Open Education
==============

Open Education is a term to describe the use of freely transferable
educational resources
([https://wiki.creativecommons.org/What_is_OER%3F] and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_education]). These materials and
their use predate both invention (1968) and widespread consumer and
commercial use of the internet (1994). However, with the adoption of
the Internet and the increasing availability of valuable educational
resources distributed in much the same way as FREE and Open Source
Software (FOSS), the movement has gained significant institutional
backing, materials and momentum.

[./images/intro.png]

City University of New York
===========================

Today’s City University of New York dates back to the 1847 founding of
the Free Academy by Townsend Harris, an early champion of public
education and a pioneering diplomat who was the United States’ first
ambassador to Japan. With an inaugural class of 143 academically
qualified young men, the Academy set upon a mission to, in Harris’
words, “let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats
together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good
conduct, and intellect.” The Academy quickly grew in reputation and
enrollment and, as a new century approached, plans were approved for
an expansive neo-Gothic campus uptown for what became known as the
College of the City of New York. Twenty years after the first young
men entered the Academy, a separate school for the education of
teachers, the Female Normal and High School, later renamed Hunter
College in honor of its founder Thomas Hunter, offered the same higher
education opportunities to
women. ([http://www.cuny.edu/about/history.html])

The University includes eleven senior colleges, seven community
colleges, The Macaulay Honors College and five graduate and
professional schools, located throughout the city’s five boroughs.

CUNY GC was founded in 1961 to primarily concentrate on the awarding
of doctoral degrees. The GC quickly expanded from 4 to 27 programs.
It currently offers 42 different PhD degrees. The Earth and
Environmental Sciences boasts a world renowned scholar on
incarceration, Dr. Ruthie Gilmore
([http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Core-Bios/Ruth-Wilson-Gilmore]) and
the LIS Center ([http://www.gc.cuny.edu/liscenter]) whose mission is
to explicitly study inequality.
[./images/nypl-cuny.jpg]

Open Education at CUNY
======================

Clearly the institutional mission of CUNY and Open Education have much
in common. There have been some pioneering efforts in FREE software
and Open Education at CUNY and much more to come. Their are two
flavors of CUNY’s contributions. First CUNY professors,
administrators and students contribute to and maintain FOSS projects.
Second CUNY professors and administrators make public Free Educational
Resources which are not FREE software.

Also there are projects that have their nexus at the Graduate Center
and a wide variety of projects in the public interest which occur
outside of the GC. I am writing about the ones I know. I am hoping
that this group can correct my inevitable oversights and omissions.
Most of the projects at the Graduate Center I describe are programs
with whom I am lucky enough to have had some interaction. To find the
programs at other colleges, I searched for the college name along with
linux, FREE software and Open Source. Apologies for any omissions.

Reproducible research
=====================

Producing new knowledge compels us to include another emerging
movement in education, that of Reproducible Research. To define yet
another term, this is the ability to reproduce published results.
There are some fairly shocking data on how much of current research
are not reproducible. In 2012, a survey done for Nature found that 47
out of 53 medical research papers on the subject of cancer were
irreproducible
([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html]).

Researchers explained in a 2006 study that, of 249 data sets from
American Psychology Association (APA) empirical articles, 73% of
contacted authors did not respond with their data over a 6-month
period. ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17032082])

Elements of reproducible research
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

– using research code that can be inspected
– publishing all code that manipulates data
– giving access to data that is used produce any published figures
– giving specifications for any library configuration
– making available any sensor data that was used to create data

Free Software
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

‘Free software’ means software that respects users’ freedom and
community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run,
copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free
software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the
concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in
“free beer”.

[./images/win8_infographic_final.png]

The freedom to inspect and improve the source code is crucial to the
educational and research mission of a world class university.

Scheduled talk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

– I, Evan Misshula [http://EvanMisshula.github.io] will be giving a
public talk specifically covering a tool for reproducible research
on November 5, 2014
[http://www.meetup.com/New-York-Emacs-Meetup/events/211960922/]

Free Software projects at the GC
================================

Commons in a box
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The CUNY Academic commons contributes to FREE Software by developing
and maintaining the Commons in a box platform
([http://commonsinabox.org]) which creates a WordPress social network.
Developers from the CUNY Academic commons have contributed features
and bug fixes which have been incorporated upstream at both WordPress
Plugins and BuddyPress.

