This fall semester my students at CUNY York College collaborated on the annual GIF the Portrait project.
CT101 is the energetic digital storytelling course that introduces, exposes and installs the awareness of a multitude and application of digital tools! All whilst simultaneously creating a digital identity on the Internet at large! We blog, a lot!
CT101 has two sections each semester. We have 40 awesome students on the roster. Although this project is not mandatory, (students can select from a myriad of creative assignments) each student was asked to write an individual post about someone who greatly inspires and motivates them. They were asked to share why and add contextual links for further clarification. (these individual posts can be found in the main feed on the ct101 website) Using the portrait of that person selected we learned basic electronic image manipulation skills with adobe photoshop. Students also made some basic sequential motion graphics with those manipulated images. Then, they were asked to extract one single still-frame from their individual animations to contribute to the animations above. The result is a fast moving collaborative sequence of portraits. The portraits quickly morph and fragment into a series of animated iterations. Does the word ENERGY come to mind? We hope so (along with a little glitch aesthetic, we hope for that too). After the first animated collab was published, we began pushing the pieces further by “examining the potentials of what else may happen?”
Students are now working on screen grabbing the consolidated GIFs and pushing them forward into “various otherness” using the mobile apps below.
Would you like to remix one? What is stopping you?
The GIF the Portrait project is an open project promoted by the NET-ART website here on the academic commons. Would you like to join in and submit? Lets chat!
Project Title – “The Cross College, Campus, Course ZINE Collab Project!”
Participating Courses & Campuses:
Professor Michelle McAuliffe’s :: – ART255, Digital Photography Class – Galluadet University, Washington, DC
Professor Ryan Seslow’s :: – CUNY York College, NYC, CT101, Digital Storytelling Class, CUNY, BMCC, NYC, Foundations of Digital Graphic Design Class, Touro College, Graduate School of Technology, NYC, Foundations & History of Design Class.
(4 different participating courses submitted works in total)
Description –
Welcome! This project is a collaborative open education exploration using design, digital tools, the creative human potential and the Internet. It is our intention to generate, discuss and fuse together disciplines through visual communication.
The “The Cross College, Campus, Course ZINE Collab Project” project synthesizes the disciplines of communication technology, graphic design, and digital storytelling courses across multiple campuses. Each course is given the same information and assignment (below) to complete from the perspective of their class content and personal experiences.
As individual courses, we are interested in knowing how traditional design principles relate and contrast with the medium of visual communication and storytelling (and vice versa). We want to understand and share how the use of integrated software applications and web tools translate when applied and presented in a public space. “Public space” has an interesting context both physically and virtually. We wanted to test both.
What will the results be both digitally and non-digitally-(Analog)?
How will the immediacy of publishing to the Internet and the contrast of using public library spaces to experience the same content effect the overall generating and receiving of the works?
What kind of dialog would this create? (This is the short list of questions, we have many more!)
This project begins today 11/12/2019 by introducing the specifications of the project and publicly inviting other professors, students and courses to join in! Are you interested?
PART 1 – Design
Design Specifications – Lets simulate, You have been selected to contribute 1 page to a collaborative magaZINE that produces a rare publication in both a (DIY) Do it Yourself printed edition and an online digital version.
*Your submission to the publication will creatively communicate an illustration that displays how:
“Technology and creativity are powerful tools for fueling communication, inspiration, digital-storytelling and design.”
You have the creative freedom to produce and generate your contribution with full autonomy as to how you experience or define this statement above, however, your final submission should display an integrated composition of imagery (use of layers and opacity) along with descriptive verbiage that has been typeset creatively.
*Size Requirements – 8.5″ X 11″ inches vertical, please. (What is the potential of a rectangle?)
Usage of Imagery – Participants should NOT randomly use images that are simply just found on the Internet, especially with-out proper attribution to its creator. Please refer to this resource page and work from the numerous repositories of public domain images and creative commons sources. (Yes, you can make your own images and use your own art work!)
