nucleus vol.3 issue 1

Nucleus A Faculty Commons QuarterlyVolume 3 - Issue 1 September 2011

Nucleus: A Faculty Commons Quarterly Volume 3 – Issue 12 September 2011

Russell K. HotzlerPresident

Bonne August Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs

Miguel CairolVice President for Administration and Finance

Gilen ChanSpecial Counsel/Legal Designee and Affirmative Action Officer

Marcela Katz ArmozaVice President for Enrollment and Student Affairs

Stephen M. SoifferSpecial Assistant to the President/

Institutional Advancement

Karl BotchwayInterim Dean, School of Arts and Sciences

Barbara GrumetDean, School of Professional Studies

Sonja JacksonDean, Curriculum and Instruction

Carol SonnenblickDean, Division of Continuing Education

Faculty Commons A Center for Teaching, Learning, Scholarship and Service

Julia Jordan, Acting DirectorAvril Miller, College Assistant

Kevin Rajaram, College Assistant

Assessment and Institutional ResearchTammie Cumming, Director

Raymond Moncada, Institutional AnalystRachel Tsang, Assessment Analyst

Olga Batyr, Research AideAlbert Li, College Assistant

Grants OfficeBarbara Burke, Director

Patty Barba Gorkhover, Associate DirectorEleanor Bergonzo, Grants Specialist

Grants Outreach Coordinator 2011-2012Professor Pa Her

Design TeamProfessor Anita Giraldo, Artistic Director Professor Reneta Lansiquot, Web Master

Antoine Christian, Keiko Nakayama, Designers

CuratorProfessor Lei Cai

EditorsBarbara Burke and Julia Jordan

DesignerCrystal Huang

PhotographerCrystal Huang

N E W Y O R K C I T Y C O L L E G E O F T E C H N O L O G Y of the City University of New York

Professional Development Advisory Council (PDAC)Norbert AnekeIsaac BarjisSidi BerriKaren BonsignoreJuanita ButSanjoy ChakrabortyLynda DiasJoycelyn Dillon

Mary Sue DonskyMaria GiulianiNien-Tzu GonzalezKaren GoodladJoel GreensteinGeorge GuidaLaina KarthikeyanNeil Katz

Roman KezerashviliMohammed KouarZongmin LiKaren LundstremDjafar MynbaevMark NoonanSusan PhillipCharles Porter

Marcia PowellEstela RojasWalied SamarraiDavid SmithSigurd StegmaierShauna VeyDebbie WaksbaumDenise Whethers

Gail WilliamsDarrow WoodAdrianne WortzelFarrukh Zia

Sonja Jackson, Chair

Nucleus: A Faculty Commons Quarterly Volume 3 – Issue 1 September 2011 3

City Tech: A Living Lab in Action? 4Bonne August

Leaders at City Tech and NSF 5Pamela Brown and Karl Botchway

NSF Grants Advance Physics Research 6Andrea Ferroglia, Giovanni Ossola, andJustin Vazquez-Poritz talk with Barbara Burke

Living Lab: Redesigning General Education for 8a 21st Century College of TechnologyMaura Smale and the Title V Steering Committee

Introducing Charlie Edwards 14Interview with Julia Jordan

Outcomes-Based Assessment 15Tammie Cumming

Two-Year NSF Award for Opportunities for 16Enhancing Diversity in the GeosciencesReginald Blake, AE Dreyfuss, Reneta Lansiquot, Janet Liou-Mark, Viviana Vladutescu

City Tech Wins Second NSF 18Advanced Technological Education Grant Barbara Burke

Introducing Pa Her 18Barbara Burke

PSC CUNY Grant Awardees 19

Fall Calendar Highlights 20

C O N T E N T S

Cover art: COMMUNICATION NO.9Lei Cai, ADGA

PrintingDigital Imaging Center at City Tech

“ The Chinese

believe that

the character,

its frame being a

written structure as

well as a painting,

is the source of

visual art.”Lei Cai

PSC CUNY Grant Awardee

At the heart of this issue of Nucleus, a compelling two-page invitation unfolds.

