Spring 2018 | CUNY Graduate Center | IDS 70100: Introduction to Queer Studies

25 Comments

  1. Francesca

    Wow, this is great! Thank you Chris.
    – Francesca

  2. I added my list of additional sources to the class Drop Box. I tried highlighting and making comments but it kept asking me to tag individual people/ e-mail addresses instead of all the members who can edit and view the folder. In the future, once we are all more comfortable with WordPress, maybe using that would be better if we want to write comments on the texts as a class.

  3. This workshop looks great, I wish I could go but have to work. Does CLAGS do this once a year? If anyone in our class does go, could you bring back some resources/ tell us what it was like?

  4. I was thinking about this over the weekend and wondered if we could incorporate both OER and canonical texts in these presentations… What if the second presentation we each do is on an OER we want to incorporate in a course syllabus, and instead of just presenting it, we design a brief assignment or activity for the source to see how it could work in a classroom setting? Those of us who are not presenting can try posing questions we may have had before we were familiar with the material, or still may have today. This way we can also play with the method of communication in addition to the content. How do others feel about this possibility?

  5. Q: Do scholars ever make an OER version of an article that was previously published by a peer-reviewed journal/ how does copy right regulate this?

    • Q: How does the Creative Commons License alter the process of publishing for an article? In other words, do the articles still go through the competitive process of selection by a publisher/ get vetted throughly for inclusion in a peer reviewed journal? Are there assumptions about OER sources being less academically legitimate, and are these fears at all founded?

      • Naoko

        Higher accessibility to educational resources would be benefit of researchers as well as students. Because publish articles online drastically increases the visibility of researchers. Indeed, the accessibility to articles in the form of pdf may be already incorporated in the process of competitive knowledge producing. Because Higher visibility leads to higher possibility that an article is read and cited by other researchers. Once published, articles are evaluated in the frequency of citation, higher visibility is greatly valuable and by itself sought after by researchers.

  6. Matt, I really love the disability statement in your syllabus. I haven’t seen that wording thus far in the GC, or at any of my schools. It’s usually something like… “it is your responsibility as the student to advocate for yourself etc.”

    • Francesca,
      The thing about that disability statement is it allows from a discussion of what I mean when I say that accommodations have been made for everyone…like printing the syllabus in 12 point font or larger (as opposed to 1 point font, which no one could read), holding the class in a room that has a doorway everyone can enter (as opposed to a doggy door), etc. That discussion begins by me asking students what accommodations that can identify as having been made for “able-bodied” people that go unnoticed (like the two examples above). We eventually get to a pedagogical theory of what is sometimes called “universal access,” a phrase that ought to be linked to *everyone* but is usually not, and a phrase that can never live up to its universalizing promise as well. –Matt

  7. Given the accessibility of online pdfs, what are there rules, regulations and/or consequences of “recycling” this material as OER?

    • Naoko

      I definitely share Melanie’s concerns. Open educational resources can be certainly helpful to reduce students’ expenses for textbooks. However, I wonder who meet the cost for keeping the internet reliable on which OER totally depends. Even in state-aided public universities, it is probable that growing technological cost leads to hike tuitions and fees.

  8. Naoko

    I definitely share Melanie’s concerns. OER might be certainly helpful to lower expenses for purchasing textbooks, but we have to think about who meet the cost to maintain the internet reliable. Even at the state-aided public universities, it is probable that growing technology costs would lead to hike tuitions and fees.

  9. How can I make sure that the OER I find is reliable? And what is the difference between OER and Open Access Publishing?

  10. Naoko,

    I added a comment to your post, but then realized I wasn’t logged in to the Commons when I sent it. Please let me know if you received it or not. Thanks! Matt

  11. this is pretty interesting. i wonder what the implications are, as you write this maybe is part of larger conversations around where classes are actually taking place (i.e. online or hybrid), i wonder how the instructor’s job description/responsibility changes. what makes me weary is not that students don’t get penalized for not being physically present in class, but rather that there is still some entity that is recording the students’ activities. like the idea that in online education people are somehow monitored less, but actually one could argue they’re monitored more because the data is so easily/inherently collected.

    • I know what you mean, I was actually really turned off by classes I took as an undergrad that tracked what documents I opened, and how much time was spent on certain screens. I wonder what programs they will implement to track students in lieu of recording attendance.

  12. Naoko

    Professor,

    I did not receive the comment you said you have sent to me yet.

    Naoko

  13. See Tobin Siebers’s article, “Disability as Masquerade,” for an analysis of the metaphorization of “coming out” in the contexts of disability.

  14. Ohhh, now I see what was so funny, lol.

  15. Francesca,

    Thank you so much for bringing this issue back up as we struggle with how to make the work we use and our own work open and accessible. Currently, a colleague and I are grappling with a similar issue regarding training curricula and materials developed as part of one of our projects. The fear is real also around piracy and mistrust when attempting to be transparent and socially-responsible with the work that we do.

  16. Thank you for this Matt! I actually just received notification that at LaGCC (they are doing a number of different OER-based activities), but one is actually integrating OER textbooks beginning with discussions with some faculty regarding what current exists in this realm as well as provide opportunities to devise ways of implementing these in courses during the Fall 2018 semester.

  17. Your perspective is one that I think many people share…perhaps it goes back to how and what ways we come to learn or come to “accept” as how/what constitutes the work within queer studies. I think one strong part of this struggle that continues to be overlooked is the true interdisciplinary nature of the field, but perhaps we need to push this beyond interdisciplinary to a space of being transdisciplinary, whereby we in the field are not pigeon-holed to one particular discipline and collaborate with others in different disciplines to create a complete puzzle. We need to be versed and capable of movement between, across, and within disciplines to capture the true nature of the field and what we hope to set as its new meaning.

  18. Sorry for the delay all, am working to upload now!

  19. Thanks for sharing this, Olivia!

  20. Hi Olivia,

    Thanks so much.