Software Skill Showcase – Over the past weeks we have all toggled through learning various techniques and methods working with adobe photoshop and related design tools. All image related composing and manipulations should be generated in photoshop, or another image-making application that allows for a saved out-put as a .jpg or .png file.
Completed Submissions –
1. I would like to ask all students and participants to publish their completed pages as a blog post describing the process and meaning of your completed page / contribution. You may write the post as a tutorial that maps your process from start to finish. You can then share the link to your individual post when you comment about the project below (in the comments area).
2. Students will save all of their design work and submit one file (.jpeg or .png image file) for both the digital zine publication here on the NET-ART website as well as a printed copy for the print version of the Zine.
( E-mail this file to me – rseslow@york.cuny.edu or rseslow@bmcc.cuny.edu )
The Galleries:
Professor Michelle McAuliffe’s – ART255, Digital Photography Class, Galluadet University, Washington, DC (below)
Professor Ryan Seslow’s – CUNY York College, NYC, CT101, Digital Storytelling Class, (below)
School children (8-10) in front of map
Professor Ryan Seslow’s – CUNY, BMCC, NYC, Foundations of Digital Graphic Design Class
Professor Ryan Seslow’s – Touro College, Graduate School of Technology, NYC, Foundations & History of Design Class (below)
Part 2 – Commenting & Dialog
In the comments section below: all students and participants will respond and react to both the project as a whole (yes, in the comments space directly below) and individually to each other’s submissions. You can click on an individual image in the gallery in this post on the piece that stands out to you and add your comments. (As submissions the come in they will appear starting the 1st week of December 2019).
The Academic Commons is a public platform and space for CUNY and beyond, the C.A.C commons community will also be invited to participate in commenting and creating dialog here. Feel free to invite others!
Please consider addressing the following questions in your comments:
*What common threads or similarities do you see between the submitted works?
*What differences do you see?
*How does seeing all of the works organized into one “space” enhance or disrupt your interpretation of the project and its outcome?
*How will apply this experience into your life? Where will this knowledge transcend for you?
*How do you think the general public will appreciate the project viewing it as a tangible object (the printed ZINES) rather than an online experience? Do you prefer one over the other? Please explain and describe your answers. The printed zine will be donated to the NYPL’s Zine collection at their 5th Avenue & 42nd Street location – DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
as well also being available at the Libraries of each participating campus as of mid-spring of 2020.
*Due dates –
All ART work Submissions must be received no later than Thursday December 5th, 2019.
All comments, reaction and discussion submissions must be completed below by Thursday December 12th, 2019.
Wait, what exactly is a portfolio? There seems to be a context…or is there?
Let’s define it, and perhaps there is metaphoric value and context in each one of these “traditional definition” examples below..
According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary:
Definition of “portfolio”:
1: a hinged cover or flexible case for carrying loose papers, pictures, or pamphlets
2: from the use of such a case to carry documents of state: the office and functions of a minister of state or member of a cabinet
3: the securities held by an investor: the commercial paper held by a financial house (such as a bank)
4: a set of pictures (such as drawings or photographs) usually bound in book form or loose in a folder
5: a selection of a student’s work (such as papers and tests) compiled over a period of time and used for assessing performance or progress
Hold up, whoa! I can already feel your inner physiological triggers sending a bright red waving flag to your ego saying: “but making a portfolio is sooooo much work!”.
Guess what?
LET, AND ALLOW FOR THIS HAPPEN!
It is perfectly normal and alright to let your “old-portfolio-definition-self” bleed out. Exercise that energy. Let’s release it. Ill wait….Take a breath, and let’s remind ourselves that things need to be replaced and upgraded. Nothing is static. We learn, we grow, we expand and we can’t allow past experiences to drive the bus on new opportunities and new ways of seeing, experiencing and re-defining things.
The word “portfolio” is not a bad word. If anything, like anything else, it’s a default term that officially requires your interaction, research, resonance and re-defining within context to who you are and who you are becoming in the process! With that said, let’s think about what the next step is in creating your new portfolio.
Let us understand the “why” part. Why do I need a portfolio? What is the purpose?