Amid a multi-part presentation of components of City Tech’s Title V project, it

announces, “Welcome to the Living Lab in Action,“ and leads into a joint musing

from the 2011 Seminar participants about general education, learning, and City

Tech. The Living Lab, of course, is not only the name of the Title V project but also

represents a vision of City Tech itself, if not yet fully in reality, then certainly in

possibility. As a student in the City Tech of possibility, as in the lab:

You start with questions.

You collaborate with a team and have a role and responsibilities.

You analyze evidence.

You keep a record of your work and reflect on it. The OpenLab is your lab notebook.

Through your observations of the concrete, you deepen and complicate your understanding of theory.

Your understanding of theory makes possible real world applications.

You know there is more than one way to solve a problem. And often more than one right answer.

You expect change.

You make room for serendipity.

You get to make mistakes and see their consequences.

You get to try again. And again.

You work to connect the disparate pieces that you experience into a meaningful, protean whole.

As the eighteen First Year Living Lab Seminar Fellows create their spaces on

the OpenLab, the learning platform that will enable students to undertake and

represent their learning in multiple, challenging, and illuminating ways, these

faculty members are beginning a process that will inform and transform teaching

and learning at City Tech. Students will not be merely the consumers or objects

of this work, but active partners in its development.

As students progress through their education here, they will benefit from greatly

expanded opportunities for undergraduate research under the direction of

City Tech faculty members. Undergraduate Research has grown vigorously at

the college in the past few years, and has been the catalyst for many students’

decisions to continue their education beyond City Tech in graduate and

professional programs. To guide what I hope will be its continued expansion, I

have asked Dr. Selwyn Williams, an assistant professor in the Biological Sciences

Department, to serve as Director of Undergraduate Research. He will work with

faculty committees from all three schools, as well as the Honors Scholars Program

and BMI, to coordinate existing opportunities, create new ones, and implement

a set of supports for students to undertake increasingly demanding research

experiences at the college and at other institutions. Like the NSF-award-winning

physicists profiled in this issue (or the widely diverse group of PSC-CUNY grant

awardees), they will “see opportunities giving rise to more opportunities.”

The Living Lab,

of course,

is not only the name

of the Title V project

but also represents

a vision of City

Tech itself, if not

yet fully in reality,

then certainly in

possibility.


Bonne August, Provost

City Tech: A Living Lab in Action?


Karl Botchway, Interim Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, has

been studying the politics of economic development in Africa

for the past three decades. Dean Botchway received his MA

and PhD in Political Science and International Relations from

the New School for Social Research and has taught at area

institutions including SUNY Stony Brook, Sarah Lawrence

College, and Kean University before joining City Tech in 2001.

He was Chair of the African American Studies Department

before assuming the role of Interim Dean. He is the author of

Understanding ‘Development’ Intervention in Northern Ghana:

The Need to Consider Political and Social Forces Necessary for

Transformation, Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, and many other

articles on the politics of development in Africa.

His accomplishments as department chair include facilitating

the creation of an Option in African American Studies to create

a more defined pathway for students to transfer to other CUNY

campuses.

As a social scientist, Dr. Botchway brings a distinct perspective

to the role of dean. He is especially interested in understanding

the socio-cultural environment that enables faculty to develop

strategies to facilitate better student learning practices.

Dr. Botchway expects that this experience will allow him

to better understand the human condition and study how

education becomes a tool for social transformation.

Pamela Brown, who has served as Dean of the School of Arts

and Sciences at City Tech since 2005, has accepted an invitation

to serve a one-year appointment as a Program Director in

the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program for

the National Science Foundation (NSF). At NSF, she will help

to oversee the peer review process to assure that the most

deserving initiatives receive funding, as well as contribute to

defining national science policy in the future.

A chemical engineer by training, Dean Brown earned a PhD

from Polytechnic University, an SM from the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology and a BS in chemistry, summa cum

laude, from SUNY Albany. She began teaching at City Tech in

1998. As a faculty member, her research interests included

microwave induced chemical reactions, crystallization, as well

as development of engaging curriculum.

