Welcome back fellow Commoners,

I’m going to do things a bit different in this post. Instead of going identifying a particular theme across new content this week on the Commons, I’m going to focus in on several aspects of one site: the conference website for Beyond the Hall.

Beyond the Hall is a conference scheduled for later this month that seeks to confront the unique history that the Bronx Community College (BCC) campus embodies. For a recent EdTech conference I was on the campus recently and so perhaps this seems particularly relevant to me this week.

BCC’s campus is beautiful by any standards, but certainly for an urban university and especially for a CUNY campus. Some of the schools, like Queens College where I teach, are lucky enough to have campuses that “feel” like a college campus–a reminder that the way we approach even something as supposedly universal as learning and knowledge is always based first and foremost in the material.

And the material campus of BCC is primarily from a former NYU campus that CUNY acquired in the 70s when NYU suffered financially and, with the changing demographics of the Bronx, decided that the campus was no longer a good investment.

This means that BCC students inhabit an academic world that, for many of them, would not have been accessible not that long ago. It’s a sobering thought, I think.

Most notable on the campus is the Hall of Heroes which enshrines, literally, in the shape of stone busts, “heroes” who were nominated for their work on behalf of Americans and the Bronx particularly. Yet, and perhaps predictably, almost all of them are white and wealthy, reflecting only one of the demographics that ever lived in the Bronx and hardly reflecting the students who actually use the campus now.

It is this strange history that the conference seeks to engage with. I think it’s a noble cause, too. But most importantly, I think, the conference organizers have sought to make the conference website more than simply an informational site for conference participants. All too often, genuine attempts to deal with history are cordoned off in academia and difficult to access, at the best of times, by everyday folks. The organizers are clearly seeking to change this by making the website a real archive of material about the history of the Bronx.

For that reason, perhaps the biggest contribution is the section of the site which sets of a virtual Hall of Heroes, with user-suggested Heroes. You can see what they’ve done here, in their special site “Visions of Greatness.”

The organizers have also been effective bloggers, releasing information about panelists both as a way of drumming up interest but also consolidating materials for future research.

Looking it over, I’m particularly struck at the care with which this material has been collected. For example, for the post on Elena Martinez, a panelist from the Bronx County Historical Society, collects Bronx-centered materials for researching the musical heritage of the Bronx.

Further, the blog connects to digitization efforts, pointing to projects that participants or community members might want to get involved with. It’s a great example of how the work that begins in a academic conference can continue on after an event.

This is a conference website that rewards poking around. I suggest you take a look and consider ways you can use the Commons in conjunction with your events to engage not only with the community of academics, but with the wider communities we of which we are a part.

Until next week,

Paul

 

Welcome back folks,

A recent college study was highlighted in The Guardian lately that confirms something we all know anecdotally: few people read terms of service. In the experiment with over five hundred college students, only a quarter “looked” at the terms of service for a fictitious service. Of course, as the article points out, looking is not the same as reading since only a fraction of those that read caught the fact that participants were actually signing away their first born child.

Terms of service can be dicey. They can be long and they can be legalistic meaning that even those who take the time to read them may not understand what they say. This is especially concerning in a city like New York where even elections instructions and signs are printed in more than seven languages. Terms of Services certainly aren’t written to be as accessible as elections instructions and we’ve all been in long lines and maybe even made mistakes on ballots ourselves. Yet we’re signing away our rights often thanks to these agreements.

I think about this especially because I work on digital tools and because I teach with digital tools. I signed up for Twitter initially because of a class requirement. “Join in the lively academic discussion!” the instructor said, with only a few comments on being aware that most of the information in Twitter is public. But we didn’t discuss the Terms of Service and what we would be giving away as our ticket into this discussion.

Now, I’m hardly a luddite or a privacy maven. This blog is proof of that, to some degree. I’m also, as I’ve written in other posts, a Social Media Fellow at the GC. I’m very aware of the value of digital tools, of social media, and of the intellectual discussion that can and does go on over many, many digital platforms.

But what I want to do this week is to take a look at Terms of Service of the Commons. Since I consider one of the reasons for this blog to be active promotion of the remarkable ways people at the GC are using the Commons and thus crafting arguments about why you might want to use the Commons, it’s still important to consider what the folks behind the Commons are doing with your data and what they can do.

Jumping in

The terms of service for the Commons can be found through the “About” tab on the site (you can’t find it from the backend when you’re in the WordPress dashboard).

At almost two thousand words, the Commons’ Terms of Service (TOS) isn’t a quick read, but it is, notably, a less legalistic document than, say, the TOS for a tool that many people use daily — their Gmail account (the link is just to the Google privacy policy since the Gmail TOS is broken into several pages; the Privacy policy is the longest). It’s a sign, I like to think, that the folks behind the Commons what the students who use it to know what they’re getting into.

