ePortfolio News

The eWriting Studio will be open regular hours through next Monday, December 21. Of course, if you have an ePortfolio up and running, you will still be able to access it over the break.

We will re-open–with modified hours–in the Spring semester. Watch this space for more info!

Studio Supervisor Jennifer Worth is out sick today.  As a result, the studio will not be open until noon today, but will remain open until 8pm.

WordCamp, a two-day conference for bloggers and programmers and educators who use WordPress (which would include all of us here at York College), is landing in New York on November 14 & 15.

The conference is being hosted at Baruch College, and will include a sizeable number of students, faculty and staff from all over CUNY.  For a mere $40 fee, you can attend a variety of panels and presentations aimed at all levels of WordPress users, from Newbies to Senior Developers, and network with others up and down the east coast who are involved with using blogs and eportfolios in educational and professional venues (and elsewhere).

Of particular interest to our users are the sessions aimed at academic blogging, which include:

Publishing and Sharing Research with WordPress. Lots of web services we use have become very good at letting us save things — We can “star” them, “favorite” them, “like” them, share them, and tag them to our heart’s content. We get suggestions from “followers” and “friends.” It’s great for the “collecting” part of doing research, but what can we do with this all this stuff after we’ve starred or favorited it? How can we find specific things or things that overlap across a dozen web services, with the end goal to actually write something about all this stuff we’ve found? I’ll share some ideas for making this happen, and present some development I’ve done to make WordPress a platform for publishing and sharing research. Speaker: Jeremy Boggs

CUNY Academic Commons. Speaker: Matt Gold.

Every Freshman at Baruch College is Blogging: Now What?. In Fall 2009, 1200 first-year students began writing to 60 blogs about elements of their transition to college. Their posts (close to 3000 thus far) have been published both to their individual blogs as well as to the central portal for Freshman Orientation. Each seminar blog is overseen by a peer mentor, and the project is directed collaboratively by Baruch College administrators and the presenter. This session will detail how and why the project was launched, explore the pedagogical, curricular, and intellectual implications of the endeavor, and crowd source some of the technical challenges created by our use of WPMU as a platform for Freshman Orientation blogging. Speaker: Luke Waltzer.

The 10-Minute Course Website.
With WordPress’s famous 5-minute install, you can have a blog up and running quickly. If you have just five more minutes to spare, you can use Courseware, a plugin from ScholarPress, to turn that blog into a simple, easy-to-manage course website. We’ll take one lucky audience member and help them create a course website from scratch, showing the audience some new features in Courseware along the way. Speakers: Dave Lester + Audience Volunteer.

EDUCHUDS: the Gentrification of Web-Based Education. Given that web-based education has been dominated by proprietary software companies through more generalized visions of the horror of the open web, this presentation will use clips from such NYC film classics as The Warriors, Escape from New York, C.H.U.D., Fort Apache, The Bronx, and several others to illustrate how the insidious process of corporate gentrification in educational technology is orchestrated through a logic of fear. What will be traced throughout this presentation are the shadowy contours of a global conspiracy against the socialist ideals at work in open source communities, which are increasingly being watered down by the iron fangs of capital. And believe you me, those protracted canines are ever-poised to pierce the neck of any attempt to re-imagine the digital landscape of education outside the profit motive we are slaves to. In effect, I will argue that there is a C.H.U.D. under every institutional sewer cap, and they’ll devour more than your puppies — they want your soul! Speaker: Jim Groom.

WordPress-Powered Eportfolios at Macaulay Honors College. Speaker: Joseph Ugoretz.

What It Really Takes To Support Eportfolios. Speaker: Lisa Brundage.

WordPress in K12: Winning Hearts and Minds. This presentation tracks the way we implemented WordPress in a fiercely conservative k12 school system. The presentation follows “Bob” as he progress from paranoid doubter to full-fledged power user. We’ll cover how we scaled the use of blogs from a teacher-driven, one-way communication tool all the way up to community-driven sites based around communication and composed of student-created content. Along the way, we’ll discuss common roadblocks, fears and ways to deal with administrative paranoia. Speaker: Tom Woodward

Roundtable: The Future of WordPress in Education. Facilitator: Mikhail Gershovich.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Public vs. private in academic settings, several others.

