The Open Road

Welcome to Our Student Community Team!

We are delighted to present the newest members of the OpenLab!  Our Student Community Builders will be helping us with student outreach, student help, and student training.  Our Student Bloggers will be writing on various topics–giving advice to City Tech students, rating places to each around campus, even discussing pop-culture.  From left to right in the picture we have Ruchoma Kaganoff, Zam Mozumder, Shawn Brumell, Patricia Jade Persaud, and Amber Vinson.  Welcome!

You’ll be hearing more from them in the coming weeks, but for now, let’s let a few of  them introduce themselves:

Hi, I’m Ruchoma! I’m finishing up my second semester in the nursing program. I love the program for its challenging professors, super classmates, and of course the field of nursing itself. I don’t really have much free time between my own school work, tutoring first semester nursing students, and extracurricular activities that include the Open Lab, writing a health column for the New Tech Times, and my position as contributing editor for the honor’s newsletter. I grew up in Chicago, but I like it here in Brooklyn almost as much. I like to think that I still retained my Midwestern cordiality and openness. I look forward to meeting all of you on Open Lab!

Hey, my name is Zam Mozumder. I was born in Bangladesh but I left as a young child and was brought up in Brooklyn. This is my first year in City Tech and I’m majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. One personal thing about me that I’d like to share is that I like to lead my team. I’m the oldest child in my family and I like to set a great example for my younger brother and sister. I love to help them and teach them about things so they can understand and achieve their goals in life and I hope to continue helping people as the days go on.

I’m Shawn Brumell, born and raised in New York.  I’m currently in my 3rd year at City Tech, and majoring in Graphics Arts Production Management. After interning at the the design agency, C4 Technologies, I plan to pursue a career in web and editorial design, once I graduate.

My name is Patricia Jade Persaud. I am an Advertising & Communication Design major, a junior at City Tech. I enjoy experiencing art in every form. I enjoy sketching, designing, writing and yoga. I’m currently exploring my artistic skills and working on a few personal and academic projects. My favorite holiday is daylight savings

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Featured Event: Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab kick-off!

The OpenLab Community Team invites you to come launch the Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab project. To kick off our project, our inaugural meeting will be a chance to meet each other face-to-face at an end-of-semester wine-and-cheese gathering. We can celebrate the semester about to close and brainstorm about next semester’s activities, including more exchanges on the Open Pedagogy site, as well as virtual and on-site discussions, workshops, and other programmed events.

When: Tuesday, 12/11, 4:00-6:00pm
Where: Faculty Commons, N227
Who: All Faculty and Staff interested in Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab
RSVP: openlab@citytech.cuny.edu, or reply here with a comment

If you haven’t already joined the Open Pedagogy on the OpenLab project, find out more about it on the project’s profile.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday!

Last week’s CUNY IT Conference was a great success.  At least one member of the OpenLab team declared, in an utterly unbaised way, that the OpenLab “ruled!”  We’d like to thank everyone who came to see our presentation, and we’re grateful we got the chance to hear all the other presentations about the exciting things going on at CUNY.  Thanks everyone!

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FEATURED COURSE: Peer-Led Team Learning Club

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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FEATURED TUTORIAL:  Embedding a Google Form

What we saw in the above site is the use of Google forms, which can be embedded directly onto OpenLab pages.  While there are other ways to create forms on WordPress sites, this is one of the simplest.  To embed a google form, go to your Google Drive and click CREATE>FORM

Then you’ll see this:

To our mind this is a bit clunky, but you can learn to navigate it pretty easily.  What Google calls “Questions” can be anything you want–anything you want a response to.  Here, as you can see, our first “Question” is “First Name.”  You add items by clicking ADD ITEM in the upper left, and you change the text by clicking the edit/pencil button to the right of the question.  There are a number of types of “Questions, including dropdowns, etc.

Once you’ve finished your form, click SAVE in the upper right.  To embed it onto an OpenLab site, then click EMBED which you can find under MORE ACTIONS:

Copy the code that pops up into your post or page, hit publish, and voila!  A form is born!

As always, contact us with any questions!

(image by BUNYAMIN NAJMI via Creative Commons license)

4000!

