SCP 50: Imagining the End of the World – http://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/apocalypse. Spring 2008: Website and multimedia projects for a seminar on apocalyptic thought and expression in the United States. Prof. Lee Quinby, Visiting Professor at the Macaulay Honors College, wanted students to collaborate on and display multimedia projects, post responses to readings, and share information discovered during research. She also wanted the website to serve as an information hub for a film series and a conference that were part of the course.
Since the site needed to be open and to serve multiple pedagogical functions, I used Drupal because it has blog, forum, and wiki features. My roles were to participate in class and online discussions, to guide the students in designing and editing their multimedia projects (they didn’t need much), and to shoot the photos and videos of the conference. The results of their work can be seen here:
- LOLapocalypse
- Bravéone the Brave
- The End
- The Party
- Imagining the End of the World in Brooklyn
- “Conscience, Culture, Politics” conference photos and videos.
IT @ Macaulay – http://macaulay.cuny.edu/it. A community portal that archives student projects, Tech Fellow workshops and files, seminar blogs and websites, and provides other supplementary information for everyone involved in our courses. In addition, a community blog, tech support wiki, and incoming RSS headlines on academic and pedagogical topics connect our work with the outside world. This project originated from conversations among Tech Fellows about better explaining our role to faculty and students. Since part of the problem was the historical segregation of these groups in our online community, I began developing this resource as a means of synthesizing our curricular needs and connecting to the outside world. Made with Drupal and still very much in progress. Started late November 2007, underwent a total redesign in August 2009.
Snapshot New York 2007 Web Gallery – http://macaulay.cuny.edu/gallery/. Macaulay Honors College freshmen participate in a cross-campus photography event as part of their first core seminar, The Arts in New York City. On the same day every year — 11 November — students take a photograph of something not commonly seen in New York. The images are collected digitally and printed for a major exhibit attended by students and guests from all seven campuses. In Fall 2007 we decided to use a free PHP / MySQL web gallery application — Gallery 2 — where students could upload, comment on, and rate each others’ pictures. This engendered community among our students and provided an integral resource for the Arts seminar. I tweaked Gallery 2, which involved editing PHP code to provide functionalities that we needed for this particular event.
Self and Community in the City – http://brooklynsoc.org/PLG/selfandcommunity. Spring 2005: Hypertext edition of a book by Brooklyn College sociology professor Jerome Krase. The edition was made for the purpose of integrating with the website of The Peopling of New York City, the second core seminar of the Macaulay Honors College. Since the book was required reading, the layout, palette, text, and image formatting were designed to be as pleasant and legible as possible for a document length not normally suited to the electronic screen. Other hypertext elements — i.e. title attributes in footnote anchors that display the note content in a tooltip — perform what print cannot in order to ease the reading experience.