Notably the posting to Commons (no matter the setting, this includes “private” or “admin only”), gives CUNY (not just the Commons) “a nonexclusive, royalty free, perpetual, and worldwide license to use the Content on the Site. . .including but not limited to, the right to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, edit, translate, and reformat the Content, and/or to incorporate it into a collective work” At first, it seems pretty scary, right? Do I really want my under-construction site to suddenly be picked up and plastered all over CUNY sites?

In reality, that’s unlikely to happen. As a Social Media Fellow, I’m particularly careful not to tweet out or link to Commons work unless I receive permission from the author or the information is clearly ready for public consumption: think of articles people have posted or content from organizations.

The last part of the sentence is related to the whole idea behind having a “commons” — a space that is not really owned by anyone but free for all to use. It’s a metaphorical relationship though, also an ethical one, that doesn’t always fit in with a University-funded project. Still, especially with the references to remixing and collaborative projects, is meant to gesture towards Creative Commons licenses (which have their own roots in academic ideas freedom of expression).

Importantly though, the Commons TOS continues though: that license remains until “you remove or delete [your content].”

That might seem like a common-sense addition. Surely, if you delete something, no one has access to it. But the digital world isn’t like that. Cached versions remain, backups, etc. Facebook and Google often have access to you data long after you deactivate your account unless you specifically request they delete them and even then, sometimes, on some platforms, you still do not have a guarantee as to your data.

Sometimes the right to delete your data is as important as the right to post data.

A Final Note

The TOS are too long to really break down in one blog post, but my point, really, is to encourage you to read them. The second to last section of the Commons TOS reminds you as well:

“We reserve the right to change, at any time, at our sole discretion, these Terms.  You are responsible for regularly reviewing these Terms.  Your continued use of the Site constitutes your agreement to all of these Terms.”

It’s a potent reminder that the TOS you agreed to when you first signed on with the Commons might not be the TOS that is currently on the site. This is true for most TOS you agree to–they can be changed at any time.

Further, it reminds us of the responsibility we all share to actually check in with TOS from time to time.

The Commons has one of the most readable TOS of any service I’ve seen and it shows a significant attempt to protect the privacy rights of its users. Still, it’s important that we all do our due diligence.

Until next time fellow Commoners,

Paul

Hi folks,

I’m in the process of writing my dissertation which means much of my time is spent doing the solitary work of writing. It can get lonely. I look forward to the communal work of revising–sharing writing, soliciting feedback, discussion, argument. Invariably, the dense, obtuse writing I produce when I’m on my own opens up through the process, is enriched and finally starts to look like the type of scholarly writing I admire. So this week I want to highlight collaborative writing Commons community members have been doing on using the tool Social Paper.

Social Paper is an experiment to develop a non-proprietary collaborative writing tool; an environment in which folks can offer their writing up for comments. It’s the brainchild of two Graduate Center students, Erin Glass (English) and Jennifer Stoops (Urban Education). You post your writing and either an invited group or the general public can comment on it by responding to the whole piece or in response to specific paragraphs. The tool is similar to Google Docs, but developed and managed by students and scholars. Google doesn’t own the data that’s there.

The list below is hardly an extensive run down, but it is inspirational. You can see all the publicly available papers on the Recent Papers thread on the Commons (check back regularly since it’s a live feed). Below are particularly interesting papers that demonstrate the benefits of the tool and the exciting possibilities that can be explored using it. Read them and be enriched by the content, see the vibrant discussion they are provoking, and (if you’re so inclined) chime in!

• Erin Glass, a student in the English program at the Graduate Center (now working at UC San Diego), and one of Social Paper’s creators, wrote up this essay about why tool like it are important. She highlights that classroom writing is rarely read by anyone other than the professor; the grading process is helpful but not really a model of positive collaboration (it’s punitive, anxiety-ridden, and is high stakes).
• Erin is also using Social Paper as part of her dissertation project on collaborative writing. She’s released her introduction here. The comments really stand out in this document, they add to and enrich the text she provides.
• Karl Steel, Professor in the English program at the Graduate Center, is using Social paper as he works on his new book. The chapter he’s offered for comment most recently is the last in his book–apparently he works backwards. It’s a fascinating read about the symbolic importance of oysters in medieval and early modern philosophy. The benefits of collaborative writing environments like Social Paper don’t only go in one direction. Making scholarship that is in process available for comment not only provides the writer with feedback but also models research processes and methodologies for the readers.
• A number of people use Social Paper to write grant proposals and project proposals. The grant application is a peculiar genre and getting a handle on it is easiest when you have a few other sets of eyes on it. Browsing through some of the recent proposals (20th Century Women Scientists Database,   Visual Archive of WWII Fashions) gives you a glimpse at some interesting ideas and a collaborative community being inspired by helping each other.

