The Open Road

(image by wyntuition via Creative Commons Liscence)

Some of us are returning from a weekend in Miami Beach, and are desperately disappointed in the weather, emphasis on work, and lack of neon in Brooklyn.  Alas, one must return to real life eventually.  And this week, we want to feature a couple of tips regarding how to manage spam for your OpenLab sites.

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FEATURED TIP:  MANAGING SPAM

As you probably know, there are a lot of spammers and spambots out there.  And they’re very keen to get their message or (more likely) link onto public sites like the OpenLab.  Most are obvious, and are actually typed by humans.  Like this one:

Basically anyone who praises a site without specifically mentioning what the site was about, usually is a spammer.  They can be freely marked as spam.

What you may not know, however, is that the OpenLab has a plug-in called Akismet which is designed to track and pull all non-human spam into a spam folder.  This works just like your email junk folder or spam folder, mostly by recognizing content-less, link-heavy spam bots, like this:

Because of Akismet, you don’t have to worry about going through and marking off the vast majority of spam that comes to the system.  However, there are two things you can do to help keep the system running smoothly.

First, you can delete the spam that’s in your spam folder.  You can do that by visiting COMMENTS>SPAM>EMPTY SPAM

In addition, you can change the Akismet settings so that the whole thing is periodically cleaned out.  You can do that at PLUGINS>AKISMET CONFIGURATION and then checking the box that says “Auto-delete spam submitted on posts more than a month old.”

The last thing you might want to try, if human-written spam is becoming a bother (and some sites are more attractive than others, for reasons which are sometimes a mystery!), is to utilize another plug-in, called Ajax Edit Comments.  One of that plug-in’s features is a simple Captcha, which will ensure that spammers have to make a bit more effort, and that you will no longer be spammed by first graders.

You can learn more about the Ajax Edit Comments’ other features in this previous tutorial.  We really recommend it for all sites.

That’s all for this week.  As always, contact us with any questions.

(image–and spelling–by OCAL via Creative Commons License)

With all the new courses popping up on the OpenLab at the start of the term, we thought we’d highlight a few promising examples…

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 Architectural Technology (Professor Paul King)

(Image by Don)

Professor King’s Architectural Technology course (which you can find here) features a complex architecture (get it?) involving linking separate areas together into what might be called a course hub.  A number of faculty members have taken this option for structuring their courses, either to help avoid redundancy (one can keep the static material on one site, allowing others to administered by students as needed) or just to give students a place of their own to take pride in.  Plus, it has beautiful student sketches!

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Architecture 1210 DESIGN FOUNDATION II (Professor Valdez)

William Valdez’ Architecture 1210 Design Foundation II course is one of our more robust course sites, replete with pdfs, assignments, examples, tutorials, and a vocabulary archive.  Not all of these sections are populated at this point in the semester, but a lot is already here.  It’s not easy to have a course site this well-planned at the beginning of the term–this is a great example of what is possible when we have time to do it.

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M1275 College Algebra and Trigonometry (Professor Smith)

We love to see students working through problems on the OpenLab, and here on Professor Smith’s Algebra and Trigonometry, we can see students helping each other out, working together and giving advice on a problem.  It’s just great to see this.

We’re happy to feature any course, assignment or project you think is interesting or notable.  Contact us anytime with your recommendations!

(image by thejimmylittle via Creative Commons License)

Welcome back everyone!  While you were away (actually right at the end of last term) the OpenLab passed 4,500 members!  That’s right:  4,500 members!  The community continues to grow, and given the start of school, we can only expect another flood of new users in the next few weeks.  Again, welcome everyone!

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OpenLab Workshops!

The OpenLab community team has been busy in the last weeks of the break offering workshops to faculty planning to use the OL in upcoming courses.  But if you missed those (or you aren’t a faculty member) you’ll have plenty of opportunity to join us for our workshops on various topics throughout the term.  We’ll be posting more about the upcoming schedule in the next days and weeks, but above you can find the schedule for student workshops, and below we have a list of upcoming faculty and staff workshops.  If you’d like to come, please RSVP at openlab@citytech.cuny.edu.  But if you can’t RSVP, please stop by anyway.  We’re always glad to have you!

NOTE:  The following are for faculty and staff only.  The student workshops are in the image above. 

February
2/6: 1:30-3:00 (G604) – Getting Started on the OpenLab
2/14 2:30-3:00 (G604) – Getting Started on the OpenLab (brief version)
2/14 3:00-4:30 (G604) – Designing a Course, Project, or Club on the OpenLab

March
3/12: 1:00-2:30 (G604) – Tools, Tips and Tricks for the OpenLab (Experience Required!)

April
4/18: 2:30-4:30 (G604) – Tools, Tips and Tricks for the OpenLab (Experience Required!)

May
5/1: 11:00-11:30 (G604)  Getting Started on the OpenLab
5/1: 11:30-1:00 (G604) Designing a Course, Project, or Club on the OpenLab

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Featured Tip:  Help!