Last week, on the 21st of November at 10:36 am to be exact, the OpenLab officially welcomed our 4,000th student member.  We’re simply thrilled, want to have a party, danced a while in our seats, etc.  And then we went on Thanksgiving break, ate too much, etc.  But now we celebrate, here on the OpenLab, the growth of our little site into a large, vibrant, and wonderful community.  Much thanks to all of you who are members, and congratulations to all.

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Upcoming Event:  11th Annual CUNY IT Conference

As we said last week,  the 11th Annual CUNY IT Conference is coming, and the OpenLab will be there!  We’ll be presenting the following at 9:30 am on Friday morning:

The OpenLab and Its Community: Fostering a Place to Learn, Work and Share
City Tech’s OpenLab is an open source digital platform for teaching, learning and collaboration for students, faculty and staff to use for courses, projects, clubs, and portfolios. Built by and for the City Tech community using BuddyPress and WordPress softwares, the OpenLab is a thriving online space. This presentation highlights best practices in managing, maintaining and expanding the OpenLab, and showcases how its use extends the classroom, conference room and student lounge into the virtual realm.

All your favorite City Tech OpenLab folk will be there.  Attendance is free, but you do have to register.  You can find out more information and register here.

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You Might Also Be Interested In These Other Sessions…

OpenLab folk are all over the CUNY IT Conference.  Here are a few of their presentations.  Come to one, come to all!

(2:15 Thursday)

The Online Journal System: Implications for Scholarly Publishing in CUNY

A dozen CUNY journals are being published using the Open Journal Systems (OJS). The Urban Library Journal has migrated from print and subscription-based to an open access, online-only journal through OJS. The change has increased visibility of the title and streamlined the process of publishing. Learn about the system back-end, how to produce an issue and how to archive issues using OJS. Implications for journal publishing in an online-only environment will be discussed.

Monica Berger, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

The CUNY Hybrid Initiative Site: An Open Resource for Hybrid Teaching and Learning

The CUNY Hybrid Initiative site is designed to be an open resource for everyone from new professors contemplating online teaching to students wanting to get the most out of their online learning experience. The resources and tools presented on the site are a culmination of ideas, suggestions and best practices from the colleges that participated in the CUNY Hybrid Initiative. In this session, members of the site’s editorial and design team will show how users might make use of the information in their online or partially online classrooms.

Karen Lundstrem, Director of Instructional Technology & the Technology Enhancement Centers (iTEC), New York City College of Technology
Maria Pagano, Associate Professor of Psychology, New York City College of Technology

(9:30 am Friday)

An Open Access Repository for CUNY: Why We Need It and How You Could Use It

CUNY’s University Faculty Senate recently voted to create an open access institutional repository (IR), which would allow faculty and staff to share scholarly writings, instructional materials, college documents and more. This session will provide an overview of open access, IRs and emerging best practices, as well as a report on possibilities for and progress toward a CUNY IR. Come learn why IRs are important and share how you might use an IR.

Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor, English, New York City College of Technology / Director, CUNY Academic Commons

 (1:00 pm Friday)

Open Ecosystems: Community-focused Development and the CUNY Academic Commons

The CUNY Academic Commons team will discuss its efforts to create a development workflow that is potentially more agile, rapid, responsive and community-focused than traditional client-services models. The open nature of Commons development, its active participation in free software communities and its communication strategies aim to create  transparent workflows that involve robust user engagement. This presentation uses several recent case studies to argue the advantages of such a model of open platform development within the university.

Matthew K. Gold, Director, CUNY Academic Commons, New York City College of Technology and Graduate Center
Boone Gorges, Lead Developer and Director of Research Projects, CUNY Academic Commons

The Writing Studies Tree: An Interactive Composition and Rhetoric Archive

The Writing Studies Tree (WST), writingstudiestree.org, is a crowd-sourced database developed at CUNY to study disciplinary growth by tracing relationships among scholars and institutions. Combining a fixed data structure with open editing privileges, the WST aggregates small data entry efforts into scalable network visualizations, thereby positioning users as active participants in disciplinary history and knowledge-making. We will discuss the process of creating the site, demonstrate its key features and suggest pedagogical and research applications.

Jill Belli, Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology

What’s Price Got To Do with It? Open Access Course Materials at CUNY

Despite dramatic changes in how educational content is created and accessed, textbook publishers appear reluctant to change their existing pricing models. Recent years have seen the proliferation of Open Access (OA) curricular materials, yet while a clear demand exists for these materials from budget-constrained students and colleges, wide adoption has lagged. How might CUNY create its own infrastructure to coordinate and share the intellectual and pedagogical OA resources that exist at various colleges?

