear, WordPress has added an oEmbed functionality for Soundcloud.  What this means is that you can add Soundcloud directly to your post by copying and pasting the URL of the Soundcloud 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.  As of this writing, the OpenLab is using Version 3.5.2, though we will be updating again soon.

As always contact us with any questions!

STUDENT EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY:  WRITE FOR THE BUZZ!

PLEASE NOTE:  THE DEADLINE FOR THE POSITION HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO NOV 1ST!

This week we just want to announce an important opportunity:  The OpenLab is looking for students to contribute to our student community blog site, “The Buzz!”

Beginning in mid-October, new OpenLab Student Bloggers will write a short post every two weeks about whatever interests you and your fellow students. Your posts could be about you: maybe you’re from another country, a parent, coming back to school after years away, a veteran, etc. Or you could write about what interests you and your friends and classmates: music, sports, food, movies, the 2012 election…  Currently we have writers who write about technology, food, student life, and more.

As well as writing on the site, OpenLab Student Bloggers will work with the OpenLab team to create conversation on the OpenLab by commenting on the posts written by other student bloggers and members of the OpenLab community.

And there’s more: In addition to being great for your resume, student bloggers will receive a stipend of $300 per semester.

To Apply: Contact us at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu by NOVEMBER 1. In your email please explain the point of view you’ll be bringing to your posts and why you should be chosen as one of our student bloggers. Please attach your resume and a short writing sample (just two or three paragraphs). In your writing sample you should write in the style you think you’ll use on your blog; there’s no need to be formal—you’re not being graded on this!—but you’ll need to be clear and interesting.

If you already work within the CUNY system or for the Research Foundation of CUNY, please note that, too.

NEW TERM=NEW MEMBERS!

 (Image by James Cridland via Creative Commons License)

The start of the term always brings an explosion of new membership, and this term was no different.  Our community now has more than 7,000 members, and more than 6,500 of them are students!  Roughly 800 students joined since the end of August.  Welcome, to all of you who joined us in the last couple of weeks.

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TROUBLE REGISTERING? 

As some of you may have noticed, a small issue has cropped up with registering for the OpenLab, having to do with student City Tech email accounts (and only student accounts). The Open Lab is not connected to the City Tech email system, and we’re working with City Tech to ameliorate the problem, but in the meantime, we have a solution.

The Problem:  When you sign up to join the OpenLab, the system sends you an email to your City Tech email account, which verifies that you are a City Tech student. Occasionally (not all the time) students click on that email and receive and error message, and are thus unable to complete sign up.

The SOLUTION!:  Instead of clicking the activation link in the email, you can copy and paste it directly into the URL field (the address bar at the top of your browser).  It seems to work more effectively if you don’t right click to copy but instead use Control C and Control V to copy and paste.  Also, some students have reported that it worked to change browsers (Chrome to Firefox, for example).

And of course, if you don’t understand any of this, or this solution doesn’t seem to be working for you, please contact us anytime.

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FEATURED TUTORIAL: CLONING A COURSE

As we mentioned in our last post, we have created an easy way to copy a course, and so we’re releasing the “Clone a course” feature:  a simple, few-clicks way to recreate a course profile and site, carrying over all the information, pages, documents, posts, etc. We now have a new help page explaining how it works, and you can find that here!

And as always, email us if you have any questions.

Welcome back to school!  It’s been a busy summer here at the OpenLab. We’ve been hard at work on a new release that has improved the overall performance of our platform. While much of that work won’t be noticeable to our users, you’re now using a sleeker, tougher, and better OpenLab! We did add a few features that we’re quite proud of, however, and we hope they’ll improve your overall OpenLab experience.

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COURSE CLONING

(image by HJ Media Studios via Creative Commons License)

At City Tech, faculty members frequently teach the same course or set of courses semester after semester. In fact, faculty often teach multiple sections of the same course each term. We thought there should be an easy way to copy a course, and so we’re releasing the “Clone a course” feature:  a simple, few-clicks way to recreate a course profile and site, carrying over all the information, pages, documents, posts, etc. We hope this makes things easier for our hardworking faculty!

