The Open Road

(Image by karlnorling via Creative Commons)

With a short week, just a few things to mention.   First of all, if you haven’t seen the Nishi piece above, you probably should before you have to stand in line in rain/snow.  Nishi built a living room at the top of the Columbus Circle monument and made it look like Columbus is standing on a coffee table in the room’s center.  Whatever else you might say about Mr. Columbus, these people are lounging on what appear to be very comfy couches…

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FEATURED TIP:  CHANGING YOUR AVATAR

With over 4,000 OpenLab members (yay!) we wanted to take a moment to remind you that nothing personalizes your OpenLab presence like an avatar that isn’t one of those grey blobs you see above.  We’d like to make a concerted push to have everyone replace those with more interesting images.  It doesn’t have to be your face if you don’t want, any image will do, and as a result you’ll be easier to find and the OpenLab will be a (literally) more colorful place.

You can find instructions on how to change your personal avatar here, and how to change it for a course, project or club here.  (Surprise!  They’re nearly the same!)

But at least as important is this site, which filters out images that are under copyright, and leaves only images you are free to use anywhere on the OpenLab.  You sometimes need to add the sort of acknowledgment you see in our own images here in This Week in the OpenLab, but you’re otherwise allowed to do anything you like (except, usually, make money off them).  To use it, simply type key words into the box, and then click one of the databases below.  The only real drawback being that you cannot search flickr and google images with one click, but need to search them separately.   Other than that, this site has been soooo helpful to us, we can’t imagine life without it.

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FEATURED SITE:  JOANNA ROONEY VOUS AIME 

Joanna’s isn’t an OpenLab site, but we found it from one–she’s a student in Katy Garnier’s Interactive Interface Design course.  She’s also a design intern for the Commons, which means she’s right at the heart of all things CUNY.  But mostly, we just really liked her designs, and the super cool font of her name, and so we thought we’d mention it here, so you all could have a look.

(Borough Hall, 1908.  Image in the public domain, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons)

This week we’re featuring student work from around the Open Lab.  Hope you enjoy, and feel free to send us any submissions–we’d be happy to feature them in upcoming editions…

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Featured Assignment:  The Blue Caves of New York

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 Assignment:  Welcome To My Complete Dentures I Open Lab!

Our second featured student work is by Crystal Allen who made these Maxillary and Mandibular Diagnostic Casts for dentures in Esther Cuya’s RESD 1111 Complete Dentures I course.  Especially great about this assignment (apart from the fact that she, like so many of our City Tech students, is doing things with clear real world impact), is the reflection and description of her process, which is fascinating for those of us who know little to nothing about restorative dentistry.   You can read more about that here.

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Featured Assignment:  My Building

And our last featured student work was done by Franklin Rojas for Matt Gold’s ENG 1101: Composing Abstractions course.  While very simple, the assignment takes advantage of the Open Lab’s ability to mix media, which gives students the opportunity to be very specific and clear in their writing.  Plus, Franklin used some great pictures!

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OpenLab Statistics:  June 30th to September 30th

Below you’ll find the statistics for the OpenLab for the yearly quarter from June 30th – September 30th, 2012.  Check back every few months to watch us grow!

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

 (image by Merelymel13 via Creative Commons)

From all of us at here at the OpenLab, happy Fall!   Keep looking out for those snakes, but so far, so good.

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Featured Course:  Interaction Design

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 Resource:  Cultivating Change in the Academy

We were looking around for resources and came across Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012  an incredible ebook on a broad swath of issues facing digital education.  It ranges from practical advice on specific classroom practices, to more theoretical attempts to diagnose and predict our future.  It’s really quite something, and we’re happy to find it, and happier to share it here.

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Featured Tutorial:  CubePoints

(video uploaded by nickantibarney shared via creative commons)

CubePoints is a way of awarding points (or “dollars,” if you’re feeling materialistic), to users for participating in your site–users have a great deal of control over what sorts of activities are worth points, and how many each activity is worth.  We see this plug-in as particularly useful for student clubs and other school projects which have fewer inherent incentives to participation than courses.  If you connect points to real-world prizes, or even just honorary titles, you might find your users are more active.

Many faculty around the world have come to believe that this model speaks to their students, encourages participation and enthusiasm particularly on low-stakes writing and other class work, and gets students thinking about school in different ways.  You can learn more about an attempt to study a very similar idea here.

