(Image by Tony Fischer Photography via Creative Commons)
After such a terrifically beautiful weekend, it’s pouring outside my window right now. But this guy seems to be making the most of it, so let’s all try to be more like him.
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Help! The Sequel
Last week we asked for your suggestions and comments on how to make the OpenLab a better place, but we forgot to mention one specific way we’d love for the community to help us out. As you can see, WordPress has over 1500 themes for their users, and we’d like to make sure that the OpenLab has the very best options for our users. If you come across themes that you think might be useful–either here in WordPress’ own library or elsewhere–please let us know. Do note that specific compatibility issues with multi-site installations like ours mean that we won’t be able to use all themes. But with your help, we’ll do our best to find themes that are reliable and work for the most users.
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CUNY Math Blog
Shocking as it might seem, there are wonderful things happening in eduction outside our OpenLab! Not long ago we were doing some snooping over in the the CUNY Academic Commons (to which many of you already belong), and came across the CUNY Math Blog, and in particular this post by Asya Shpiro of Medgar Evers, which discusses how math is being taught in elementary schools. Not only was it interesting to some of us who have children that age, it’s also a great example of how platforms like the the Academic Commons and the OpenLab can be that critical bridge between inside academia and ‘the real world.’
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In The Spotlight: The Archive
Many of our users have come to rely on “In The Spotlight” on the OpenLab homepage. It’s a great way for us to highlight current activity that might otherwise be missed. But what if three months from now you want to look up that wonderful work Sandra Cheng’s class did on Tim Hetherington? Well, we’ve added an archive here on The Open Road to keep track–not much there yet, but it’s growing.
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Featured Tutorial: Exporting Your Site
(image by by twicepix via creative commons)
If you’re a faculty member, you might be wondering what to do with your courses when we want to move them to the next term. There’s admittedly a lot to think about when it comes to this issue, and depends on how you set up your course, whether you’re teaching the same course, how many sections of a course you teach. Your Community Facilitation team is always available to help you plan these things out. But one simple solution to issues of how to best move course materials from one term to another is to create a new site for your upcoming courses, and export all the old material there. We’ve created a tutorial for how to do that here. As always, please contact us with any questions.