Johannah Rodgers, Assistant Professor, English, New York City College of Technology
Maura A. Smale, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

(2:15 Friday)

From Data Mining to Mobile App Development: Digital Scholarship across the Disciplines

In spring of 2012, the CUNY Graduate Center inaugurated a new grant program aimed at fostering cutting-edge digital projects by graduate students. In this session, representatives from the ten winning grant proposals will provide overviews of their projects and discuss their progress so far. Funded projects include a range of disciplines, including Musicology, English, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, History and Computer Science, and incorporate a range of methodologies from text mining to data visualization to mobile app development.

Jill Belli, Assistant Professor of English, New York City College of Technology
Matthew K. Gold, Advisor to the Provost for Master’s Programs and Digital Initiatives, Graduate Center

A Cloud-based Tutorial System Integrated with a Center for Performative Design

City Tech received a National Science Foundation grant to create and develop a Center for Performative Design. This center, housed in shared visualization, computation and fabrication facilities, will offer students the ability to work together in teams, problem-solving like engineers, architects and industrial designers. It will feature a cloud-based tutorial system using modern social media and game-based learning assessment approaches. Presenters will discuss its development and how it will be integrated with the physical laboratories.

Iem Heng, Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering Technology, New York City College of Technology
Anne Leonhardt, Assistant Professor, Architectural Technology, New York City College of Technology
John McCullough, Assistant Professor, Entertainment Technology, New York City College of Technology
David B. Smith, Chair, Entertainment Technology, New York City College of Technology

Gaming across the Curriculum

This workshop will provide a fun, hands-on introduction to the principles of game-based learning. The session will begin with examples of learning games designed and tested by CUNY faculty across multiple disciplines and continue with “What’s Your Game Plan?,” a game designed by members of the CUNY Games Network to help educators brainstorm learning games for their students. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore the fundamentals of game-based learning and educational game design.

Maura A. Smale, Associate Professor, Library, New York City College of Technology

(image is in the public domain.  retrieved form Wikimedia Commons)

We put up a Thanksgiving picture last week, we know.  But we’re putting up another one today, because we have turkey on the brain.  A few quick things.

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Featured Tip:  Changing URLs (Permalinks)

Occasionally we change the title of a page (especially from default pages) rather than deleting it and creating a new one.  There’s often a good reason for doing that–the problem is that it can result in a url that’s different from the title of your page (as in the image above).  This is because the url is based on the original title.  But never fear!  You can change the title of any page, and change the URL as well.   Simply go to the page or post in question, and click EDIT just below the title.  As here:

Once you do, you’ll see this:

You can change the URL, hit okay, and you’re done!  Do note that you can adjust the default settings for your permalinks as well, if you like.  You can find a set of options, or even create a custom default, by going to SETTINGS>PERMALINKS in the left hand dashboard menu. 

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Upcoming Event:  CUNY IT Conference

We will almost certainly remind you of this next week, but it’s going to come up quick after the break, so we’re going to mention it here as well.  The 11th Annual CUNY IT Conference is coming, and the OpenLab will be there!  We’ll be presenting on Friday morning.

Attendance is free, but you do have to register.  You can find out more information and register here.

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Featured Site:   Adventures in Modern College Writing

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.

That’s all for this week.  Have a wonderful break!

(photo by martha_chapa95 via creative commons)

Hope everyone is getting their lives back to normal…and looking forward to the time off next week!  A few things this week…

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Featured Site:  Storm Stories (Update)

(image by Baljinder)

Last week we featured the site “Storm Stories,” here on the OpenLab.  At that point there was very little content, but we were terribly excited by the possibilities.  Well, since then the site has been heavily used by various faculty and students who have been sharing their experiences, and if you haven’t had a look back at it, you should do so.  It’s pretty wonderful.

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Upcoming OpenLab Events:  City Tech 10th Annual Poster Session

On Thursday, November 15th (that’s this Thursday), the Open Lab will be happily presenting at the City Tech Poster Session, a chance for faculty and students to publicly display their research and publications.  “Connecting and Collaborating on the OpenLab.” will be presented, poster-style, by Jody Rosen, Jenna Spevack, Maura Smale, and Charlie Edwards.