Here is a short list (feel free to add more to your updated definition)
To showcase a body of your work. This is obvious, but curating and organizing things with intention becomes very specific. It activates a higher level of awareness and attention to the process / project. You will learn how to get selective, and this takes practice.
2. To show off your strengths, creativity, skills, effectiveness, efficiency, enthusiasm and passion! Of course, this energy translates directly through the work included in the portfolio. This will be what you believe is your best work at the time, but there is context. Keep reading.. (PS – it’s OK to have more than one portfolio to help showcase various bodies of works and projects.) For example, I’m an applied artist, a digital artist, animation-maker, graphic-designer and a professor of art and design. Some of the works in my portfolio can overlap in theory but I keep a lot of the works separate to subject, but enjoy showcasing them together on my website. That’s right, my website is my portfolio. In fact, I have created a few, the links are below to help.
3. Display your process and evolution. Duration is your friend! Nothing shows off progress better than time. A metric of growth shows itself through time. When I look back at the design work I was doing 10 years ago in comparison to today I see an incredible difference in skill, technique, taste and where my thinking and focus was at the time. I also find a lot of ideas that can be pushed and expanded upon with more with my “awareness-of-growth eyes.” I write a lot about my work and share my process. I believe that this helps me reflect and explain myself better.
4. Stand out and show your style and authenticity – There is only one “you” that you can be. Yes, we certainly learn and are greatly inspired and influenced by others, but at the end of the day we must learn how to be our authentic selves. We must learn how to translate that through our mediums of choice. How will you do this? The short answer is through consistent experimentation and practice. Over time you will create your inner curator, and that part of yourself will begin putting pieces together in groups and compartments. The process will build and flow. This aspect is a journey and it too is anything from static. I take great interest in making changes, learning new things and applying them to the foundations that I continue to build.
OK, all easier said than done… or is it you ask?
I hope that this post will inspire you to begin! Be patient with yourself. The goal is not to create a portfolio in one hour, and there is no such thing as “perfection”. or the perfect portfolio. Let’s produce a result and discuss that result. Be generous with yourself in the process.
I admit it. I love to experiment, test, tweak, deconstruct, remix and repeat processes. I treat the creation process of such a task, creating a new portfolio, the same way that I approach making art. Suspend your judgement! Allow yourself to “make something that may really suck” as a first iteration. This is crucial to developing a contrast of your own. Again, you need to produce a result in order to make an assessment about the result. Until you do this, your contrast is someone else’s stuff / thing that has inspired or affected you.
I would like for you to consider both of these portfolio building and displaying options below. Im a huge fan of both the Academic Commons and the OpenLab platforms. (If you are reading this and are not a part of CUNY somehow, then you can easily follow along individually as both the commons and the OpenLab are powered by WordPress.) Using your own self-hosted WordPress based website and account via ReclaimHosting.com – I have created a sample and template / example using both the Academic Commons, OpenLab and my own self-hosted projects that go into the process. I consider all of these links below to be portfolios. Perhaps you have a preference over one or the other? I hope that these links below will help you get started.
3. My personal website- this is my own domain and my own self-hosted website (WordPress) – https://ryanseslow.com
4. This is also my own domain and a self-hosted website to showcase a body of work (WordPress) – https://Situationalfiction.com
5. Of course, the NET-ART website here on the commons also functions as a portfolio and online platform for various galleries, blog posts, online exhibitions and selected works. Take a tour.
6. Looking for more examples? Contact me, lets chat!
Feel free to leave your questions and feedback in the comments section below! Lets add to this post together!
GIF the Portrait, A Collaborative Contribution, ELL101, Spring 2019
About the Project:
Faculty Instructor: Inés Vañó García Teaching Artist: Ryan Seslow ELL 101, Introduction to Language LaGuardia Community College
ELL 101, Introduction to Language students from LaGuardia Community College submitted a wonderful array of works in the Linguistic Landscapes project, which is also a cog in the Pressing Public Issue project
For the purpose of this project, we stressed how our languages and language practices influence the way we interact with people and how language(s) relates to our role in society. Considering the symbolic construction of the public sphere in NYC, we explored and examined the linguistic landscape of Jackson Heights, in Queens. This approximation aimed to explore the linguistic diversity of the area in context: from a visual/written perspective (public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, among other public signs) as well as from a speaking/aural one (interviews, music, background conversations). As a community, we were critical researchers and creators of a digital storytelling that investigated the multilingual and multi-literate sociolinguistic ecology of Queens.