You can find out more about the guest speakers and sessions, and register online for the conference at the WordCampNYC site.  Regular registration ends Wednesday, November 4.

We in the eWriting Studio are pleased to announce that we have a new way to offer blog help and technical support to students and faculty.

Although we’re still available 38 hours a week for one-on-one assistance in the Writing Center, we know that problems never arrive at your convenience (that’s why they’re problems).  So, in order to provide assistance to you when you’re off campus or otherwise unable to get to the Studio, we’ve launched an email account– eportfolio@york.cuny.edu –that is dedicated to fielding any questions you might run into while working within the ePortfolio.

During Studio hours M-F, we’ll be checking our mailbox regularly and responding ASAP (give us at least half an hour, please).  Over the weekend, we’ll have more limited coverage, but we’ll still do our best to get back to you within a few hours.

When you send us your question, please include as much detail as you can, so we can get right to solving the problem, rather than following up with you for clarifications.

Good luck as you continue to use and learn ePortfolio, and let us know how we can help!

All faculty and students should know:  NEVER adjust your Privacy Setting to the most restricted degree (the one reading “I would like my blog to be visible only to administrators.”).

If you do, you are effectively locking yourself (and almost everyone else) out of your own blog.   While each individual e-portfolio user “administers” her or his own blog, only York College Webmasters have full Administrative privileges, and they will be the only ones who will be able to access your blog should you restrict your blog privacy at the highest level.

The e-Writing Studio suggests you choose any of the three middle privacy settings.  Students should consult with their professors about concerns and preferences regarding privacy settings.

Due to a scheduling conflict, the e-Writing Studio will be open from 11-8, rather than 10-8 today.

Good news–the York College e-Writing Studio has expanded its hours!

We have hired a new student worker whose availability means that the Studio now has hours each weekday, as well as a number of evening hours.

The revised schedule is as follows:

Monday:  10-8

Tuesday:  1-8

Wednesday:  10-8

Thursday:  11-5

Friday: 10-3

That’s 38 possible hours for you to get one-on-one guidance on setting up, adding to, and customizing your e-Portfolio!

It’s come to our attention that blog security and  visibility is a continuing problem.    Unless your students set their privacy level to the most liberal (“I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers”), they are not visible to anyone other than the student, not even the other members of a class group.

This is a bug in WordPress/Buddypress programming, and IT is trying to see if they can develop a plugin to remedy it.  In the meantime, have your students set their privacy level at “I would like my blog to be visible only to registered users from blog community” (this is the middle privacy ranking).  If faculty members need access to their students’ blogs, or require their students to have access to each others’ blogs, here’s what to do:

1.  Have students copy/paste their blog URL into an email to you.

2.  Collect all those URLs in a list and post it to the Wire of your class group’s page.

3.  You and all your students will have access to the blogs by clicking through those links, but the material will still be password protected, as they will only be visible to that group’s members after logging into the ePortfolio site.

If you have any questions about this process, please contact me at jworth@york.cuny.edu, call x 2478, or come by AC-1C18.

The e-Writing Studio is now open!  Come on down (or send your students) for one-on-one assistance with setting up a blog, customizing its look, adding pages, or attaching files and media.

We have 10 Macbooks waiting for students, and sometimes we have cookies.

Although they are subject to change, the hours for the E-Writing Studio  (AC 1-C18), scheduled to be up and running as of Monday, September 14, are as follows:

Monday:  10-5

Tuesday:  1-5

Wednesday:  10-5

Thursday:  TBD

Friday: 10-3

If you haven’t already set up an orientation workshop with Wenying Stolte-Huang or Jennifer Worth–and you want one–please contact Jennifer at x2478 or jworth@york.cuny.edu.

Remember to tell your students that they can call ahead for an appointment, or visit the Studio on a drop-in basis for help with their e-portfolios during the hours listed above.