Open CUNY
~~~~~~~~~

Mission
——-

OpenCUNY, the student-governed, open source, academic medium for The
Graduate Center, CUNY community, where you can build the website of
your dreams through a WordPress interface
([http://opencuny.org/blog/]).

Current initiative
——————

In order to help OpenCUNY assess the current usages of OpenCUNY and
plan for its next five years, they have launched OpenCUNY’s First
Participant Survey here. Whether or not you’re on OpenCUNY, we
encourage you to take 10-15 minutes of your time and share about your
experience on digital platforms.

CUNY Institute for Software Development
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CISDD’s mission is to promote economic development in New York City
and encourage the growth of the New York software industry. CISDD was
created by the Board of Trustees, as part of CUNY’s economic
development initiative, in January of 2000. CISDD provides the
software industry, as well as CUNY faculty and students, with
opportunities to learn about cutting-edge software products and
methodologies.

CISDD is particularly interested in promoting work on core and new
software technologies, including: operating system enhancements,
server-side software, Linux, security issues with software,
distributed computing, logic and visualization.
([http://www.cisdd.org/about.php])

Free research code
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The research labs of at least four professors of Computer Science make
regular contribution to FOSS projects.

The Discrete Imaging and Graphics Group
—————————————

Led by Professor Gabor T. Herman this group has developed SNARK09
([http://www.dig.cs.gc.cuny.edu/software/snark09/]) which is a
programming system for the reconstruction of 2D images from 1D
projections. It is designed to help researchers interested in
developing and evaluating reconstruction algorithms. In the area of
image reconstruction, researchers often desire to compare two or more
reconstruction techniques and assess their relative merits. SNARK09
provides a uniform framework in which to implement algorithms and
evaluate their performance. SNARK09 has been designed to treat both
parallel and divergent projection geometries and can create test data
for use by reconstruction algorithms. A number of frequently used
reconstruction algorithms are incorporated.

Big Spatial Data
—————-

Jiangting Zhang has a series of online demos and research codes in the
exciting interactive spatial data visualization and parallel
computation
([http://www-cs.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~jzhang/LabSoftDemos.htm]).

Pattern recognition
——————-

Computer Science Executive Officer has numerous research publications
and teaching materials available on [http://haralick.org]. Research
code for his cutting edge linear and non-linear manifold clustering
algorithm is available at [https://github.com/wildart/LMCLUS.jl] and
[https://github.com/wildart/ManifoldLearning.jl].

Data Visualization
——————

Recent faculty addition Lev Manovich has released two new important
visualizations in 2014, /SelfieCity/ and /The Exceptional and the
Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev/. Selfie City ([http://selfiecity.net])
investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities
across the world. In an important step toward reproducitbility, the
interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of
3200 photos. In the The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in
Kiev ([http://www.the-everyday.net]) uses computational and data
visualization techniques to explore 13,208 Instagram images shared by
6,165 people in the central area of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian
revolution (February 17 – February 22, 2014). All photos and their
metadata are available on the site.

GC Digital Fellows workshops
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are a free series of workshops open to the CUNY GC community
many of which concentrate on building open educational resources. The
schedule is available at
[http://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/workshops/]. These include
workshops on WordPress, Python, command line tools, git and data
visualization.

Based in the GC Digital Scholarship Lab, the GC Digital Fellows
Program operates as an in-house think-and-do tank for digital
projects, connecting Fellows to digital initiatives throughout The
Graduate Center. Digital Fellows utilize a team-based approach as they
explore creative solutions for projects that can be implemented in a
collaborative fashion. In the process, the Program helps build out
“The Digital GC” — a vision of the Graduate Center that incorporates
technology into its core research and teaching missions. Their
reflections on this process can be found on their blog, Tagging the
Tower
([http://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/tagging-the-tower/])

Institutionally supported student initiatives
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were two student projects that came out of the Digital Praxis
seminar

Social Paper
————

The Social Paper won a Digital Humanities start up grant in 2013. The
project aims to create a social network that allows graduate students
to share seminar papers, enabling students to collaborate and
facilitate conversations across the disciplines. – See more at:
[http://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/GC-News/Detail?id=24347#sthash.otXe34Ib.dpuf]

DH Box
——

Ready-to-go configurations of Omeka, NLTK, IPython, R Studio, and
Mallet live in DH Box. Through this praxis friendly environment,
professors and students have instant classroom access to a cadre of
gold-standard DH tools. Professors will be able to launch a DH
computer lab in just a few minutes and guarantee their students an
ideal environment for hands-on learning. ([http://dhbox.org/about/])

This is accomplished by making a linux computing environment available
over the web. Behind the scenes DH Box uses Docker () to allow
multiple users and non-overlapping directory structures.

Free Software project not at the CUNY GC
========================================

City College
~~~~~~~~~~~~