Following this digital storytelling methodology, students discovered and learned about the linguistic diversity in Jackson Heights and how languages shape this public sphere. This project allowed students to investigate different forms and shapes of literacy and to analyze the multilingual and multi-literate sociolinguistic ecology of the neighborhood. Based on our readings, discussions and inquiry, we found an analysis of language ideologies that precipitates the understanding of the power relations between individuals, groups and communities.
“This final project had the potential to have a temporary physical exhibition at the James Gallery as well as a permanent online presence.”
We are proud to share our outcomes here on the Net Art Website!
Here are some things that you can do to help spread Deaf Awareness at your campus, in your department, in your classroom and beyond.
This month you can help spread awareness about Deaf culture, what it means to be Deaf & Hard of Hearing (HofH) or experiencing the various spectrums of hearing loss. You can get involved and proactive, here are a few ways to take-action:
Understanding comes through Awareness.
1. Learning, Sharing and Informing your Family, Friends, Colleagues and Students:
First, spread the word by sharing this post! Simply talking about Deaf Awareness Month is also a great start. Let other people know by reaching out. This can easily take place in a department meeting, in the classroom, via a group e-mail or by creating an event or meet up to discuss.
In your department, reach out to the Human Resources office and ask about the resources your campus offers. This may mean connecting to a specific person in charge or the office of disabilities on or off the premises. If there aren’t any current resources, (and sadly, there may not be) then it is time to create them! Let this post be a guide and a starting point. Again, awareness is everything!
Obviously, the Internet is filled with tons of resources, here are a few to help get you started:
1. Learn A Sign Language: It’s time to learn a sign language! Here in the USA we use ASL, also known as American Sign Language. ASL is beautiful! It is an official foreign language. Even learning the basics of fingerspelling and the ASL alphabet goes a very long way. I’m a big fan of smartphone applications like The ASL App, Dr. Bill Vicars and for those of you here in NYC I highly recommend taking classes at the Sign Language Center – Several CUNY colleges also offer ASL classes at the beginner level (did you know that?) Take a peek at your college’s course catalog or do a search for ASL / CUNY online.
3. Join orCreate a Sign Language Group: All college and university campuses have an allotted “club-hours” time each week for clubs on campus. Does your campus already have a Sign Language group or club? Inquire! If not, perhaps you can use the club-hours time to form an ASL club and practice learning Sign Language together. Learning with a friend or a group of people is a great way to inspire, encourage and motivate each other.
4.Support! Reach out to your local Deaf & Hard of Hearing Communities: This means, People, Businesses, Organizations and Groups! Once again, by reaching out to your HR dept. and or office of disabilities make an inquiry about how to get involved and who the contact names are for various groups, communities, events and businesses.
5. Creativity – Go on and Create Something to Express Yourself: I made the animations in this post specifically for Deaf Awareness Month. You can get creative too! This can be done individually or in your classroom, it can be done with your department and fellow faculty members, administrators and staff. Collaborate! Make a sign, make a flyer or a poster. Hang them up around your department offices and in your classrooms! Im going to launch a CUNY wide project soon to bring further awareness, I will be reaching out to YOU!
Contact me! Want to learn more, chat, connect and create some kind of an awareness based creative project with your students, class or faculty members? I’m here to help.
Im excited to share this blog post with you today (and beyond as it will be updated and archived). As you all know, I’m a big fan of the CUNY Academic Commons. There are more reasons than I can mention at the moment, but I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasize the idea of how essential and easy it is to create a portfolio on the platform. I know, the word “portfolio” itself has several internal triggers. We almost always associate it with “work” or a “job” and it is time to purge, bypass and rethink this. That part is OUR responsibility. Lets not forget the word “FUN” as a part of this process because it can be the driving force behind actually creating something that you are both proud of and eager to put out into the world- (our community here and beyond).