Dean Brown has published in American Institute of Chemical

Engineering Journal, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry

Research, American Laboratory, Chemical Engineering

Education, Journal of Chemical Education, and Woman

Engineer. An article she wrote with her daughter Heather,

a Research Fellow in Health Economics at the University of

Aberdeen, Scotland, titled, “Lessons from the Past: Economic

and Technological Impacts of US Energy Policy,” was recently

published in the summer 2011 issue of Science Education and

Civic Engagement: An International Journal.

Pamela Brown

Karl Botchway

Leading Roles at City Tech and NSF


Barbara Burke: What area of physics do you work in?

ALL: We all work within the broad field known as high-energy theoretical physics. Molecules are made of atoms whose nuclei contain protons and neutrons which, in turn, are composed of quarks. Breaking up matter into smaller and smaller constituents requires greater and greater energy. The high-energy frontier involves what is currently believed to be the smallest pieces of matter, such as quarks. We want to understand the properties and behavior of fundamental particles like quarks. However, the higher one goes in energy, the more speculative theoretical work becomes. The job of a theoretician is to explore all possibilities. This has led physicists to study string theory-motivated “exotic ideas” such as extra dimensions in space.

BB: What drew you to physics as a young student?

Giovanni Ossola: I found physics to be a field where I could apply my natural curiosity towards the understanding of basic things about our universe. Good teachers inspired me to appreciate the complexities of physics problems and to want to tackle them.

Andrea Ferroglia: What appealed to me about physics early on was that it is a “clean” subject; that is, you can distinguish between true and false, fact and opinion.

Justin Vazquez-Poritz: For me, reading about physicists as people was important. From reading about the lives of Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, I learned how interesting it could be to ponder the universe through mathematics. For students who are contemplating what path they should take in their own lives, I’d recommend that they consider the lives of those who have already embarked on particular paths.

Andrea Ferroglia, Giovanni Ossola, and Justin Vazquez-Poritz talk with Barbara Burke

NSF Grants Advance Physics Research

NSF Awards Research Grants to Three City Tech Physicists

Andrea FerrogliaTop-Quark Pair Production Beyond NLO, $75,000

Giovanni OssolaAutomated Computation of Oneloop Scattering Amplitudes, $75,000

Justin Vazquez-PoritzConstraining Gravity Dual Models of Strongly Coupled Plasma, $60,000


BB: Is it possible to talk about practical applications of your area of research or is it purely theoretical?

GO: In many instances, work in fundamental physics has

pushed technology forward. For example, the Large Hadron

Collider at CERN in Switzerland, that was designed to

conduct investigations in high-energy physics, required new

advances in engineering and

technology in order to be built.

AF: Physics enables you to

know how nature works. Such

understanding is a necessary

precursor for deriving

technological applications.

Moreover, the World-Wide-

Web is also a product of

CERN, it was proposed and

developed at CERN in 1990,

and the first web site in the

US was the one of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

JV: Historically there many examples, too, of how other fields

have applied technologies originally designed for experimental

physics to new applications in other domains—applications that

were not foreseen at the time the technology was developed:

for example, the medical application of radiation.

BB: What is the focus of your individual research?

AF: My research focuses on top quarks. I calculate the expected

production rates for those

particles at the LHC. Top

quarks are particularly

interesting at the moment

because they interact with

the Higgs Boson, which

is the last missing piece

predicted by the current

model of particle physics.

GO: My research pertains

to the development of

computational and theoretical

approaches for managing

huge calculations in particle physics.

JV: Rather surprisingly, certain systems of strongly-

interacting particles are more easily described in terms of

strings moving near a black hole. My main focus is to use

these exotic techniques for the description of strongly-

interacting quarks.

BB: Who are your primary collaborators?

ALL: The methods used by Giovanni and Andrea are applicable

only to particles which are weakly interacting, while Justin’s

techniques work only for strongly-interacting particles. Our

work is complementary, since taken together it covers both

weakly and strongly interacting particles. Collaboration is

essential; our colleagues span the globe from China to CERN

(Switzerland) to France and Germany and throughout the

United States. We have invited colleagues from around the

globe to give seminars at City Tech.

BB: Have you involved City Tech students in your research?