Get out there and get writing and commenting!

Paul

It has been fascinating to watch the activity on the Commons steadily over this semester as part of my work on this blog. In spite of the gravatars and the fact that many of the people who show up on the colleagues are colleagues, digital interfaces sometimes disguise the human work that’s being done here. Watching every week for what’s new and what people are doing has given me a sense of the way the Commons breathes, in a way. Right now it’s Spring Break at CUNY, so since mid-week or so last week, there’s been a slowing of work published. But we’re starting to see more, as people publish larger projects they’ve been pulling together over the break. It’s one of the many signs that social networks are, in fact, made up of people.

Perhaps in preparation for this week off, I noticed that quite a few people were talking about programming. Breaks are ideal times to work on that project that takes more time than is available during the relentless regular schedule. And, it makes sense that on a platform with the digital humanities in its ideological DNA, you’d have many participants interested in programming.

So this week, take a look at some of the programming resources folks are making available on the Commons (maybe you should try learning some code this week?) and also take a look at an easy, but effective, tool put together by one of the GC digital fellows using some simple code (inspiration!).

• Rachel Rakov, a Computational Linguistics PhD student here at the GC, penned a wonderful and personal essay about how the perceptions of learning a program language are significant barriers to people learning.
• The GC Digital Fellows as a program have been particularly supportive of people using Python, a language well suited to helping researchers parse data and create visualizations (good for STEM and the digital humanities). They routinely have events to introduce folks to Python but also have created an easy guide, in the tone Rakov suggests, for people who want to just dip a toe in the water for programming.
• They’ve also compiled good lists of resources for those who are hoping to use their Spring Break (or any time) to learn to bend computational power to their will…
• But what’s the use of all this without a flashy example? Patrick Smyth, a Digital Fellow, has put together a small app that allows you to see the impact of NEH grants in your neighborhood. Enter your zip code and adjust the distance radius to see grants in the neighborhood you select. It’s a good example of a way that data from a giant set can be quickly personalized for people. It makes a strong argument for the benefits of NEH grants while actually saying very little. It’s a personalized anecdote machine and has the side benefit of telling you about interesting projects in your neighborhood with which you can get involved or check out.

That’s all for this week. Next week I’ll be writing about Social Paper, the collaborative writing software developed for the Commons. We’ll have links to interesting in-process writing, but also discussion about how to use collaborative documents in class.

Until then,

Paul

Hi folks,

There has been a lot of activity on the Commons recently as a result of people thinking about what it means for material, spaces, nations and organizations to be accessible. It’s not just the Commons, either. The New York Times published an article this week about wheelchair access on NYC subways. There’s even a related, and effective, interactive video ride-along with a subway rider in a wheelchair. So this week I figured I’d give a shout out to some of the folks working on this important issue here on the Commons.

• My favorite line from this twitter interview with @OpenAccessHulk is “PUNY BANNER SIGN AWAY OWN COPYRIGHT. PUBLISHER PAYWALL PUNY BANNER ARTICLE. PUBLISHER WEBSITE DEMAND PUNY BANNER PAY IF PUNY BANNER WANT READ OWN WORK.
  OA HULK BORN THAT DAY.” The interview dramatizes (in all caps!) the issues of open access for scholarly publications, but also blends social mediums an interesting way. The interview, posted on the Commons, makes use of twitter and Storify, a tool to cultivate narratives using social media posts. So the interview is interesting both because of its content and the way it makes use of the different social networks people use to share content.
• Jenifer Polish penned a a thought-provoking piece on the importance of anti-ablest pedagogy and the types of questions thinking about dis/ability raise. She says that it’s the first in a series, so I’ll be on the look out for more.
• The Open@CUNY blog posts about open access issues regularly (they also hosted the Open Access Hulk Interview mentioned above) and recently re-posted reports about the consequences of textbook marketers moving to access codes. Among other things, access codes work to prevent students from doing simple things like sharing textbooks and making photocopies–or these days, taking digital photos with their phones. This reduces accessibility to those without the ready cash to pay for expensive textbooks and requires they have internet connections to access the information.
• Professor Janet Calvo at the CUNY Law school makes public an article she wrote in 2008 about the negative consequences of restricting immigrants’ access to health care. She argues how such restrictions negatively affect U.S. population broadly and the article is timely in the wake of the recent failure of the Republican Authored American Health Care Act. It is also a potent reminder that issues of immigrant’s access is not restricted to borders.

That’s it from me for this week.

All the best,

Paul

Hi folks,

I’m an English student, so it’s not surprising that most of the time I’m reading texts. I love texts. For the past few months I’ve been visiting museums and archives to reads nineteenth-century sailor’s journals as part of my dissertation research. Recently, I came across a journal with vividly painted watercolors, fragments of (poorly written) original love poetry, and collages of articles from periodicals. It is a text, for sure. But it’s not a straightforward narrative and requires a different sort of reading that I would do of a more conventional textual narrative.