The portfolio site is designed as a visual tutorial that gives both suggestions and instructions, it will help you get started. Think of your visit to the site as inspiration on what some of the potentials can be. It is intended to be the fuel that sparks your ideas into action. I’m also here to help, so feel free to reach out. The example website can be applied to a professional faculty portfolio, a collaborative group project, a specific event or accomplishment. This can also easily be the template for your students, and student work, including helping students create their own variations.
Looking for useful tools, apps & tutorials to get your submission started?CLICK HERE!
Looking for examples of “what” has been submitted previously? Explore here!
The NET-ART Submission Guidelines:
Submissions may be generated by CUNY faculty, students of all levels, alumni & community members. CUNY classes/courses may also submit collaborative proposals as a group. CUNY faculty & students may also collaborate with others from outside of CUNY as well.
All submitted works will be featured and published as individual blog posts as well as added to existing galleries on the NET-ART website.
Depending on the submission’s proposal, relevant and in context, various submissions will be published and exhibited as an individual page created specifically for the project.
All submissions should be described in written detail with a clear vision, context and meaning. Supporting images and links should be provided as well.
Authors of the submissions and their collaborators must be willing to participate, respond to comments and expand upon their projects with incoming queries via the commons, twitter and beyond.
The purpose of exhibiting submissions in various categories displays a platform for creative and experimental methods of pedagogy. Please consider how your work will contribute to a larger whole that will be archived for teaching, learning, reference and posterity.
We anticipate your submissions!
Question, Proposals & Submissions can be sent via e-mail or via Twitter to:
I would like to ask my fellow teaching colleagues far and wide to consider this information as you begin teaching your courses this fall.
Whether you are teaching 1 course or 7 (like myself), this applies to all.
Keywords – Patience, Empathy, Compassion, Creativity, Accessibility, Inclusion & Community
1. There is no ego in teaching. Be an example of patience, compassion, empathy and understanding. Make this your mantra. Your energy is contagious! Meaning, your vibration carries information to each and every person in the classroom. The emotional state of your vibration creates rapport between people. You can set the vibration for the semester in your first-class meeting by expressing your gratitude, excitement, appreciation and enthusiasm for teaching and meeting your new students. Again, this is contagious energy!
2. Take acute awareness that your course(s) holds all of the potential to be an incredibly unique learning experience in and of itself. I mean this far beyond any of the specific course content that will be covered throughout the semester. Acknowledge, we are all human beings coming into the course from various places and stages in our journey together on this planet. There is always a part of each and every one of us within each other. Whether it is an example of who you once were, relate to now, or a reflection of the future you to come. There you are.
3. Think about the fact that yourself, and the group of incoming students will be having a new experience in the same physical space, at the same time for the next 15 weeks. This experience, with the exact same people, in the exact same space and time frame will never happen again. Discuss and discover your similarities and collective strengths as a class and how those individual characteristics form the modular fragments that make up the whole. Every class is a community. It will function as one with great energy if it is declared collectively.
4. Create a community! Every course holds the potential to be platform for collaboration and community building. This means, setting up a series of dialogs early on for learning about each other. What are the passions, concerns and ambitions of each student, how are they taking steps to realize those things? Remind yourself before, during and after each class; what roll do you play as a leader and facilitator of inspiration for your students?
5. Realize, our students are teaching us far more than we are teaching them. (read that again if you need to) If you have a classroom of 20 students, then a minimum of 20 new potentialities, solutions, variations and iterations will be generated, worked on, crafted, discussed, written, spoken, presented uniquely and shared back to you (and the class itself) for each assignment. That is a tremendous amount of information and energy. Remember, there is no EGO in teaching, so whether these outcomes please your expectations or not, you have been exposed to a new opportunity to help, learn, grow and see things from another’s perspective. The sum total of awareness from openly experiencing things from another’s point of view is the diminishment of competition-based thinking, and the humble transition into seeing infinite creativity.