ALL: Students have been a vital ingredient for maintaining

a climate of excitement surrounding our work. We have

continuously been involving students in various aspects of

our work, which has been presented at poster sessions at

City Tech as well as at international conferences. While the

topics on which we work are extremely advanced, students

participate in weekly discussions of journal articles and

several City Tech students

have even co-authored

articles that have appeared

in physics journals. While

this is not common because

of the complexity of the

subject matter, the fact that

it has been possible at all

can be attributed to the

intellectually vibrant and

motivating atmosphere

that we seek to foster. So

there have been many

levels of positive student

engagement.

BB: Have you realized any synergistic effects among your projects?

ALL: We have found that our research lends excitement to our

classes and awakens a sense of scientific curiosity within the

students. Obviously, the research grants each of us has received

from the National Science Foundation have enabled us to

accomplish significant work. We have also received support

through the Center for Theoretical Physics. These funding

sources have enabled us to enrich the intellectual climate by

bringing eminent physicists here and by enabling us to visit our

collaborators at their home institutions. We see opportunities

giving rise to more opportunities.

Justin Vazquez-Poritz

Giovanni Ossola

Andrea Ferroglia


envision General Education through place-based learning and high-impact educational practices;

2) The OpenLab: creates a new digital platform to support open teaching and learning at City Tech, and enhance the intellectual and social fabric of the college community;

3) A “Culture of Assessment”: integrates comprehensive outcomes assessment into the General Education curriculum;

4) The Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center (BWRC): builds an endowment to support student and faculty research at this newly-created City Tech institution.

In each of these areas, as the teams explain, we’ve made great strides. The Gen Ed Seminar has completed its first year, we are recruiting our second cohort of Fellows, and the current Fellows will soon be sharing their work with their colleagues. The OpenLab is up and running in beta mode to support the Fellows’ fall classes, and will launch to the whole college community in spring 2012. We are working closely with the AIR team to strengthen the key connections

between assessment and all the project activities. And the BWRC team has established the Center as an important presence for research, with a major conference next month and additional funding secured.

The grant enables City Tech to create new open spaces—both virtual and intellectual—for experimentation, exploration, and collaboration. And there are many ways you can get involved in the project, as you will see. We on the project team are excited to build the Living Lab with you, and to see how the City Tech community will use the spaces we’ve created together.

Finally, I would like to thank Dan Wong for his dedication in co-directing the OpenLab with me during the first year of the grant as we moved from design to development to launch. And I would also like to express my gratitude to the outgoing Project Director, Matthew Gold, for his inspired leadership during the first year of the grant. I am honored to step into this position, and look forward to working with the Living Lab team and the college community in the coming years.

“A Living Laboratory” is a five-year initiative funded by a $3.1M grant awarded under the U.S. Department of Education’s Strengthening Hispanic-Serving Institutions (Title V) program. The project was launched last October and covered in the December 2010 issue of Nucleus. Here the project team reports on its activities over the past year.

BUILDING THE “LIVING LAB”Maura A. Smale, Project Director

When we were interviewed for Nucleus last December, we were just laying the foundations for the project: planning our approach, hiring resources, and dealing with all the logistics of initiating a very large grant project. Now, only a few months later, we are delighted to share substantial progress towards the project’s ambitious goals.

The project has four activities, centered on the conceptual model of City Tech and the Brooklyn Waterfront as “living laboratory”:

1) The Gen Ed Seminar: brings together a diverse group of Faculty Fellows to re-

A LIVING LABORATORYRedesigning General Education for a 21st Century College of Technology

Living Lab Steering Committee: (left to right) E.Benardete-Moll, C.Edwards, J.Spevack, S.Smith, J.Rosen, A.Leonard, M.Smale, R.TsangNot pictured: Tammie Cumming, Richard Hanley, Robin Michals, Peter Spellane


Want to become a Second Year Living Lab Seminar Fellow?

Application available at

http://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/livinglab/

Emma Moll and Shelley E. Smith, General Education Seminar Co-Directors,

with outgoing Co-Director Jody Rosen and Julia Jordan, Acting Director of

the Faculty Commons

This first year of the Gen Ed Activity has been tremendously

busy, exciting, and fruitful—a foundational experience for all.

We organized the seminar around a number of key questions:

“What is the first-year experience for students at City Tech?”;

“What high-impact practices can be implemented in first-

year courses to help engage students and improve student

retention?”; and “What could be the impact of creating an open,

collaborative environment for students, in the classroom, with

the City Tech community, and with those outside City Tech?”