So it’s with questions about how works can be read in new ways on my mind that I call attention this week to two recent posts on the Commons about visualizing unique data sets.

• Jacob Cohen posts to his Commons site on Affective Music Theory and Exploration about “Phishmaps,” visual schematics of songs created by Mike Hamad of the Hartford Courant. The maps chart what Hamad is hearing as he listens to the song and, fascinatingly, they are to scale. So if you look at the maps in the middle, you’re looking at what Hamad is hearing at roughly the midway point in the song. It’s a remarkable (and low-tech) way to “see” sound and Cohen’s gallery well curated. The site is a companion to a poster presentation for a poster Cohen presented at the 2017 Society for American Music conference.
• Beyond the Vale: Visualizing Slave Life in Craven County is a project by a CUNY Graduate Center student inspired by the student’s own discovered history. Filling in information on slavery on North Carolina, which is underrepresented in the literature, the project aims to make the local history of slavery, in one small county, visible. There are charts and graphs, each made with Google sheets which show how even with simple, freely available tools, important scholarly work can be done to reinterpret and re-envision the historical archive.

Well that’s it for this week.

All the best,
Paul

 

Welcome back folks–

The main goal of the CUNY Commons is to “build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning.” So it is not surprising that there is a lot of discussion going on all the time on the Commons about how to use technology in the classroom (and by technology I don’t mean the slide projectors and overhead projectors that teachers used when I was in high school). The philosophy of the Commons is to encourage tools that enable collaboration and not the use of technology for its own sake. So this week I’m taking a look at a few sites that have published new articles and posts recently that delve into making the most out of digital tools but also aim to be resources for the community of teachers at CUNY and elsewhere.

• Annotation Tools is a very narrowly focused blog on the Commons, but one that is likely to be helpful for nearly everyone. I teach literature and I’m always looking for better tools that allow my students to annotate a text such as a chapter in a novel, a theoretical excerpt, or a journal article. having students add glosses to a text encourages active reading, as does recording questions as they arise. I can ask students to come to class with one or two scenes they found particularly interesting, but it is another if we can look at a collaborative document in which we can see immediately the passages to which most students are responding. Annotation Tools collects and reviews (or at least gives in depth explanation of) various annotation tools as they are developed. The most recent post details a new project by MIT that looks promising.
• The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) was one of the first publications on the Commons so it’s an oldie-but-goody. In the most recent post in their “Assignments” section,  Karla Fuller of Guttman Community College makes use of image galleries in ePortfolios to visualize scientific concepts. The post is interesting because, in a way, it’s a “hack” of ePortfolios. ePortfolios suggest a very particular purpose but Fuller uses them in a new way that, I think, make the widely available tool adaptable for many classes–not just STEM classes.
• The CUNY School of Professional Studies Writing Fellows blog just updated its Commons site to include articles specifically geared towards online courses. However, many of these techniques work if you’re adding a digital component to your typical class. If you’re using blogs for example, how to you encourage students to use that digital space to share rather than just to write in a private journal? It’s definitely worth taking a look.

Until next week–

Paul

Thinking of a theme for this week, it occurred to me that I may be forcing myself to get very creative in the future if I decide that I can’t repeat themes. But, perhaps that defeats the purpose of letting these themes emerge from the weekly stream of public posts on the Commons, anyway. I guess it’s something I’ll have to work out along the way.

Anyway, this week I noticed a lot of posts responding to music and film,  or presenting digital art.

• Net Art is a gallery of sorts of animated graphics created by Ryan Seslow. They are often mesmerizing as a result of their looping pattern. I’m quite fond of the most recent, the endless A-train that reminds all at once of ride I once had, the view of an oncoming train when you’re at the front of a station, and the cheesy PowerPoint transitions we all like to use between slides.
• Phillip Weiss has been setting up sites with dozens and dozens of pictures of sites around the U.S., each site has its own digital site. The most recent site is the Eastern State Penitentiary, subtitled “Pictures of an American Ruin.” Interesting if you want to glipse Al Capone’s cell…
• Many classes make use of the Commons and as a result you get to see students working on some fascinating projects. In this example, David, a student in a Music since 1945 class blogs about the Latin Jazz song “Spain,” by Chick Corea.  Listen to the music while you read. It’s worth it.
• The Queens Community College Documentary Film class has been featuring student responses to weekly documentary films. At the very least the site offers a pretty remarkable list of films to go out and stream (if you can’t see them live at QCC, of course) but also recreates, in a way, the shared experience of viewing a movie in a theater. Reading how others respond to films is to have a shared experience.

Until next week,

Paul