The primary goals of the Fellowship are:
- To convert your course syllabus to use cost-free, openly-licensed resources
- To share your work with an open license via:
- An accessible course site on CUNY Academic Commons with at least a syllabus and
- An accessible Syllabus on CUNY Academic Works
- To code your course as ZTC (Zero Textbook Course) in CUNYFirst
Day One
Words of Welcome | Dr. Maura Smale, Chief Librarian
Introductions & Syllabus Mini-Overview | Elvis Bakaitis, Head of Reference
A Fellow’s Experience | Sandy Jimenez, Comic Book Artist and City Tech faculty
Open Access: What It Is and Why | Jill Cirasella, Scholarly Communications Librarian and University Liason
Day Two
Privacy and the Open | Elvis Bakaitis
Permissions Puzzles: Creative Commons Licenses and Rogue PDF Activity | Jill Cirasella
Day Three
Artificial Intelligence and OER | Stephen Zweibel, Stefano Morello & Zach Muhlbauer, CUNY AI Lab
Integrating Archival Resources | Donna Davey, Reference and Scholarly Communications Librarian
Day Four
Wikimedia in the Classroom | Richard Knipel, CUNY Wikimedian-in-Residence
A Case Study: OER at Laguardia Community College | Ian McDermott, Coordinator of Library Instruction
Day Five
Accessibility Considerations | Margaret Miller, Adjunct Reference Librarian
Day Six
Final Survey
As a supplement to the Syllabus, this Reading List is intended to give you a sense of current conversations within these topic areas. As you will note below, some of our presenters are known for their scholarship in these emerging areas.
OER: A panacea for all social ills?
What do We Mean by Open Education? (2015)
Though written 10 years ago, Audrey Watters’ blog post meditation on implications of the word “open” in higher education feel all the more relevant in today’s emerging context of AI.
- “And it’s complicated, of course, by the multiple meanings of that adjective “open.” What do we mean when we use the word? Free? Open access? Open enrollment? Open data? Openly-licensed materials, as in open educational resources or open source software? Open for discussion? Open for debate? Open to competition? Open for business? Open-ended intellectual exploration?”
Open to What? A Critical Evaluation of OER Efficacy Studies (2020)
Penned by CUNY Library faculty member Ian McDermott, this article delves into questions relevant to all new-fangled educational modes being introduced into higher education.
- “The Hewlett Foundation’s definition signals an interesting shift, emphasizing “high quality” OER, which is not surprising since Hewlett, as an OER funder, has a financial stake in OER development.
Open Access
Buranyi, S. (2017, June 27). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian.
This article is an engaging and eye-opening overview of the commercialization of scholarly publishing and the motivation for open access. [Note: Despite the word “scientific” in the title and the focus on “scientists” in this excerpt, this article will likely interest researchers from all disciplines. It’s also a really engaging read!]
- “Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.”
Pia, A. E., et al. (2020). Labour of love: An open access manifesto for freedom, integrity, and creativity in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Commonplace.
- “The undersigned are a group of scholar-publishers based in the humanities and social sciences who are questioning the fairness and scientific tenability of a system of scholarly communication dominated by large commercial publishers. With this manifesto we wish to repoliticise Open Access to challenge existing rapacious practices in academic publishing—namely, often invisible and unremunerated labour, toxic hierarchies of academic prestige, and a bureaucratic ethos that stifles experimentation—and to bear witness to the indifference they are predicated upon.”
Artificial Intelligence & Content Creation in Higher Education
How Generative AI Affects Open Educational Resources
And in response: Open Isn’t Just About Product
Archives / Primary Sources
The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast (2016)
The digitization of archival resources has transformed historical research. This article by University of Pittsburgh Professor Lara Putnam maps the corresponding turn among historians towards the transnational, and the promises and pitfalls of accelerating digitization.
- “The world lies within reach as never before. The radically reduced time cost, geographic un-anchoring, and heightened granularity of digital discovery have transformed the structural conditions shaping the generation of historical knowledge…Digital research that carries us deeper into real-world connection may indeed create the border-crossing wisdom that our border-riven world needs.”
Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past (2017)
This essay, by a former professor in the Graduate Center Ph.D. Program in Urban Education and founder of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program Stephen Brier, explores the potential of the CUNY Digital History Archive for teaching CUNY history in the classroom.
- “…the history of CUNY…hopefully reminds us that only through a commitment to progressive ideas, mass action, political will and organization, and, last but certainly not least, innovative forms of teaching and learning, can an institution like CUNY be sustained and enhanced in the coming decades.”
Critical Theories of the Open Internet
Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies (2015)
This book by Amy E. Earhart provides a twenty-five year history of digital study as a “necessary prelude” to future developments in the Digital Humanities. This history provides an important backdrop for many of the resources we are exploring.
- “My analysis of the development of digital literary studies itself owes much to new historicism, which theorizes that movements should be contextualized within power structures and examines the impact of theoretical, economic, social, and historical impacts on scholarship. By examining the evolution of what we have come to call digital literary studies within such contexts, we might better understand how the form has both shifted and maintained certain conceptions of text, literature, and scholarship.”
A Framework for Understanding Internet Openness in A Universal Internet in a Bordered World: Research on Fragmentation, Openness and Interoperability (2016)
Illegal Literature: Toward a Disruptive Creativity (2015)
In an exploration of copyright issues surrounding fan fiction and parody texts, David S. Roh sketches the potential for a cultural dialogue strengthened by “literary versioning,” a concept drawn from computer science that maps onto the concepts of “remixable” and “reusable” in the world of OER.
- “A disruptive textuality. . . . openly acknowledges source texts and the right of successive texts to perform alterations; it aims to expand and alter in iterative rather than paradigm-shifting moves; and last, it tends to revel in complicating and problematizing rather than claiming centrality.”
CUNY Resources
OER Representatives List – All of the campus librarians who work with open resources at CUNY. If you work/teach at another campus, feel free to ask about additional opportunities such as Fellowships, workshops, and compensated project support.
OER Programs Across CUNY – This drop-down list links to various individual campus-based programs at the University.
This guide, written by CUNY Librarian Amy Wolfe, provides a comprehensive overview of best practices for accessibility.
Zero-Textbook-Cost Designation
Publications about OER
An anthology that includes reflections on OER in various fields, written by Graduate Center students/faculty/staff.
Towards a Critically Open Future
2021 compilation of open resource guides on tracking police violence, feminist care narratives, history of pandemics, and archival resources for Latix history in the United States – all through openly-licensed material. Contains work by former Open Knowledge Fellows Brian Mercado, Angela LaScala-Gruenewald, Nicole Cote, Tania Avilés Vergara, and Maria Victoria Salazar.
Fellowship Help
Open Knowledge at the Mina Rees Library
This is the website for all-things-Open at the Graduate Center. Maintains a web version of the Fellowship Syllabus, OER publications, information regarding former Fellows, and helpful resources and publications.
This is where we will be documenting your progress through the fellowship. It may be helpful to save this page in your browser.
Reflections Essays by Former Open Knowledge Fellows
To browse at your leisure and give you inspiration for when you write your own reflection essay.
CUNY Academic Commons Resources
Managing Privacy on the Commons
