Tag: City Tech

  • Empowering Faculty with AI Roundtable Discussion on Zoom, Friday, May 16, 2025 at 2:00PM

    poster for "Empowering Faculty With AI, May 16, 2025, 2:00pm, Zoom, featuring Ryan Baker, Jennifer Sparrow, and Jason Ellis." Details are in the body of the post below.

    I’ll be participating in an roundtable discussion organized by Jose Diaz of City Tech’s Academic Technologies and Online Learning (AtoL) on the topic of “Empowering Faculty with AI.” The other speakers are Ryan Baker, Professor and Director of the Penn Center for Learning Analytics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Jennifer Sparrow, Associate VP for Research and Instructional Technologies and Chief Academic Technology Officer at NYU. The event will take place on Zoom on Friday, May 16 at 2:00pm. The link for registration is below and more details are included in the attached poster. I hope to see you there!

    Registration link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Nx_cvo63TKevpoV06F8DuA

  • Video of Final Exam Review for My Spring 2025 Introduction to Language and Technology Class

    Last night, I recorded this final exam review for my Introduction to Language and Technology ENG1710 students. These are the slides that I’m using in the background. The following are the readings that my students and I discussed over the past 14 weeks that comprise the exam review:

    1. Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
    2. Ted Chiang, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”
    3. Victoria Fromkin, “What is Language?” from An Introduction to Language
    4. Stephen Jay Klein, “What is Technology?”
    5. Salikoko S. Mufwene, “Language as Technology: Some Questions That Evolutionary Linguistics Should Address”
    6. Walter J. Ong, “Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition,
    7. Bruce Mazlish, “The Fourth Discontinuity”
    8. Jacques Derrida, “Linguistics and Grammatology,” translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
    9. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
    10. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chapter 1: “Toward Embodied Virtuality”
    11. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 1: “The Medium is the Message”
    12. Friedrich Kittler, “Gramophone Film Typewriter”
    13. J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, “Remediation”
    14. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New, “Introduction”
    15. Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community”
    16. Lev Manovich, Language of New Media, Chapter 1: What is New Media?”
    17. Alexander Galloway, “What is New Media? Ten Years After The Language of New Media”
    18. Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern, “Online Lives 2.0: Introduction”
    19. Anil Dash, “The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media”
    20. David Nofre, Mark Priestley, and Gerald Alberts, “When Technology Became Language: The Origins of the Linguistic Conception of Computer Programming, 1950-1960”
    21. Marie Hicks, Introduction to Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
    22. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”
    23. William Hart-Davidson, “On Writing, Technical Communication and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication”
    24. Dan Milmo, Seán Clarke, and Garry Blight, “How AI Chatbots Like ChatGPT or Bard Work—Visual Explainer”
    25. Alan F. Blackwell, “Are You Paying Attention?” from Moral Codes
    26. Lorena O’Neil, “These Women Warned of AI’s Dangers and Risks Long Before ChatGPT”
    27. Maria Christoforaki and Oya Beyan, “AI Ethics—A Bird’s Eye View”
  • Some Links About Social Media and Professionalization for Today’s Intro to Professional and Technical Writing Class

    a faceless cybernaut wearing a spacesuit prepares to explore cyberspace. image created with Stable Diffusion.
    A faceless cybernaut prepares to explore cyberspace. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    For today’s class, my ENG2700 Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing students read two articles about social media and professionalism in the Technical Communication field:

    • Ferro, T. & Zachry, M. (2014). Technical communication unbound: knowledge work, social media, and emergent communicative practices. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(1), 6-21.
    • Verzosa Hurley, E. & Hea, A. (2014). The rhetoric of reach. preparing students for technical communication in the age of social media. Technical Communication Quarterly, 23(1), 55-68.

    I plan to discuss the difference between active and passive approaches to building an online professional identity (and why the former is the way to go–giving an example about LinkedIn from Dr. Rebecca Burnett).

    I’ll also show them some things related to my social media presence, easy-to-build HTML websites hosted on Github like this one, my old domain name, and online calling card/mini-bio/link aggregator sites, such as:

  • National Poetry Month 2025 Display at City Tech

    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade

    My colleagues Rob Ostrom and Jennifer Sears put together an impressive display for this past April’s National Poetry Month at the entrance of City Tech’s Ursula C. Schwerin Library. Here are some photos of the display and titles that they curated for the installation.

    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
    display of books and banner for national poetry month behind a large glass facade
  • Observations of the Fourth and Sixth Floors of City Tech

    city seen out glass roof in highrise building

    While my students were diligently completed their Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) feedback forms today, I took photos while walking around the Namm and Library buildings on the fourth floor (afternoon class) and the sixth floor (evening class). Some are mundane, some are technological objects, and some have interesting compositions (to me). Afterwards, I shared my work my students and encouraged them to do the same to build up a personal library of photos that they might want to make use of in their multimodal compositions.

    messy written whiteboard
    music stand in hallway
    four black doors with blue trim
    cluttered hallway
    multilevel walkways under glass roof in highrise building
    alarm speaker box mounted near ceiling
    windows and thermostat make a face on a block wall
    a keyed switch in an electrical gang switch box
    recessed metal trash can in tiled wall
    ceiling mounted wifi router
    hallway hidden behind the elevators
    ceiling mounted surveillance camera
    water fountain
    elevator call buttons
    multilevel walkways from below in highrise building
    empty classroom with a ceiling mounted projector
    multilevel walkways in highrise building under a glass roof
    multilevel walkways under glass roof in highrise building
    snack and drink vending machines in an alcove
    worker outside the glass roof