(image by tsaiproject via Creative Commons)

This is a “tip” mostly for our new users of the OpenLab:  we (meaning the community team) are always here to help you.  Many many answers can be found in our help section, which is accessible from any page of the OpenLab:

In addition, as we say all the time but want to say again, feel free to email us anytime!

(image by David Berkowitz www.marketersstudio.com via Creative Commons)

Well, it’s finally happened–the term is coming to an end, and we’re all looking forward to a much deserved break.  We’re looking back on this term with a special fondness already–this is the term the OpenLab really entered a more mature phase, and we have to say we’re watching it grow up with a singular happiness.  This is the term that we reached 4000 users, the term we saw it reach more than 300 courses and 800 projects, and the term when we saw more and more users taking the OpenLab and making it theirs.  These are just a small sampling of the highlights from the term: 

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Featured Site:  Writing Acros the Curriculum (originally posted September 10th)

We want to highlight the presence of Writing Across the Curriculum on the OpenLab, and to encourage everyone who teaches and deals with writing in their courses to have a look at the resources being collected here.  You can check out their upcoming workshops and activities here.  And welcome to the new fellows!

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Featured Blog Post:  WordPress in education, meet the free software community. And vice versa. (originally posted September 19th)

This post isn’t on the OpenLab, but it was written by our own Boone Gorges, who has been invaluable to our own Openlab, the CUNY Academic Commons, and just about every digital pedagogical platform around.  In this post, he outlines some things you might not know, particularly if you’re new to WordPress Installations like ours (a bit of a simplified definition of the OpenLab, but for the purposes of Boone’s blog entry, it’ll work).  But more than the outlining, he makes a strong case that platforms like ours, and the “WPedu” users  who help develop and use and improve them day after day, are doing important, important work:

“…impressive innovations can be found all over the WPedu world. The innovation is motivated by the love of the work, and by principles: education should be open, individuals should control their data and their online identities, software should be free as in speech. These are the very same principles that are close to the hearts of free software enthusiasts.”

You can read more of Boone’s blog post here. 

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Featured Course:  Interaction Design (originally posted September 25th)

Today we’re featuring Professor Amelia Marzec’s Interaction Design course.  A simple, robust course, featuring plenty of examples of student work (including the snazzy flowchart above, by the cleverly named Noitatidem group, which includes Ian, Remy, Rosa).  In addition, Professor Marzec has readings and videos posted to her page, and in general seems to be humming along very nicely.  An exemplary course site, if you’re looking for one.

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Featured Assignment:  The Blue Caves of New York (originally posted October 1st)

The first of our featured student works comes from Mark Noonan’s The Place Where We Dwell: Reading and Writing About NYC.  This nice bit of writing by Shaquill Houston made us very happy… here’s an excerpt:

“The Blue Caves of the city: left and right you see the cave walls of gray and brown rusty rods of steel; above you see the cave’s roof of blue splinted wood; if you have a keen eye, you might even be able to see the mysterious glass stalactite. I call them mysterious because they start glowing at special times of day and you don’t see them under all blue caves. Don’t be ashamed if your blue cave doesn’t have the mysterious glass stalactite.”Your blue cave?”, Yeah “your blue cave”.Why are you puzzled? You’ve seen these caves around all around the city. They aren’t anomalies; they’re abnormally- normal. These caves should not be foreign to you unless you’re new to the city. Only under that condition I’ll cut you some slack but under any other condition shame on you. The “smart guys” like to give everything a scientific name so maybe you know them by their scientific name: scaffolding. My childhood began in one of the blue caves, specifically the blue cavern that was located at 122^nd street between Park & Lexington Avenue. I place emphasis on the word because these caves don’t stick around forever, though it may be hard to believe at times.”

Can you guess what the blue caves are?  You can read more here!

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 Featured Site:   Adventures in Modern College Writing (originally posted November 20th)

This week we thought we’d bring to your attention Thomas Wilk’s ENG 1101 Composition I courses, which you can find here and here and here.  They’re notable mostly because the site has a nice use of student examples of both strong work and things that could use improvement.  And you see here that he is drawing specific examples from student work in order to give tips that he thinks will be useful to the whole course.  Which serves as a reminder that the OpenLab is at its best, really, when the one on one communication between instructors and students is opened up, and all students start to benefit from advice given to any other.

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FEATURED COURSE: Peer-Led Team Learning Club (originally published December 4th)

This week we’re featuring the site for the Peer-Led Team Learning Club, whose mission is “To promote and disseminate the Peer-Led Team Learning model by assisting students to succeed in their studies through peer-led workshops, informing faculty of the model, sharing success and opportunities for Peer Leaders, and creating a community of practice among peer leaders.”

Practically speaking, we’re highlighting this site because we think it really does a great job identifying a need, responding to that need, and using the OpenLab to its fullest.  In that sense it reminds us of the Brooklyn College rideshare site that was created for students who needed rides after Hurricane Sandy:  not flashy, but specific to a specific need.  And conceived of and created by students!

While simple (and imageless), the site is much more than just the display of written and visual information, and each of its pages is distinct and useful.  It uses a number of tools (including Google forms, about which more in a second), and thus offers a number of ways for users to engage with the site creators.

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Happy holidays, everyone, and enjoy the break!