The Fellows used selected readings, field trips, and talks from

guest speakers to work through these complex questions and

move towards shared understanding of the first-year experience.

We met during the spring semester activities ranged from

workshops with WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) Fellows; a

rubric workshop with AIR; field trips to “The Brain” exhibit at the

American Museum of Natural History and a boat trip on the New

York Harbor; a visit to discuss Macaulay Honors College’s Gen

Ed program and open course websites; and a joint “visioning”

meeting with City Tech’s Gen Ed Committee, to name a few.

Seminar Fellows are using the knowledge and experience they

gained to reframe their first-year courses. Several courses are

using Brooklyn as a common theme—a Living Laboratory—

to engage students in hands-on, place-based learning. The

Seminar Fellows also explored the transformational impact of

field trips on group interactions. One seminar participant found

that the trips “facilitated camaraderie and helped cement the

seminar as group. There was an amazing variety, which provided

important examples for our own classes: institutions, outdoor

excursions, scholarly conferences.”

The seminar worked closely with the OpenLab team to shape

City Tech’s new open digital platform. The Seminar Fellows and

their students this fall are the first users of the OpenLab, and

they are beta testing a variety of online enhancements to their

courses, providing students with opportunities for expression

and exploration in support of the classroom experience. On

September 23rd, the first year fellows presented their experience

of the spring seminar. They expressed particular appreciation

for the opportunity to collaborate and build friendships with

faculty from other disciplines, and for their role in shaping the

direction of the project and the future of General Education at

City Tech.

In the Lab with the Gen Ed Seminar

First Year Seminar Fellows: (L-R) B.Gelman, P.Catapano, S.Scanlan, J.Davis, M.Bilello, J.Reitz, S.Cheng, E.Halleck, C.Hirsch, J.Akana, D.Alter, D.Moody(standing) L.Karthikeyan, P.King, K.Goodlad, M.Noonan, M.Gellar (seated) not pictured: Viviana Vladutescu


The

Streets

Are Our

Classroom

and We Have

Nothing To Lose

But Our Chains.

1. General Education

is ideas and ethics plus

concrete content modules!

2. General Education is mind and

body analyzing, synthesizing, integrating, and

communicating!

3. Students will improve writing skills.

4. Students will blog.

5. We, the professors of City Tech, ask for an open university that values

opinions, encourages risk-taking, and rewards the efforts of all of those

dedicated to serving our students well with an innovative, vigorous, intellectually

rigorous, Gen. Ed. Curriculum that makes ground-breaking use of one of the world’s

greatest locations --- A TRUE LIVING LABORATORY --- for advancing the future of

higher education at the premier urban university in the nation.

6. Learn.

7. Inquire.

8. Exist.

9. Always be hungry for more!

10. Aboard, sailing their first semester of college.

11. Aboard the launched digital platform.

12. Aboard all!

13. Generating Gen Ed means creating safe spaces to experiment, fail, and try again; and

providing the time to look, read, reflect, and connect the world to our student’s personal

W

elcome to the

L

iving Lab in Action

How can learning be more dynamic using Movement, Plac

e, Tim

e, T

alk

?

The Streets Are Our Classroom and

We Have Nothing To Lose But Our

Chains.

1. General Education is ideas

and ethics plus concrete content

modules!

2. General Education is

mind and body analyzing,

synthesizing, integrating, and

communicating!

3. Students will improve writing

skills.


5. We, the professors of City

Tech, ask for an open university

that values opinions, encourages

risk-taking, and rewards the efforts

of all of those dedicated to serving

our students well with an innovative,

vigorous, intellectually rigorous, Gen Ed

Curriculum that makes ground-breaking use

of one of the world’s greatest locations

—A TRUE LIVING LABORATORY—for advancing

the future of higher education at the premier urban

university in the nation.

6. Learn.

7. Inquire.

8. Exist.




12. Aboard all!


providing the time to look, read, reflect, and connect the world to our students’ personal histories.

14. Light Bulb.


The

Streets

Are Our

Classroom

and We Have

Nothing To Lose

But Our Chains.

