(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.