City College has become the host of the New York Linux Group. Their
next meeting is August 21
([http://www.meetup.com/nylug-meetings/events/213604362/])

Hunter college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Carson Farmer ([http://carsonfarmer.com/research/]) has contributed to
a number of Graphical Information System programs including GeoPandas
([https://github.com/cfarmer]).

John Jay
~~~~~~~~

John Jay hosts NYC4Sec([http://www.meetup.com/NYC4SEC/]) which is a
computer security and forensics meetup in NYC. A number of its
members have made contributions to the Volatility
Project([https://code.google.com/p/volatility/]).

Open educational resource
=========================

Journal of Interactive Teaching and Pedagogy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The CUNY Graduate Center is home to Journal of Interactive Teaching
and Pedagogy. JiTP’s mission is to promote open scholarly discourse
around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching,
learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced
instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of
technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such
approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the
integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. JITP
endeavors to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy
in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will
also work to change what counts as scholarship—and how it is
presented, disseminated, and reviewed—by allowing contributors to
develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers
using multiple
formats. ([http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about-the-journal/])

Futures Initiative
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another exciting new open educational resource is the Futures
Initiative ([http://futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu]). The Futures
Initiative is dedicated to creating and inspiring new methods of
interdisciplinary and collaborative learning and pedagogy in order to
stimulate institutional changes in higher education. Drawing upon and
catalyzing the energy of CUNY faculty and students, the Futures
Initiative seeks to explore new models for empowering the next
generation of college professors to teach and engage in research most
effectively in our modern age. The Futures Initiative encourages
peer-to-peer pedagogies that support open and connected forms of
learning, experimentation, and multimedia publication. Housed at the
Graduate Center and extending throughout the CUNY system, the Futures
Initiative serves as a model for innovation and aims to inspire public
reinvestment in higher education and in our collective future as a
society.

One of the many innovative projects is a new course on the Future of
Higher Ed taught by Futures Initiative Director Dr. Cathy N. Davidson
and former CUNY-GC President William Kelley. The course has a public
collaborative syllabus
([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hlbAHk_7GQ0o0pTJCozROya956M1CXYeChBPuBpyqsI/edit]).
Information about the course and open materials are available at
([http://futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2014/10/05/crowdsourced-syllabus-mapping-the-futures-of-higher-education-teaching-learning-and-research-in-the-age-of-google/])

Open educational projects not at the CUNY GC
============================================

Baruch college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is a Free and Open Source blog that has started at Baruch
([http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/foss/]). Baruch also has a detailed
guide to using Open Source mapping software
([http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/]).

Macaulay honors college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Macaulay Honors College has produced a series of videos and a
website
([http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/scienceforward/videos/]) which
informs citizens on scientific issues. This was highlighted on this
group just yesterday
([http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/open-education-at-cuny/forum/topic/new-science-oer/]).

Brooklyn College
================

Samir Chopra, a military historian wrote a relatively early treatment
of the philosophical implications of FREE software. It is available at
[http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/foss-reading/DLbook.pdf]

College of Staten Island
========================

Professor Roy Vanegas has made his course on Web Design, Graphics, &
Theory available on the web as an Open Educational Resource
([http://roy.vanegas.org/teaching/at_csi/com_370/]).

Queens College
==============

Queens College of the City University of New York announced May 14,
2014 that Douglas Rushkoff, the famed cyberculture expert who
originated concepts such as “viral media” and “social currency,” will
be joining its faculty. This marks the first full-time academic role
for the prolific media theorist, award-winning author, and
documentarian, who is considered one of the most influential thinkers
of the digital age. Starting this August, he will help lead the
development of a new Master of Arts in Media Studies program that will
address the technological and market forces that dominate our daily
lives.

His book titled Open Source Democracy is available here
([http://www.rushkoff.com/open-source-democracy/]).

Open Education
==============

Open Education is a term to describe the use of freely transferable
educational resources
([https://wiki.creativecommons.org/What_is_OER%3F] and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_education]). These materials and
their use predate both invention (1968) and widespread consumer and
