CUNY IT Conference

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Last Friday I attended the 15th Annual CUNY IT Conference. IT here standing for both Information Technology and Instructional Technology, the conference was a diverse mix of students, faculty- and non-faculty-staff, and businesses. I was there to present on a work in progress, but I did nonetheless get a glimpse (partly documented using #cunyit16) at the ecosystem around education and technology, in a wider perspective than what I am usually exposed to in the scholarly atmosphere in GC.

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 I presented on my independent study project for the Interactive Technology & Pedagogy certificate program, titled Critical Machine Learning. It is an attempt to build a resource usable by students and researchers to learn about machine learning, both in its technicalities and in a critical perspective about the field’s implication towards people.

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 slides: http://achimkoh.github.io/assets/cunyitconference16_koh.pdf

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Mike Lawrence’s session on Austere Internet Technology Instruction Delivery provided a look into his approach to teaching web development skills at QCC. Mike’s course is based on the flipped classroom model, much dependent of experiential learning happening outside the classroom. His class is divided into groups, each of which working with different sets of web technology (static HTML vs Ruby on Rails, SQL vs NoSQL, …). Mike put an emphasis on the skills’ practicality, embracing open source and proprietary (like Amazon Web Services, for instance) tools alike as long as they are affordable, fall within the criterion of industry best practices, and can be considered resilient in the fast-changing tech landscape. As reflected in his choice of tools that work well in the mobile environment, Mike wanted the tools to be “things that students might eventually use,” unlike Blackboard. His decision of tools was a good refresher to questions such as “why open source,” which I sometimes take for granted (even when it means putting up with inefficiency)—but which should be the subject of critical and practical negotiation.

5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 slides: http://mdlawrence.net/cuny-it

6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Friday’s keynote speaker was George Otte. His presentation not only reminded me of the importance of a project like the CUNY Academic Commons, but also was informative of the diverse landscape that technologically engaging projects across CUNY made possible. I took some notes but the whole thing was shared online, so I’ll simply link to it. During the Q&A session, one question I found especially relevant was: what role will media literacy play in the next four years?

7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 The gist of the speaker’s answer was that

  • 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0
  • there is huge access, but access is not literacy
  • literacy is our job.
  • literacy is the ability to create, and not just consume.
  • digital literacy is not something achievable with one course, but rather a job for all courses across curriculum

9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 I think this is one way of thinking about the question of whether DH requires coding skills, which we discussed last week (and over the semester).

10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 keynote address and slides: https://purelyreactive.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2016/12/05/cunyfying-uses-of-technology/

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  • Welcome to Digital Praxis 2016-2017

    Encouraging students think about the impact advancements in digital technology have on the future of scholarship from the moment they enter the Graduate Center, the Digital Praxis Seminar is a year-long sequence of two three-credit courses that familiarize students with a variety of digital tools and methods through lectures offered by high-profile scholars and technologists, hands-on workshops, and collaborative projects. Students enrolled in the two-course sequence will complete their first year at the GC having been introduced to a broad range of ways to critically evaluate and incorporate digital technologies in their academic research and teaching. In addition, they will have explored a particular area of digital scholarship and/or pedagogy of interest to them, produced a digital project in collaboration with fellow students, and established a digital portfolio that can be used to display their work. The two connected three-credit courses will be offered during the Fall and Spring semesters as MALS classes for master’s students and Interdisciplinary Studies courses for doctoral students.

    The syllabus for the course can be found at cuny.is/dps17.

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