We were barely out
of middle school
when Stuart showed me the scar—

From Gary Jackson’s “The Family Solid”

The Grad Center’s Convocation and New Student Orientation took place yesterday, and if Twitter is any indicator it was a good crowd. It starts with joy and excited anticipation, the scars come later.

Packed house for @CareerPlanGC and @GCTLC sessions @GC_CUNY convocation and orientation day! pic.twitter.com/THsxoDeivU

— Grad Center TLC (@GCTLC) August 23, 2016

Yesterday also saw a good post from The Grants and Grants Research blog about actual deadlines:

Whenever a researcher approaches me for help with a grant proposal, my first question is always, “when is the deadline?” In truth, the researcher’s idea of the deadline is very seldom the actual deadline. For most researchers, the final deadline is 2 minutes prior to the absolute cut-off time issued by the funding agency.

Blogging truth. But that fact has not stopped Matthew K. Gold from working to secure a NEH Digital Humanities Grant that will develop “an open platform for humanities education.” Congratulations are in order.

Speaking of the digital, the Grad Center’s Teaching and Learning Center has a great guide for newbies on integrating education technology into the curriculum.

When I think of ed-tech, I can’t help but think of blogging. And, as it happens, the Commons has a brand new blogger on, of all things, ed-tech—or to be specific tech and bilingualism. Please welcome Sara Vogel to her new Commons diggs. Research says the more encouragement you provide fledgling bloggers, the more likely they are to take over the world [citation needed].

And even more on ed-tech, the Transformative Games blog takes a look at French billionaire Xavier Niel‘s free coding school:

Can 42 US, a free coding school run by a French billionaire, actually work?

And while on the topic of futurist apocalyptic horror stories, the Political Science department at the Grad Center is hosting a series this Fall about the elections titled “Unprecedented Politics.” Here’s the teaser…

The 2016 election is proving to be an historic one, pitting the first woman nominee from a major party against an outsider candidate who defies his own party. Beyond conventional and convention politics, tensions run high over the deaths of black men by the police, LGBTQ people, particularly Latin@s, are reeling from a massacre at a southern nightclub, and the chasm of economic, social, and political inequality deepens.

Speaking of this unprecedented election, the John Jay Research site has a great new article by Dan Stageman reflecting on the recent news that the federal Bureau of Prison’s will end its fourteen contracts with private/for-profit prison providers, “citing as cause its own August 2016 investigation into the safety and security of these contract facilities.” He links this to Immigration-related prisoner, which remain a “uniquely profitable segment of the private corrections industry.” A timely and informative post, read more here.

And in wrapping up this week’s run through the Commons I want to leave you with an “open educational resource” I found on Artem Altman’s blog, which was a link to this YouTube video uploaded by the School of Life:

Speaking of videos on YouTube, the HBLL blog’s summer teaching series continues. This week it is focused on Open Educational Resources. There are various degrees of specificity when it comes to what’s an OER, but I’d be interested to know what online, free resources folks out there integrate into their courses.

This week’s run through the Commons suggests one of two things: I am inevitably drawn to the the topic of ed-tech despite my best interest to be partial, OR ed-tech is inescapable in this day and age when talking about teaching and learning in higher ed. I tend to think it’s the latter, but maybe I have an ed-tech problem…

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
From “America” by Allen Ginsberg

I have to start this week’s round-up with a nod to Katherine E. Entigar‘s post “Captain America: belonging and fear in Prospect Park”:

Evidently, some Brooklynites are unhappy with this installation (yes, it’s a real statue). Yet I was hugely relieved…and then saddened. How is it possible that over the years, the sight of the American flag plus congregants in open spaces has become menacing?

With a bit less menace, the Commons was smoothly migrated to a new server last Friday without a hitch. Let us know if you experience any issues going forward, but so far so good for this communal set of tubes.

Possibly the biggest news around CUNY last week was the overwhelming majority (94%) that approved the ratification of the new contract. Tony Picciano posted PSC president Barbara Bowen’s letter to the community announcing the news, here’s a taste:

I’m proud to announce that the 25,000 faculty and professional staff represented by PSC will receive long-overdue raises because an overwhelming 94 percent majority of PSC members voted to ratify the new PSC-CUNY contract.

The agreement provides 10.41 percent in compounded salary increases over a period of slightly more than seven years, from October 20, 2010 through November 30, 2017. The raises will be retroactive to April 20, 2012 and will be paid to employees who worked at CUNY between then and now even if they have retired or left CUNY.

That said, the continued sub-standard wages for adjuncts makes this a hard pill to swallow for a large part of the CUNY work force.

Damn, CUNY. It’s hard times over there (even when it’s good times for some.) https://t.co/Sq5K3hVJkO

— Karen Gregory (@claudiakincaid) August 4, 2016

The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages department continues there blog series highlighting resources for teaching and learning around CUNY, and last week they focused on the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center. Highlighting their office hours, workshops, guides, and much, much more. In fact, the Grad Center’s TLC has recently announced a set of guides for folks that are new to teaching, as well as three course planning workshops on August 19th, 22nd, and 23rd. Boberino has been busy!