commercial use of the internet (1994). However, with the adoption of
the Internet and the increasing availability of valuable educational
resources distributed in much the same way as FREE and Open Source
Software (FOSS), the movement has gained significant institutional
backing, materials and momentum.

[./images/intro.png]

City University of New York
===========================

Today’s City University of New York dates back to the 1847 founding of
the Free Academy by Townsend Harris, an early champion of public
education and a pioneering diplomat who was the United States’ first
ambassador to Japan. With an inaugural class of 143 academically
qualified young men, the Academy set upon a mission to, in Harris’
words, “let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats
together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good
conduct, and intellect.” The Academy quickly grew in reputation and
enrollment and, as a new century approached, plans were approved for
an expansive neo-Gothic campus uptown for what became known as the
College of the City of New York. Twenty years after the first young
men entered the Academy, a separate school for the education of
teachers, the Female Normal and High School, later renamed Hunter
College in honor of its founder Thomas Hunter, offered the same higher
education opportunities to
women. ([http://www.cuny.edu/about/history.html])

The University includes eleven senior colleges, seven community
colleges, The Macaulay Honors College and five graduate and
professional schools, located throughout the city’s five boroughs.

CUNY GC was founded in 1961 to primarily concentrate on the awarding
of doctoral degrees. The GC quickly expanded from 4 to 27 programs.
It currently offers 42 different PhD degrees. The Earth and
Environmental Sciences boasts a world renowned scholar on
incarceration, Dr. Ruthie Gilmore
([http://www.gc.cuny.edu/Faculty/Core-Bios/Ruth-Wilson-Gilmore]) and
the LIS Center ([http://www.gc.cuny.edu/liscenter]) whose mission is
to explicitly study inequality.
[./images/nypl-cuny.jpg]

Open Education at CUNY
======================

Clearly the institutional mission of CUNY and Open Education have much
in common. There have been some pioneering efforts in FREE software
and Open Education at CUNY and much more to come. Their are two
flavors of CUNY’s contributions. First CUNY professors,
administrators and students contribute to and maintain FOSS projects.
Second CUNY professors and administrators make public Free Educational
Resources which are not FREE software.

Also there are projects that have their nexus at the Graduate Center
and a wide variety of projects in the public interest which occur
outside of the GC. I am writing about the ones I know. I am hoping
that this group can correct my inevitable oversights and omissions.
Most of the projects at the Graduate Center I describe are programs
with whom I am lucky enough to have had some interaction. To find the
programs at other colleges, I searched for the college name along with
linux, FREE software and Open Source. Apologies for any omissions.

Reproducible research
=====================

Producing new knowledge compels us to include another emerging
movement in education, that of Reproducible Research. To define yet
another term, this is the ability to reproduce published results.
There are some fairly shocking data on how much of current research
are not reproducible. In 2012, a survey done for Nature found that 47
out of 53 medical research papers on the subject of cancer were
irreproducible
([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html]).

Researchers explained in a 2006 study that, of 249 data sets from
American Psychology Association (APA) empirical articles, 73% of
contacted authors did not respond with their data over a 6-month
period. ([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17032082])

Elements of reproducible research
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

– using research code that can be inspected
– publishing all code that manipulates data
– giving access to data that is used produce any published figures
– giving specifications for any library configuration
– making available any sensor data that was used to create data

Free Software
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

‘Free software’ means software that respects users’ freedom and
community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run,
copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free
software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the
concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in
“free beer”.

[./images/win8_infographic_final.png]

The freedom to inspect and improve the source code is crucial to the
educational and research mission of a world class university.

Scheduled talk
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

– I, Evan Misshula [http://EvanMisshula.github.io] will be giving a
public talk specifically covering a tool for reproducible research
on November 5, 2014
[http://www.meetup.com/New-York-Emacs-Meetup/events/211960922/]

Free Software projects at the GC
================================

Commons in a box
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The CUNY Academic commons contributes to FREE Software by developing
and maintaining the Commons in a box platform
([http://commonsinabox.org]) which creates a WordPress social network.
Developers from the CUNY Academic commons have contributed features
and bug fixes which have been incorporated upstream at both WordPress
Plugins and BuddyPress.

Open CUNY
~~~~~~~~~

Mission
——-

OpenCUNY, the student-governed, open source, academic medium for The
Graduate Center, CUNY community, where you can build the website of
your dreams through a WordPress interface
([http://opencuny.org/blog/]).