6. Do you really think that you are going to inspire your new students this semester by spending the first-class meeting time reading the entire syllabus? Place an emphasis on our collective human-ness first and foremost. Your class(s) are communities awaiting the declaration of its potentiality. Introductions should be the first thing that happens. Learn each other’s names, share stories, connect and learn about each other.
Keywords – Patience, Empathy, Compassion, Creativity, Accessibility, Inclusion & Community
Have a wonderful Semester, and feel free to add to this thread in the comments section below!
“We need a caption, Phil, I don’t want to disappoint Roz again, help me out here”
Countless memories, the sea air and the seemingly creative blunders of reflective such-ness..what will you contribute to the process?
This is a manipulated image, its a silly one, or perhaps you resonate with it seriously? Either way, we need to adjust the contrast of the art work, please help by listing some of the options we can apply.
This is great fodder for creative inducement, consider the potential of how images speak to us, especially finding value in the subjective. What will you “allow” yourself to share?
Contrasts can be oh so subtle, they can disrupt the default patterns, this is a metaphor! How will you disrupt the pattern to bypass the part of you that clings to the familiar?
OK, patterns can also be very COOL! Patterns are about order, but order is in need of an integration of variety every so often, OK, this is another metaphor, see the pattern? 🙂
A little bit of movement goes a long long way! A little bit of texture goes a long way as well. Seems to me that creative variety is more accessible than we may think..
Ahem, you get the message, right?
“The Contemplation of Metaphoric Flight”, 2019, is a series of digital art illustrations & GIF animations generated from public domain source images via the NYPL digital archives. The illustrations were created by your old friend, Ryan Seslow. The new series of works above were specifically created to be displayed here on the C.A.C as a part of the Net Art website’s ongoing exhibition series. It is intended to serve as a visual example, an accessible template, and the creative potential for displaying, publishing, presenting and archiving such a project. (The whole thing is a metaphor)
Wait! Am I suggesting that an online exhibition, published as a blog post on a unique cross-campus social media network can also be used as a teaching tool? A transparent pedagogical tactic?! Well, yes, yes, I am! Lets dig in.
The original public domain images were cut-out with the pen-tool, composed and applied using adobe photoshop (photoshop is your friend and loves you). Do you need a photoshop pen-tool / cut-out video tutorial? Go Here – The cut-outs were necessary for the first iteration of the static pictures above. (Im referring to the bird portraits and the human clothes used to place their heads onto and into) The cut-outs are handy as they can be saved as both .psd files (the original photoshop documents) and as a transparent .PNG file. The .PNG files have a transparent background, this makes it easy to layer them over and into existing images. Plus they are forever re-usable (variation, variation, variation). But, Ryan, I don’t have access to Photoshop… OK, well, there is a trail versions! Sign up and try it! But after that trail ends, so that you know, photoshop is not required to do any of this. Web applications like Pixlr are free and accessible for all to use in the browser window itself, er, with access to the Internet of course.. OK, you can just download the .PNG files here in ready to use mode (your welcome).
Click here to access my database, this includes all spiritual GIF making insights and alchemy tactics to engage students!
OK, so, there are a few animations above as well. The first animations above were created in adobe after effects. The renders were pushed to my iPhone and into mobile applications like Glitche (yikes, its only for iOS) and iPhone’s “Clips” video sequence maker (there are alternatives for android) The files can be saved as mp4 or .mov files making it easy to apply the videos into other mobile video editing apps. Filters are fun to play with for more customizing and visual effects. The videos can be looped into GIF animations using great apps like ImgPlay (this app is awesome, it re-sizes, edits, and has multiple out-put sources.) Animated GIFs are great extenders of so many forms of communication! Im hooked on making GIFS! I make them all public domain by adding them to Giphy.com so by all means use them at will! Here is my feed.