In addition, the Living Lab (which is the larger City Tech-wide grant of which The OpenLab is a part), will present other portions of itself at the Poster Session.  Living Lab Fellows Karen Goodlad, Jonas Reitz, Richard Hanley, Anne Leonard, Sandra Cheng, Urmi Ghosh-Dastidar, Elaine Leinung, Barbara Mishara, and Zoya Vinokur will participate in a display on “A Living Lab: Faculty Fellows Incorporating Place Based Learning and High Impact Educational Practices at City Tech.”  And Ralph Alcendor, Marie Montes-Matias, and Diana Samaroo have a display on “Transforming  Undergraduate Laboratory Experiences in Science Through the Title V Living Lab Project.”

The session will run from 1 to 3 pm in Klitgord Gym.  You can find out more about it here.

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And more from the LivingLab!

Are you a faculty member who wants to be involved with the Open Lab and General Education here at CityTech?  The Living Lab has put out a call for its Spring 2013 Associate Fellows Program.  Here’s an excerpt:

“We are currently seeking full-time and part-time faculty members to join the General Education Seminar Associate Fellows Program in Spring 2013. As an Associate Fellow you will become part of the growing interdisciplinary community at City Tech that is enthusiastically engaged in this transformational effort.

Fellows in the General Education Seminar commit to exploring innovative pedagogical approaches and incorporating what they have learned into their courses. Among the questions seminar participants consider are these:

– What changes can we make to the student experience that will not just prepare our students to succeed at City Tech, but also support creative, original, and critical thinking through the use of high-impact educational practices?

– How can we use one of City Tech’s greatest assets — its location within the “living laboratory” of the downtown Brooklyn waterfront — to create hands-on, place-based learning opportunities with our students?

– How can we use the City Tech OpenLab, an open-source digital platform, to customize learning experiences for our students that will engage them in the intellectual fabric of our College and make their achievements visible to our own community and to the wider public?”

You can find out more about the project, and an application, here.

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(Image by WarmSleepy via Creative Commons )

As you might expect, everything is about the hurricane this week.  We hope you’re staying warm and dry, and keeping each other safe.  And don’t forget that other big story of the month: be sure to vote on Tuesday!

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Featured Site:  Storm Stories

Professor King has created a site called “Storm Stories,” where he hopes to collect pictures and stories of City Tech students’ Hurricane Sandy experience.  We couldn’t recommend more that you go there and share what you saw, what you did, and how you’re feeling.  Please help us create this, please share your stories!

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FEATURED SITE:  CUNY CARPOOLING

Not an OpenLab site, but one that might be useful/usable for those of you still having trouble getting around the borough. Some folks at Brooklyn college created this carpooling site for all of CUNY. Go here if you can offer a ride, and here if you need one. Much thanks to all those involved in putting it together.

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FEATURED ARTICLES:  A HURRICANE RESOURCE ROUND-UP

As we go back to school and regular life (if we’re lucky), faculty might find themselves looking for resources to spark discussion in their classroom on various issues having to do with the storm.  And students, you might find yourself looking for more information about what happened, what it means, or what we as a city and borough might do to prevent it in the future.

Let us admit from the start that these articles were collected by people much smarter than us.  We’d particularly like to thank Jen Giesking, John Boy (who led us to /Scott),  and other brilliant CUNY folks.

• From social justice advocates:: In Sandy’s Wake, New York’s Landscape of Inequity Revealed by Michelle Chen
• From environmental journalists:: Yes, Hurricane Sandy is a good reason to worry about climate change by Brad Plummer
• From public policy:: Fish on Fridays: Hurricane Sandy, Climate Change, and the Future of Fish by Michael Conathon
• From politics:: Is Sandy a ‘Cassandra’? How Cities Should Prepare for Future Natural Disasters led by Judy Woodruff and Ray Suarez, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Joseph Romm, and Kenneth Green
• From business:: After Hurricane Sandy, NYC Tech found Wanting by Richi Jennings
• From economics:: Market-Based Disaster Justice by HU Press Blog
• From the academy:: There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster by Neil Smith
• From design:: 5 Ideas That Could Have Prevented Flooding in New York by Emily Badger
• From design:: Protecting the City, Before Next Time by Alan Feuer

http://youtu.be/X8W9vpNf2yI

Among other things, this weekend involved a visit to the Ulster County Pumpkin Cannon. The Ulster County Pumpkin Cannon is pretty much what it sounds like: a giant cannon in Ulster County which shoots pumpkins.  It’s all kinds of awesome.  And so, in a move entirely unrelated to the OpenLab, we’re posting a video above–it’s hard to see the pumpkin (because it’s going 600mph and flies a literal mile), but you can hear a small boy’s reaction, which is how you know it’s great.  Happy Fall.