Current initiative
——————

In order to help OpenCUNY assess the current usages of OpenCUNY and
plan for its next five years, they have launched OpenCUNY’s First
Participant Survey here. Whether or not you’re on OpenCUNY, we
encourage you to take 10-15 minutes of your time and share about your
experience on digital platforms.

CUNY Institute for Software Development
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CISDD’s mission is to promote economic development in New York City
and encourage the growth of the New York software industry. CISDD was
created by the Board of Trustees, as part of CUNY’s economic
development initiative, in January of 2000. CISDD provides the
software industry, as well as CUNY faculty and students, with
opportunities to learn about cutting-edge software products and
methodologies.

CISDD is particularly interested in promoting work on core and new
software technologies, including: operating system enhancements,
server-side software, Linux, security issues with software,
distributed computing, logic and visualization.
([http://www.cisdd.org/about.php])

Free research code
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The research labs of at least four professors of Computer Science make
regular contribution to FOSS projects.

The Discrete Imaging and Graphics Group
—————————————

Led by Professor Gabor T. Herman this group has developed SNARK09
([http://www.dig.cs.gc.cuny.edu/software/snark09/]) which is a
programming system for the reconstruction of 2D images from 1D
projections. It is designed to help researchers interested in
developing and evaluating reconstruction algorithms. In the area of
image reconstruction, researchers often desire to compare two or more
reconstruction techniques and assess their relative merits. SNARK09
provides a uniform framework in which to implement algorithms and
evaluate their performance. SNARK09 has been designed to treat both
parallel and divergent projection geometries and can create test data
for use by reconstruction algorithms. A number of frequently used
reconstruction algorithms are incorporated.

Big Spatial Data
—————-

Jiangting Zhang has a series of online demos and research codes in the
exciting interactive spatial data visualization and parallel
computation
([http://www-cs.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/~jzhang/LabSoftDemos.htm]).

Pattern recognition
——————-

Computer Science Executive Officer has numerous research publications
and teaching materials available on [http://haralick.org]. Research
code for his cutting edge linear and non-linear manifold clustering
algorithm is available at [https://github.com/wildart/LMCLUS.jl] and
[https://github.com/wildart/ManifoldLearning.jl].

Data Visualization
——————

Recent faculty addition Lev Manovich has released two new important
visualizations in 2014, /SelfieCity/ and /The Exceptional and the
Everyday: 144 hours in Kiev/. Selfie City ([http://selfiecity.net])
investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities
across the world. In an important step toward reproducitbility, the
interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of
3200 photos. In the The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in
Kiev ([http://www.the-everyday.net]) uses computational and data
visualization techniques to explore 13,208 Instagram images shared by
6,165 people in the central area of Kiev during 2014 Ukrainian
revolution (February 17 – February 22, 2014). All photos and their
metadata are available on the site.

GC Digital Fellows workshops
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are a free series of workshops open to the CUNY GC community
many of which concentrate on building open educational resources. The
schedule is available at
[http://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/workshops/]. These include
workshops on WordPress, Python, command line tools, git and data
visualization.

Based in the GC Digital Scholarship Lab, the GC Digital Fellows
Program operates as an in-house think-and-do tank for digital
projects, connecting Fellows to digital initiatives throughout The
Graduate Center. Digital Fellows utilize a team-based approach as they
explore creative solutions for projects that can be implemented in a
collaborative fashion. In the process, the Program helps build out
“The Digital GC” — a vision of the Graduate Center that incorporates
technology into its core research and teaching missions. Their
reflections on this process can be found on their blog, Tagging the
Tower
([http://digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu/category/tagging-the-tower/])

Institutionally supported student initiatives
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There were two student projects that came out of the Digital Praxis
seminar

Social Paper
————

The Social Paper won a Digital Humanities start up grant in 2013. The
project aims to create a social network that allows graduate students
to share seminar papers, enabling students to collaborate and
facilitate conversations across the disciplines. – See more at:
[http://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/GC-News/Detail?id=24347#sthash.otXe34Ib.dpuf]

DH Box
——

Ready-to-go configurations of Omeka, NLTK, IPython, R Studio, and
Mallet live in DH Box. Through this praxis friendly environment,
professors and students have instant classroom access to a cadre of
gold-standard DH tools. Professors will be able to launch a DH
computer lab in just a few minutes and guarantee their students an
ideal environment for hands-on learning. ([http://dhbox.org/about/])

This is accomplished by making a linux computing environment available
over the web. Behind the scenes DH Box uses Docker () to allow
multiple users and non-overlapping directory structures.