The plug-in itself is quite simple:  it keeps track of each user’s activity, allows for a “leaderboard” on the site home-page, and gives the administrator a ton of specific options, making it very customizable.  You can find out more about it the tutorial here.

And as always, contact us with any questions!

 

Hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend and/or holiday!  Just a few quick things this week…

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Featured Tip:  Handing off Your Site to a New Administrator

In the category of Not So Frequently Asked Questions, we have had a few questions lately about what to do when you want to hand a site over to a new administrator.  The short answer is to go into MEMBERSHIP in the right hand menu and change the person who wishes to no longer be Administrator to MEMBER and to promote the person who yearns to administer to ADMIN.  Then each person changes their email settings (to ‘All’ or ‘None’ as you like), and everything is grand.

But, if you were the creator of the site, you might find you’re still getting emails.  Why is that? you might wonder.  Well, when you created the site you entered an email address that won’t change until you follow these instructions:

1. First, go to the DASHBOARD of your site, then click SETTINGS>GENERAL

2. Once there you’ll see an email address.  Change it, save the changes, and you’re done!

 

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Featured Blog Post:  WordPress in education, meet the free software community. And vice versa.

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.

 

 

 

 

(Image by Jason Rosenberg via Creative Commons License)

Usually our images have something to do with what’s going on at City Tech, but this week we were simply taken aback by this, described as “A huge crowd gathers outside The New York Times building in Times Square to hear play-by-play bulletins of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Brooklyn Robins on Oct. 12, 1920.”  The image is in the public domain, and is another reminder of what wonderful things you can find via Creative Commons search of http://commons.wikimedia.org/.

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Featured Tip:  Welcome Email

The OpenLab now features an optional welcome email for your new members.  It’s extremely simple to use, though kept a little bit out of the way.  You can find it under PROJECT SETTINGS>EMAIL MEMBERS and then scrolling down.  Be sure to click SAVE!

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Featured Plug-In:  Subscribe2

Subscribe2 is a plug-in that allows “comprehensive email subscription management.”   Many of its features overlap with our already existing email members settings on the OpenLab.  But it also provides a number of things you might find valuable, including customizable unsubscribe messages (you can confirm that they wanted to unsubscribe, and thank someone for having been a member).

We think it might prove particularly valuable for those sites that have or hope to have a non-City Tech readership:  becoming a member of an OpenLab group requires OpenLab membership, which is available only to City Tech students, faculty and staff. However, you can make it easy for non-City Tech readers to follow your site.  If they subscribe through this plug-in, which will accept any valid email address, they will get a message anytime you add a new post.

You can learn more about setting up and managing this plug-in here, and as always contact us with any questions.

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Featured Site:  Writing Acros the Curriculum 

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!

 

(image by Ed Yourdon via Creative Commons)

Hope you had a wonderful Labor Day weekend!  Courses are being built, projects are being started, and students and faculty are joining the OpenLab by the hundreds–the year is in full-swing here at City Tech.  As always, we’ll be highlighting what’s going on here at The Open Road.  Urge your friends to join, and we can work to make this a fruitful place for inquiry.  While most of The Open Road activity is here on this site, we do want to be sure that you notice our newish forum on our Project Page, which you can access here.  Tell us what you think, what you’d like to see, or start a discussion of your own (including asking questions about features!)

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Fall 2012 Workshops!

 

 

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Featured Tutorial:   pageMash

How To Install & Use PageMash For WordPress by newbizblogger

We just spent three minutes with pageMash and fell in love with how easy it makes Menu manipulation.  It makes things easy if you want to hide pages so they don’t show up on your menu, or if you want to quickly rename the page, or if you want to create parent/child pages (an odd way of saying “I want this page to appear as a dropdown on my menu”–the way the tutorials on The Open Road appear under “Useful Tools”).  You could do all these things before, of course, but this makes it easy and intuitive in ways that new WordPress users will love.  The above tutorial is just about perfect…

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Featured Site:  Bookonomic

While not an OpenLab (or even CUNY) site, Bookonomic is an impressive site created by a CUNY student as a way for students from all over the country to exchange books easily and privately.  You can join it, use it, or just learn more about it in the video below, but we’re also bringing it up here because it represents a student’s great idea made flesh.  While there are limitations on commerce on CUNY-hosted websites (the limitations being, well, one can’t engage in it), we here at the OpenLab would love to hear about your other great ideas, and we’d love to help you realize them.  Contact us anytime!