The rest of this week’s episode is all tips for using the OpenLab, but maybe a couple of these tips will help you.  To cover our bets, we’re offering three.

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Featured Tip #1:  Changing Your Tagline

When you created a site on the OpenLab, you probably noticed that beneath the title you get a tagline.  The default tagline is “Just another City Tech OpenLab Site,” which is perhaps fine for you, if a bit self-depreciating.  If you want something more specific to your course, project or club, however, you can easily change it.  It’s just not in the most intuitive place.  You can find the tagline under SETTINGS>GENERAL, where you’ll see this:

Change the tagline, save your changes, and you’re done!

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Featured Tip #2:  Problem embedding Video from YouTube, etc? 

While our tutorial on how to embed YouTube videos is available here, we did want to point out a wrinkle, or possible wrinkle, pointed out to us last week by the brilliant Andrew McKinney.  If you’re having trouble embedding using the direct link (rather than the embed code), you can check under SETTINGS>MEDIA, where you might find that the auto-embed setting (circled below) might not be clicked.  This might not be true for you (there are other reasons why there might be problems with embedding a video, including privacy settings for the uploader of the video), but it’s something to check.

Click save changes, and you’re done!

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Featured Tip #3:  Recovering Your Username

Last week we were approached by a user who had forgotten his username.  He remembered his password, however, and so when he looked around our home page and didn’t know what to do when he saw this:

Don’t worry, though–if you click ‘Forgot Password’ and give your City Tech email on the next page, you’ll get the lost username in the change password email, and you’ll be able to log in.  You don’t need to change your password, even if you get that email–as it says, you can ignore the email and leave the password as is.

(image by Jason Persse via Creative Commons)

We spent the weekend at Comic Con, and walked away thinking: 1) more people should wear costumes to work, wherever that is; and 2) if the developments in gaming are any indication, the future of technology and the classroom is going to be crazier than any of us can imagine now, let alone could have imagined even a few years ago.  One thing we’re especially looking forward to are whole masses of students waving their arms in coordination to complete one task or another.  Like a dance video game, but smarter.  And more fun.

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Featured Site:  Jes Bernhard

This week, both here and In The Spotlight, we’re featuring the site of Jess Bernhard.  First of all, it has the world’s best subtitle (building cities of teeth).  Secondly Jess has created a wonderful personal/professional/essayistic/poetic site to show her work here at City Tech.  It demonstrates some willingness to play around and utilize the tools of our platform–like embedded video, text widgets, and links.  As our own Bree Zuckerman said, “I love her creative metaphor of teeth as tiny buildings and mouths as tiny cities, and love how she ties in the header image.”

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Featured Page:  OpenLab Statistics

We’ve added a new feature to the Open Road, called OpenLab Statistics.  This will allow us all to keep track of the growth of the OpenLab, which is, as you know, growing every day.  If you’re interested in this sort of thing, you’ll find updates every few months here.

And the first of our breakdowns (through September 30th) is as follows:

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

Students: 3636
Faculty: 255
Staff: 56

Number of courses, projects, clubs, portfolios:

Courses 296
Projects 715
Clubs 23
Portfolios 227

Pageviews (for past quarter)

381,000

Average visit duration (for past quarter)

7:52

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Featured Project:  Anthologize

Our own Boone Gorges (Boone helps with the development of the OpenLab) has just completed an Indiegogo project to give himself time to work more on the Anthologize plug-in.  Anthologize is already in place on a few systems around CUNY, and will likely make an appearance here on the OpenLab soon.  You can find more about Boone’s campaign here, and more about Anthologize here.

We are proud to help sponsor his work, and our users can look forward to being able to use the new and improved Anthologize in future.  But we’re also excited that the Open Source community is finding ways to help support the development of its most valuable tools.  The amount of work developers like Boone do for free is heroic, and it’s now wonderful to see a model that might help them continue on under a bit less of a burden.  Great work, all around.