Of course, the digital art, illustration, collage, GIF animation aspect can be a great creative course project in and of itself! Indeed, both on an individual level but perhaps collaborating is where the extended creativity and learning takes place. This can be achieved through digital storytelling using a blogging platform just like this one. See that, you find yourself “inside the actual example”! The illustrations above clearly required a caption, captions and or a narrative. Is the narrative fictional? Will you write a short story to support the images or maybe a reflection induced by the sequences of images? What references come to mind or coincide? How can you make the description compelling? Will you share hyperlinks to your references and resources? Will you embed animated GIFs or other snippets of relevant content? Can you recompose this blog post and use it as a metaphoric template for your own class project, assignment, syllabus or exhibition? (Hint, you can easily break free of the digital art example, but it might be fun to play with this as an idea.)
I believe that this example / template series will expand, who wants to collaborate on a creative cross campus project?
This blog post is a contribution that I made for the CUNY BMCC Open Pedagogy website here on the Academic Commons. I am lucky to be a part of the BMCC teaching and learning team this summer!
This blog post will serve as a series of examples to help inspire, format and display the myriads of potentials that wordpress based websites offer for teaching, learning, presenting, publishing, archiving & sharing. I am drawing from my own courses and examples here, please feel free to leave comments below or in the forum. My examples range from my courses on the academic commons, the Openlab, and a self-hosted private website. All of which use the wordpress interface.
The question I continue to ask myself through these experiences is; “what are the ongoing potentials of this website/ blog /blog post(s) as an experience?” How can I offer more value? I start with a draft and build/generate content over time as I go. For me, this is a really fun process, I enjoy creating and curating my courses and course content! By all means, be experimental, ask questions, and most of all have fun with the process.
Lets jump in! Perhaps you will click on each example and take a brief tour of each site listed below as you read through here. you can always open each link in a new tab and compare and contrast them as well.
1. https://ct101.us – CT101 – Digital Storytelling. (This is the example that I share at the workshop) This website is a good example of how the course functions as both a repository of content, course calendar and assignment bank with students contributing as authors to the website. The course calendar page is populated with many creative projects that you can follow along with on your own. CT101 is a hybrid course, it is meant to be accessible for distant learners.
2. https://bmccmma100.commons.gc.cuny.edu – This is a foundation graphic design course that places an emphasis on learning the elements and principles of design in relationship to industry standard software applications (Adobe CC). The website serves as the course guide and calendar. Weekly blog posts are published to share assignments, assignment descriptions, research, resources, examples, videos and student contributions via the comment section.
3. https://netart.commons.gc.cuny.eduNet Art is a CUNY-Wide open source course, collaborative exhibition space, research project and experimental “such-ness” created specifically for the Commons. The course is a template and repository for animated GIFs, digital art and video art projects. Contributions come from other CUNY professors, students, courses and beyond! You are welcome to participate and or use any of the projects for yourself and your courses! Submit!
4. Creating presentation content in the blog post format –https://bit.ly/2IZN76OThis example will most likely be published as its own blog post here later but I also wanted to include it as a part of this post for contrast. Sometimes an individual blog post can inspire the building of an entire website. This is what this post has inspired for myself. In March of 2019 I was in invited to conduct a workshop at the Graduate Center for the Digital Humanities Initiatives program. The workshop was an introduction to graphic design in relationship to applying it to content created for websites, especially those teaching on the commons and with wordpress. (There are tons of resources here! Enjoy!)
5. Piloting on the OpenLab –https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/mma100-seslow-spring-2019/ – For the spring of 2019 I was invited to pilot my BMCC MMA100 Graphic Design class on the OpenLab – there are many similarities between the Commons and the OpenLab. I am placing this link and example here for visual contrast. Many of you may find yourselves also working with both platforms as you move forward developing courses at BMCC and in CUNY.
Thoughts and feedback? Feel free to leave a comment and or visit us in the learning lounge during our summer hours!
PS- if you would like to see another creative example of a wordpress blog / portfolio website that mixes together a series of different things, check out my blog here – https://ryanseslow.com 🙂
PSS – Do you see typos? Help me out 🙂
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