(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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Last week we had a request for a way to have the same material appear on multiple OpenLab sites. This would especially be useful for faculty, who sometimes teach the same material or want to relay the same messages to more than one class, but for various reasons still want each class to have a separate site. But of course going from site to site and posting the same message can be too labor intensive.
The answer to that problem is a plug-in called Feed WordPress, which is available on the OpenLab. It pulls the information from other sites (using their feed), to any other. We suggested it was good for faculty, but it can also be used to draw information from almost any site to any other.
You can find a tutorial on how to use it here–it’s a little cumbersome to set up (as always contact us with any issues/questions), but once it does it’ll pull information from any of our sites (and even outside sites) to any other.