Speaking of the coming year, the Student Services blog at the Grad Center provides a list of 10 things to see for new students arriving in the Big Apple. Jennifer Polish announces her move to Laguardia Community College to be part of the first cohort of Fellows for the Mellon Grant-funded CUNY Humanities Teaching and Learning Alliance. Mani Garcia has been working on a very cool project to hack a portable, low-cost EEG device. Wild stuff like is a good reminder the future has arrived, it’s just unevenly monitored!

A couple of additional literary gems I discovered on the Commons recently was the Spanish-language literary magazine Enclave and this site focused on mapping NYC’s cultural and literary history—now that’s quite an undertaking! There was a recent post with a link to an article about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sojourns in Morningside Heights.

It was also cool to see that CUNY’s Academic Works now has a feature enabling those who have used a particular resource to feedback on its value. And as Adrianna Palmer argues on the GC Library blog, this goes a long way towards helping demonstrate the impact of open access scholarship at CUNY—not to mention fostering community through sharing.

Also, don’t have enough micro-aggressions in your life? They now have a game for that, this I know thanks to Maura Smale’s post about Killing Me Softly on the CUNY Games Network site—the things they call games these days!

Iceland’s Troll Rocks

Finally, to end this week’s newsletter with a last hurrah for Summer, travel, downtime, and troll rocks before the school year starts, Don Sutherland shared some images from his trip to Iceland this Summer. Impressive stuff, the Commons giveth….

An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
—“End of Summer” by Stanley Kunitz

With the coming of August there’s been a bit of panic in the academic social mediasphere:

How is it Aug 1?! Where did the summer go?! Classes start in 3 weeks?!!!!! pic.twitter.com/fbY2GVexs2

— Intellagirl PhD (@Intellagirl) August 1, 2016

The start of another school year is coming, and Ruthann Robson describes what that can mean for academics in her recent post “August Anxieties: The New Teaching Year Approaches; Is That Article Finished Yet?”:

It’s depressing: Our summer scholarship project(s) may still be incomplete, the deadlines seeming to be rebukes rather than reasonable timetables. Or if we have finished, the end product is somehow not quite as spectacular as we had envisioned in June.

At the same time new year, new courses, new possibilities, and one of the things she recommends is to “reject the idea of a stark separation between ‘summer’ and the ‘academic year,'” pointing to an essay she wrote on the topic that’s readily available on CUNY Works.

And while you’re beginning to make out the silhouette of a new academic year far off on the horizon, you might want to consider a couple of things. First up, the good folks in the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages (HLBLL) are running a Summer Series on Fall Teaching, and this week they’re showcasing the CUNY Academic Commons, Social Paper, and OpenCUNY. I couldn’t agree with their choices this week more 🙂 Be sure to follow them for more teaching resources in and around CUNY over the coming weeks.

The other event that’s just around the corner is the submission deadline for the 15th Annual CUNY IT conference which will be held December 1st and 2nd, 2016. Have something you did on the Commons you want to share? Did you integrate a technology in the classroom that you’d like to discuss? This year’s theme is “Good Moves in Hard Times,” and the submission deadline is September 15th—you can submit online here.

Speaking of conferences, the North American Nietzsche Conference will be held at both Hunter College and the Grad Center this fall from October 14th through the 16th. There is no conference fee, but you must bring your will to power.

One of the gems I discovered this week was Maria Hernandez’s blog Spanish Through Culture, she has integrated her coursework into her blog in some remarkable ways. From the “About the blog” page:

Exploring Spanish Cultures in New York City, is a Civic Engagement assignment designed to address this issue. The students will be conducting an interview with or report on a Hispanic organization, business, community, or individual to learn about the subject’s cultural identity, experience, and stories. The reports, with the subjects’ consent, will be shared with the public on the blog to bring awareness of Hispanic and Latino communities in New York City, which make up 27.5% of the population. This assignment considers storytelling as a practice that bridges cultural and civic engagement, and your participation is essential for it.

This blog is part of a broader way of re-thinking language learning curriculum in professor Hernandez’s classes at Kingsborough Community College, and it is very, very cool! Her recent post on the blog points to what this might look like by providing a link to multilingual pop music by Prince Royce:

https://soundcloud.com/newyorktimes/popcast-prince-royce-pitbull-and-multilingual-pop-music

In terms of O.G.Commons gems, Tony Picciano writes about everything from “Making Algorithms Accountable” to a report on Hillary Clinton’s record with Teachers Unions to probably the biggest news of the past week: Captain Humayun Khan’s parents speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Speaking of politics and unions, the Murphy Institute blog continues to be one of the most active sites on the Commons. The institute is a partnership between the City University of New York and New York City’s labor unions “designed to serve the higher education needs of working adults and traditional-aged students in their pursuit of advancement within the framework of labor, urban, social, economic, and political issues.” The folks there regularly share reports, jobs, resources, and more on their blog—it’s well worth a follow. Yesterday alone they posted four job opportunities.

