What You're Doing, Where We're Going
In Prof. Sandra Cheng’s ARTH1112 – Introduction to Film-Hybrid, students blog and comment about the films they watch. Check out their thoughts on Pirates of the Caribbean, Reservoir Dogs, and the 1978 version of Superman. For extra credit, they get to visit MoMA or the Museum of the Moving Image. And in case you need any movie recommendations over the holidays, look to the course home page for Prof. Cheng’s comments on the films they’re watching for class.
For ECON2505 – Environmental Economics, Profs. Diana Mincyte and Sean MacDonald have built a course site featuring reading assignments, exam materials, PowerPoint presentations, and extra credit options. You can see here, for example, their detailed instructions for a research project that their students will do. Students in the class also write weekly posts in response to their readings. And they’ll be able to use the site to post their final presentations and review each other’s work. See the site here for more!
Students in Prof. Jill Belli’s Writing with New Media course are considering the ways in which writing practices have been affected by digital spaces. The course site is very active, with lots of great discussion. Students have been posting and commenting on Prezi presentations they created about different types of social media. Coming up next, they’ll be posting internet memes, and reflecting on a recent visit to the Museum of the Moving Image to see the exhibit “How Cats Took Over the Internet.” They also recently had a visit from some of The Buzz bloggers, including a great follow-up virtual discussion. Check out their work!
Healing the Body is a new interdisciplinary course co-taught by Profs. Sandra Cheng (Art History), Gwen Cohen Brown (Dental Hygiene), and Aida Egües (Nursing). Students have been analyzing images they’ve chosen from an online database of images about the history of medicine. For their next blogging assignment, they’ll be reflecting on artist Carrie Mae Weems’ ideas and work on race, appropriation, and photography. Check out this excellent course site, and the interesting work students are doing on it!
Prof. Mary Brown’s students have been blogging about typography by observing, photographing, and writing about examples they have come across in their neighborhoods. The course site also uses the new theme Twenty Fifteen, with nicely-designed custom backgrounds, and has helpful videos, handouts, and other information on typography. Check it out — you may think about your corner bodega’s kerning in a new way!
This club site is clean and well-structured, and members have been actively writing, with regular posts that include helpful information about dentistry and dental school. It’s also easy to find out more about what the club does and how to contact them. Take a look!
A group of Hospitality Management students is participating in an exchange program with students from Universite d’Evry in Paris for the month of June. They’re taking turns writing “Paris Correspondent” blog posts reflecting on their activities each day, including plenty of photographs! It looks like a great experience, and we’re happy they’re sharing it with the OpenLab community and beyond!
Brianna Vasquez, a student blogger for The Buzz, has written a wonderful post about her experience writing for The Buzz and presenting on it at the CUNY CUE Conference. As Scott Henkle writes about the conference, “Brianna remained her charming self, speaking knowledgeably and well about her role on the team, and our presentation wouldn’t have been the same without her.” She also baked an incredible cake (pictured above) for the occasion, which we all got to sample!
Brianna’s thoughts about community on the OpenLab touch on one of the central purposes of the platform, the creation of a virtual space where all members of the City Tech community can come together in a way that doesn’t always get to happen as much as we’d like on City Tech’s physical campus.
This project was created by students in Prof. Laura Westengard’s course, ENG 3407: Gothic Literature and Visual Culture. Students have posted photographs, video, and written about numerous Gothic sites in New York City, analyzing them through the theories and concepts they’ve been learning in class. For those interested in taking their own spooky tour, the students created a Google Map that includes all the locations on the site. Check it out, but as they warn, enter at your own risk!
Prof. Jill Belli’s Science Fiction course site has a lot happening, and is well-structured so it’s easy to explore and access specific information and resources. The site is very active, with frequent student posts and interaction in the comments sections. There are also some great discussions generated in the Class Discussion Posts, where conversation is extended beyond class time. You can tell from reading through any of these comment threads that students are very engaged with the material they’re studying, as well as their classmates’ ideas. Each week the class votes on which student post they think should be featured on the site, and the winner is chosen as the People’s Choice Post of the week. We also love that the course avatar (pictured above) was created by a student in the class, Andrew Dutt.
The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.