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HELP!

We’ve improved our help navigation over the summer, streamlining links and improving the right hand menu, which you’ll see now has submenus to help you find the content you’re looking for.  We’re going to continue adding to help over the course of the term, so keep an eye out.

As we’re always saying, if you ever need help that you can’t find in our “help” section, you can use this form to contact us.  And we’ve improved that this summer as well: you’ll see that we’ve also added a new option to our drop down menu: “request a workshop/meeting.”  Feel free to use this whenever you would like us to visit your class (for faculty) or your department (for faculty and staff).  And we’re happy to arrange meetings whenever we can!

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PLUG-INS

We’ve also added a few plug-ins and plug-in addons that we hope users like.  We’ll have complete tutorials up soon, but for now you might want to try…

SoundCloud

You can now embed a SoundCloud file directly into a post or page, just like we’ve done here. This is a plug-in, but in fact we’ve activated it across the OpenLab, so you don’t need to activate it–just copy the code and you’re good to go.  We’ll have a more complete tutorial soon.

Gravity Forms Directory

If you’re a Gravity Forms user, you’ll see that we’ve added a new feature: you can now easily collect and display contact information, creating a directory of users. Members can display, for example, their email, or phone numbers, or interests, which then become searchable.  Because of this tool, all members of a club interested in a particular topic, for example, can be easily identified. Or one can create a private directory: student information (email addresses, major, year) for a class, for example, can be easily shared with the instructor.

WP DPLA

As developer (and OpenLab developer) Boone Gorges writes about his plug-in, “The DPLA has lots of cool content, and WP DPLA is a way to help your readers discover and explore that content. It takes the tags you’ve assigned to your post – say, cheesehead and Packers or pizza, beer, and nachos – and fetches four random items from DPLA’s partner collections, and displays them at the bottom of the post.”

We’ll have more on these plug-ins and other features in up-coming Open Road posts.  Until then, happy back to school!  And please, contact us anytime!

(Image by Rob Hughes via Creative Commons License)

School is nearly out!  It’s the end of the year!  We’ll be taking most of the summer off of This Week to concentrating on other elements of the project, and just wanted to take this chance to thank everyone for supporting the OpenLab this year.  It’s been an amazing time, the growth of the project has been unbelievable, and we’re looking forward to keeping it up in the fall.  Thanks again!

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CUE CONFERENCE SUMMARY 

Last week, the OpenLab community team presented at the CUNY CUE Conference.  Designed for faculty and administrators, this year’s CUE conference focused on research and evidence-based practices to improve student learning outcomes in the classroom and in all academic support services.

The OpenLab Team promised to “examine how faculty learn new techniques to enhance student learning by presenting examples of the pedagogy from OpenLab.”  In practice, that meant we showed some of the great work going on at the OpenLab, and the many advantages our users have gained from keeping their work open and public.

Once we presented some possibilities and advantages for open pedagogy, we asked the attendees to play a game!  As in our Living Lab Workshop a few weeks ago, groups of participants were to create an assignment based on three cards, drawn at random.  The event was a great success, topped off with some serious campus envy on John Jay’s amazing roof-lawn-patio-field…

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our session, and the conference!  Have a sane finals week, and have a wonderful summer!

(image originally uploaded by Eric Shalov via Creative Commons License)

Hope you had a wonderful Cinco de Mayo!  As the term winds down, a few things, one of which we could very much use your thoughts on…

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Featured Request:  What Would You Like From a Grader?

In our ongoing efforts to make the OpenLab the best teaching and learning platform it can be, The OpenLab team is in the middle of evaluating grading options, including the feasibility of creating a tool to support grading.  We’re asking for your help in determining the community needs, and the bet way to meet them.  We’d love your general thoughts, but here are some specific questions:

a) What do you currently use for grading? (Blackboard, spreadsheet, another tool?)
b) What do you like about your current tool? What don’t you like?
c) What are the minimum features you would need in a grading tool on the OpenLab?
d) In your dream world, what features would you like to see?
e) Any other input you would like to provide?