1. General Education

is ideas and ethics plus

concrete content modules!

2. General Education is mind and

body analyzing, synthesizing, integrating, and

communicating!

3. Students will improve writing skills.


5. We, the professors of City Tech, ask for an open university that values

opinions, encourages risk-taking, and rewards the efforts of all of those

dedicated to serving our students well with an innovative, vigorous, intellectually

rigorous, Gen. Ed. Curriculum that makes ground-breaking use of one of the world’s

greatest locations --- A TRUE LIVING LABORATORY --- for advancing the future of

higher education at the premier urban university in the nation.

6. Learn.

7. Inquire.

8. Exist.




12. Aboard all!


providing the time to look, read, reflect, and connect the world to our student’s personal

W

elcome to the

L

iving Lab in Action

How can learning be more dynamic using Movement, Plac

e, Tim

e, T

alk

?

The Streets Are Our Classroom and

We Have Nothing To Lose But Our

Chains.

1. General Education is ideas

and ethics plus concrete content

modules!

2. General Education is

mind and body analyzing,

synthesizing, integrating, and

communicating!

3. Students will improve writing

skills.


5. We, the professors of City

Tech, ask for an open university

that values opinions, encourages

risk-taking, and rewards the efforts

of all of those dedicated to serving

our students well with an innovative,

vigorous, intellectually rigorous, Gen Ed

Curriculum that makes ground-breaking use

of one of the world’s greatest locations

—A TRUE LIVING LABORATORY—for advancing

the future of higher education at the premier urban

university in the nation.

6. Learn.

7. Inquire.

8. Exist.




12. Aboard all!


providing the time to look, read, reflect, and connect the world to our students’ personal histories.

14. Light Bulb.

Gen Ed Manifesto by First Year Living Lab Seminar Fellows


Jody Rosen and Jenna Spevack, OpenLab Co-Directors, with outgoing Co-Direc tors Maura Smale and Dan Wong

After a busy spring and summer, we are pleased to share the City Tech OpenLab!

City Tech’s OpenLab is an open-source digital platform where students, faculty, and staff can meet to learn, work, and share their ideas. Its goals are to support teaching and learning, and to enable connection and collaboration across the entire college community. Unlike closed online teaching systems, the OpenLab allows classes throughout the curriculum to communicate with one another and the world outside City Tech. Like a lab, it provides a space where faculty and students can work together, experiment, and innovate.

While courses are an important part of the OpenLab, the site also features spaces for students, faculty, and staff to create projects and clubs. Anyone in the City Tech community can become a member of the site, and site members can create profile pages and individual websites to share their work, both within City Tech and beyond.

We’ve built the OpenLab using the open source software WordPress and Buddypress. Choosing open source software for the site will allow us to participate in the active WordPress

development community, with its large population of educational users. We’re using an iterative development process for the OpenLab in which we will continuously add features and improve the site, and we plan to release any custom code developed for the OpenLab back into the wider WordPress and Buddypress community.

The OpenLab was designed by the co-Directors, with former City Tech

students Natasha Marcano, Solomon Doley, and Faiyez Haider, all graduates of our ADGA department. Our fantastic Community Team is working hard to support City Tech students, faculty, and staff in using the OpenLab: Instructional Technology Fellow Elizabeth Alsop; Community Facilitators Tom Blunt, Scott Henkle, and Bree Zuckerman; and Documentation Specialist Renee McGarry. We’d like to thank the entire OpenLab team for their hard work and dedication.

Introducing CityTech’s OpenLab

Want to be an OpenLab pioneer? Visithttp://openlab.citytech.cuny.eduto take a look around and sign up.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] And watch out for our workshops coming up later this semester.


Richard Hanley, Direc tor, Peter

Spellane, Assoc ia te Direc tor,

A nne Leonard, Geospa tial

Research Fellow, and Brendan

O ’Malley, BWRC Coordina tor

The Center’s three-fold mission

supports research, education,

and public outreach, and

offers research opportunities

for students and faculty

interested in laboratory and

primary source place-based

learning. City Tech’s location,

adjacent to Brooklyn’s historic

and endangered waterfront,

offers students and faculty a

“living laboratory” for inquiry,

research, and other activities

to strengthen Gen Ed.