And that’s just some of what’s out there. The CUNY Academic Commons could share a slogan with the famed spaghetti sauce Prego: “It’s in there!”

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has
been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed
there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. —Henry David Thoreau

Well, let’s begin. The Commons knows no vacation, and the activity over the last two weeks during the dog days of Summer is a testament to that fact. There’s a lot going on in the world right now, none of which is lost on the Commons. The pending ratification of the new contract (something faculty, Higher Education Officers (HEOs), and adjuncts have been without for 6 years now) is highlighting the gross inequalities when it comes to adjunct salaries. Old reliable Tony Picciano, discussing the recent Chronicle article on the matter, notes in his post on the article:

It has been American higher education’s dilemma that adjunct and contingent faculty have been paid so poorly.  As the article suggests, the CUNY offer does little to alleviate the problem.

Yet, as Andrea Ades Vásquez notes in her recent post on why she is voting yes for the contract and what it means for HEOs:

We certainly did not get all that we wanted or deserve. However, we achieved raises at the level of other city employees and made other significant advances. And along the way, we built tremendous union power.

I’m not sure I want to even write this, but it looks like there is already talk of actually having a school year! The Student Services blog for new students has posted about the upcoming orientation scheduled for August 23rd, 2016. I’m so old I did my new student orientation at the Grace Building! It looked something like this…

While on the topic of Grad Center events, the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature has published their CFP for their annual conference to be held November 10th and 11th, 2016 at the Grad Center. The topic of this year’s conference is “I <3 Pop,” and their pull quote from Susan Sontag is a keeper:

If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?

Shawn Smith-Cruz’s post on #blacklivesmatter and the power of the primary source. She unearth’s the very first issue of the Black Panther’s Black Community News Service (BCNS) newspaper

…which highlights the fatal shooting of a 22 year old black man, Denzil Dowell, who was unarmed, yet received “six bullet holes and shot gun blasts” according to the BCNS. The article highlights, “‘I believe the police murdered my son” says the mother of Denzil Dowell.’

#BlackLivesMatter and the Power of the Primary

And Ruth Robson believes sex-segregated bathrooms in schools will soon make their way to US Supreme Court.

And as plagiarism has taken center stage before Michelle Obama stole it back last night, Don Sutherland shares how he reduces plagiarism in his undergraduate Strategic Management course.

And David Shapiro revisits the Panama Papers in the form of a rubric assessment for his accounting students.

Panama Papers – Revisited

And if you are looking for more teaching and learning resources, the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy is a regular wellspring of goodness. In particular, Jill Cirasella’s recent review of Paul Martin Eve’s Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (2014) is a good place to start.

It should be reassuring to know that the development crew behind the Commons is still working hard for you, and last week they dropped the latest version, 1.9.21. Follow the link to see if they are allowing GIFs in comments yet!

Commons 1.9.21

While I covered a bit above, the expansive nature of the Commons means there’s a lot more I missed. If you’re out there, reading this, and know of a good post/blog/story on or related to the Commons that I missed, use the comments below to share the love and let me know. If you are afraid of the maddening crowd, drop me a line at jimgroom@gmail.com which will help me cast a wider net for highlighting the work happening around the Commons.

Finally, I invite all criticisms, recommendations, and general aspersions for how I might make this round-up more useful. This kind of blogging is new to me, and following in the imposing footeprints of Brian Foote I am going to need all the advice and support you can muster.

I’ve been blogging for the last five months on the CUNY Commons News blog. I’ve been getting a feel for the community and keeping up with what’s happening around the Commons. That said, I’ve been struggling a bit with how to best accomplish the task of highlighting the work in the community. Seems simple enough, I know, but for some reason it has come a bit harder for me than expected. So, this is my attempt to change up the process a bit and use Brian Foote’s blog as the model—something I should have done from the very beginning. My bad.

As community facilitator for the Commons, Brian did a phenomenal job of interweaving the news of the world with the weekly posts around the Commons. It was seamless. I must admit that I am reluctant to try and put the news of the world at this moment in any kind of focus for fear of being committed, but I’ve been reading his posts and he does a really nice job of walking the line—a balance I won’t necessarily be able to match but certainly will use it as inspiration. I’m not sure how the voice and focus on this site will evolve over the next 6 months, but I plan on giving it a shot. The plan is at least one post about what’s happening around the CUNY Academic Commons every Monday morning for the entire semester. I’m working on my first one for this coming Monday, which will mark the beginning of a new chapter in Citation Needed. I hope it works, because if it doesn’t I’ve been told I won’t get the antidote for the timed-release cyanide capsules the Commons team injected into my bloodstream.