Free Software project not at the CUNY GC
========================================

City College
~~~~~~~~~~~~

City College has become the host of the New York Linux Group. Their
next meeting is August 21
([http://www.meetup.com/nylug-meetings/events/213604362/])

Hunter college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Carson Farmer ([http://carsonfarmer.com/research/]) has contributed to
a number of Graphical Information System programs including GeoPandas
([https://github.com/cfarmer]).

John Jay
~~~~~~~~

John Jay hosts NYC4Sec([http://www.meetup.com/NYC4SEC/]) which is a
computer security and forensics meetup in NYC. A number of its
members have made contributions to the Volatility
Project([https://code.google.com/p/volatility/]).

Open educational resource
=========================

Journal of Interactive Teaching and Pedagogy
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The CUNY Graduate Center is home to Journal of Interactive Teaching
and Pedagogy. JiTP’s mission is to promote open scholarly discourse
around critical and creative uses of digital technology in teaching,
learning, and research. Educational institutions have often embraced
instrumentalist conceptions and market-driven implementations of
technology that overdetermine its uses in academic environments. Such
approaches underestimate the need for critical engagement with the
integration of technological tools into pedagogical practice. JITP
endeavors to counter these trends by recentering questions of pedagogy
in our discussions of technology in higher education. The journal will
also work to change what counts as scholarship—and how it is
presented, disseminated, and reviewed—by allowing contributors to
develop their ideas, publish their work, and engage their readers
using multiple
formats. ([http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/about-the-journal/])

Futures Initiative
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Another exciting new open educational resource is the Futures
Initiative ([http://futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu]). The Futures
Initiative is dedicated to creating and inspiring new methods of
interdisciplinary and collaborative learning and pedagogy in order to
stimulate institutional changes in higher education. Drawing upon and
catalyzing the energy of CUNY faculty and students, the Futures
Initiative seeks to explore new models for empowering the next
generation of college professors to teach and engage in research most
effectively in our modern age. The Futures Initiative encourages
peer-to-peer pedagogies that support open and connected forms of
learning, experimentation, and multimedia publication. Housed at the
Graduate Center and extending throughout the CUNY system, the Futures
Initiative serves as a model for innovation and aims to inspire public
reinvestment in higher education and in our collective future as a
society.

One of the many innovative projects is a new course on the Future of
Higher Ed taught by Futures Initiative Director Dr. Cathy N. Davidson
and former CUNY-GC President William Kelley. The course has a public
collaborative syllabus
([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hlbAHk_7GQ0o0pTJCozROya956M1CXYeChBPuBpyqsI/edit]).
Information about the course and open materials are available at
([http://futures.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2014/10/05/crowdsourced-syllabus-mapping-the-futures-of-higher-education-teaching-learning-and-research-in-the-age-of-google/])

Open educational projects not at the CUNY GC
============================================

Baruch college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There is a Free and Open Source blog that has started at Baruch
([http://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/foss/]). Baruch also has a detailed
guide to using Open Source mapping software
([http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/practicum/]).

Macaulay honors college
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Macaulay Honors College has produced a series of videos and a
website
([http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/scienceforward/videos/]) which
informs citizens on scientific issues. This was highlighted on this
group just yesterday
([http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/open-education-at-cuny/forum/topic/new-science-oer/]).

Brooklyn College
================

Samir Chopra, a military historian wrote a relatively early treatment
of the philosophical implications of FREE software. It is available at
[http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/foss-reading/DLbook.pdf]

College of Staten Island
========================

Professor Roy Vanegas has made his course on Web Design, Graphics, &
Theory available on the web as an Open Educational Resource
([http://roy.vanegas.org/teaching/at_csi/com_370/]).

Queens College
==============

Queens College of the City University of New York announced May 14,
2014 that Douglas Rushkoff, the famed cyberculture expert who
originated concepts such as “viral media” and “social currency,” will
be joining its faculty. This marks the first full-time academic role
for the prolific media theorist, award-winning author, and
documentarian, who is considered one of the most influential thinkers
of the digital age. Starting this August, he will help lead the
development of a new Master of Arts in Media Studies program that will
address the technological and market forces that dominate our daily
lives.

His book titled Open Source Democracy is available here
([http://www.rushkoff.com/open-source-democracy/]).