The BWRC had a busy

summer. In June, the

Brooklyn Borough President’s

office made an award

of $48,000 to fund the

geospatial research initiative.

These funds will be used to

support hardware, software,

data, as well as student

research fellowships and

faculty coordinators of

student research. We

also participated in the

Metropolitan Waterfront

Alliance’s City of Water Day

on Governors Island in July,

where we crowdsourced our

research mission, asking the

public their opinions about

important waterfront issues.

Catching Up with the Brooklyn Waterfront Research Center

Integrating Assessment for Learning

On October 26, the BWRC will

host a waterfront conference,

co-sponsored by the

Newman Real Estate Institute

at Baruch College and the

CUNY Institute for Urban

Systems. BWRC Research

Fellows Sapna Advani and

Jonathan Peters will present

their papers. Sapna, Director

of Planning at Chelsea West

Architects, is Research Fellow

for Preservation and Urban

Design. Jon, Professor of

Finance at the College of

Staten Island, is Research

Fellow for Economics.

Once again, City Tech was

successful in its proposal

for the NEH Summer

Institute program “Along

the Shore,” which will bring 50

community college faculty

to campus in June 2012 to

explore Brooklyn’s industrial

waterfront. The Project

Directors are Shelley Smith and

Richard Hanley, and the BWRC

will coordinate this project.

Coming soon: BWRC’s informal “hangouts,”

where you can learn more about the Brooklyn Waterfront,

and get ideas for place-based research and pedagogy.

Olga BatyrRachel Tsang

Please visit our website to keep yourself informed about training opportunities and resources at http://air.citytech.cuny.edu.

Tammie Cumming, Co-Director, Rachel Tsang, Assessment Analyst and Olga Batyr, Research Aide

City Tech’s approach to Gen Ed

is outcomes-based. The City

Tech Assessment Committee,

Gen Ed Committee, and

Living Lab and I-Cubed grant

activities are coordinated

to ensure a quality Gen Ed

experience for our students.

Under the auspices of the Living Lab, our faculty members have had an opportunity to embrace the concept of Assessment for Learning.

The college is actively

utilizing an assessment

process in critical courses

that have been identified

for each department. The

performance of our students

in these courses with stated

student learning outcomes

has enabled faculty to review

the data as a department,

discuss the results, strategize

methods to improve student

learning for outcomes that

have been identified as falling

below the departmental

target, and implement the

approved strategies.

By improving student learning

outcomes in a critical course,

we expect students to be

better prepared for their

subsequent courses, as well

as be better prepared for the

workforce.

In developing our assessment model, we focused on an efficient and effective process to ensure a college-wide system that meets our need to continuously evaluate and improve student learning outcomes.

Sapna Advani, Richard Hanley, Anne Leonard


An Interview with Julia Jordan

Charlie Edwards joined the Living Lab team in April, after working for more than twenty-five years in the IT industry, initially as a programmer, later as a project manager and management consultant. Her professional career has focused on implementing large software development projects for corporate clients in fields as diverse as the life sciences and financial services. Her undergraduate degree, however, was in English Literature, and she is now a fourth-year student in the English PhD and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate programs at CUNY Graduate Center. Her research interests include theories of text and technology, the Victorian novel, and the Digital Humanities (she is co-founder, with City Tech’s Matthew K. Gold, of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative). She also holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research, New York.

Charlie grew up in the English countryside, spent ten years in London, another ten in New York’s East Village, and now lives in Hoboken, NJ, with her husband Jack and their two cats.

Julia Jordan: What attracted you to the Living Lab project?Charlie Edwards: Is it crazy to say that part of it was the metaphor, the “Living Lab”? The project is so important. It takes on a tough set of problems: reshaping General Education, enhancing our students’ experience of Gen Ed, improving outcomes. But the metaphor of the Living Lab opens up creative ways of thinking about these problems, as I think the Gen Ed Seminar Fellows have found in their work this semester. It’s such a powerful idea, and draws together a whole collection of other ideas – experimentation, innovation, collaboration, space – that inform the grant activities.