We’re also evaluating our current grader, the KB gradebook.  If you have used it, either here on the OL or in other settings, we’d love to hear what you think, what issues you might have had, what you like about it, etc.

Leave a comment below, or contact us here anytime.  We greatly appreciate your help and look forward to seeing your feedback!

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Featured Features:  New Plug-Ins

(photo by Qurren (talk) via creative commons license)

If you’ve visited the Plug-Ins page in your site’s dashboard, you might have noticed there are some new plug-ins available, including Easy Table, a convenient way to add a table to any post or page.   We’ll have a tutorial for it in the coming weeks, but for now just know that there are always improvements happening to the OpenLab:  some you’ll notice, some that just make the site work better.  Feel free to ask questions about anything new you see, and know that we’ll have updates and tutorials on all of it  in time for the summer sessions. 

(image in the public domain)

Happy May!

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Upcoming Workshops

We have two faculty workshops on Wednesday of this week!  Come!  Learn!

We’re also having a student showcase on Thursday at 1pm.  Here you can learn about all the great things students are doing on the OpenLab, and develop ideas for your own projects.

RSVP here!

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OpenLab Statistics!

We posted this elsewhere on The Open Road last week, but we’re going to repost it here, since we’re so very proud.  These are the statistics for the OpenLab over the last three months:

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

Students: 5654

Faculty: 353

Staff: 68

Number of courses, projects, clubs, portfolios:

Courses: 457

Projects: 966

Clubs: 39

Portfolios: 783

Featured Site:  Undergraduate Research

This week we’re featuring the Undergraduate Research project, dedicated to bringing students and faculty together to do research.  It gives students a chance to gain credit, get close to a professor, and improve their resumes, and it gives professors a unique way to passing on knowledge and skills, discover with students, support their professional discipline, and apply for grants targeted to undergraduate institutions.

As the home page of the site says:

(image by v-collins via Creative Commons Licence)

Happy Earth Day!  And welcome to this week’s This Week in the OpenLab!

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FEATURED CLUBS:  Arch(itecture) Fellowship, Mobile Application Developers

This week we’re featuring a couple of promising yet still underpopulated clubs:  Arch Fellowship and Mobile Application Developers.  The first of these hopes to “get to know our fellow classmates, build a network, and share the different points of view regarding architecture and other subjects.”  If you’re an architecture major, or just interested, you certainly should join here.  The second of these, M.A.D. proposes to be a place for app developers to share and ideas and create new projects.  Join that one here!

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FEATURED CONTEST: WHAT DOES GEN ED MEAN TO YOU?

The contest, “What Does Gen Ed Mean to You?” has officially begun. You have from now until April 29 at 5pm to submit a creative work that represents an answer to this question. Examples of accepted submission forms are audio visual works (in .MP4 and .MOV), art projects, posters, and other creative media.

Remember, three prizes will be awarded. One from each school: Technology and Design, Arts and Sciences, and Professional Studies. The winning submissions will be used to promote General Education in the college starting next semester.

This is a great opportunity for you to think about what the goal of General Education is, and what it means to you. Group submissions will be accepted, however the prize will be $250 per winning entry no matter the size of the group.

Make sure that you submit the release forms with your entry. They can befound under files on the project site. https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/what-does-gen-ed-mean/files/

For general questions, submit in the Discussion labeled Questions. For individual questions, email genedcontest@gmail.com

You can learn more here, and view the pdf here.  Good luck!

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FEATURED SITE:  Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center

It’s been a while since we caught up with our friends at the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center, part of the larger City Tech project of which the OpenLab is a part.  They’ve been active:  they held a Bikes on the Brooklyn Waterfront Conference (with photos!), and have an upcoming breakfast talk on May 10th ( 8:30am to 10:00am at CityTech (CUNY): 300 Jay Street, Room N119).  The subject is “What’s There Now and What Might Be Coming: A Look at Land Use along the Brooklyn Waterfront” with Richard Bearak, Director, Land Use, Brooklyn Borough President’s Office

Once opened, registration (which is free) for the talk will be found here.