The opportunity to play a role in building the OpenLab was very exciting too, especially for someone who’s a practicing technologist and has spent a lot of time thinking about theories of technology (in other words, a nerd). The OpenLab seeks to create a new kind of online academic community, in which openness enables students, faculty, and staff to connect with one another, the school, and our local environment in new ways. It’s inspiring work.

JJ: What do you think is the project’s biggest challenge?CE: Any project of this size and complexity has challenges, of course. The Living Lab has a large scope, and many moving parts. For instance, right now there are twenty-five people working on

the grant, in addition to the eighteen Gen Ed Seminar Fellows. That’s an enormous amount of activity! So perhaps the most important task we have as a team, day to day, is to make sure that all this hard work is heading in the right direction. If you were to sit in on our team meetings, though, you’d see how dedicated everyone is to the project and its goals: that’s how the team has accomplished so much in only a few short months.

JJ: What do you hope to achieve?CE: The grant proposal lays out a compelling vision; the team’s mission is to make it a reality. Fortunately, we’re not doing this alone. One of the most exciting things about the project is that everyone at City Tech can play a part in making it a success. The OpenLab website says that it’s built “by City Tech, for City Tech,” and the same is true of the Living Lab as a whole. Students, full-time and part-time faculty, staff – everyone will have the opportunity to get involved in some way, from signing up on the OpenLab to becoming a fully-fledged Seminar Fellow. I hope that over the next few years we will see the conceptual and virtual spaces that the grant imagines become real places that are part of the daily life of the college community, and help make that life richer and more rewarding. It’s an absolute privilege to be able to contribute to this work.

Charlie EdwardsLiving Lab Project Coordinator


By Tammie Cumming

Outcomes-based assessment is gaining prominence in higher education as evidenced by the movement of regional and professional accreditation governing bodies moving toward this type of assessment. Perhaps the most dramatic case has been the American Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET), but there are others as well, including the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). City Tech has programs accredited by each of these professional accrediting bodies. Outcomes-based assessment provides an opportunity for educators to view their courses and curricula from a different perspective than from one that considers education primarily in terms of inputs. The “checklist” approach where an institution designates a particular set of courses for students to take and when the course count is completed, assumes that the inputs (courses on the checklist) provided for students will lead to certain outcomes, the knowledge, skills, and other attributes we believe our graduates should possess. An outcomes-based approach to education does not rely only on this assumption. Rather, with an outcomes-based approach, the faculty members have the opportunity to identify the educational outcomes for a program, including its Gen Ed program, and then evaluate the program according to its effectiveness in enabling students to achieve those outcomes.

CUNY is considering a cross-curricular approach to defining Gen Ed requirements to help students experience a seamless transfer process between CUNY colleges within the CUNY Pathways to Degree Completion (“Pathways”) initiative. Under consideration as a framework to develop Gen Ed across the colleges within the system, the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) model is being reviewed by the committee. The LEAP model, adopted at many American universities, tends to lean toward overarching learning outcomes that transcend curricular areas – and works well for an outcomes-based approach. According to CUNY’s Director of Assessment, Raymond Moy, “With outcomes based assessments, it is what the student does not end up forgetting that counts.” This emphasizes the importance of Gen Ed in students’ everyday lives beyond their experience at City Tech. Gen Ed competencies, such as teamwork, information literacy, ethics, writing, quantitative reasoning, and oral communication, to name several, are important skills for a person to be an effective citizen in the world of work and in our ever-increasing complex global world.

David Smith, City Tech’s Pathways representative and a member of the School of Technology and Design Assessment Committee mentioned that “City Tech is well-poised to implement the Pathways initiative, as our Gen Ed development committee has been investigating an outcomes based analysis for the last couple of years. It was interesting to me that when the Pathways committee met, many of their source documents had already been explored by the City Tech Gen Ed committee. The basic set of learning outcomes meshed very well to our draft document, and I anticipate very little modification to our development of a modified Gen Ed curriculum will be required.”

Outcomes-based Assessment

Gen Ed Assessment Committee members: (left to right) J.Zhang, R.Guidone, L.Leng, M.Maklan-Zimberg, S.Cho, A.Zhang, B.Grumet, G.Ossola, D.Smith, L.Pope-Fischer, H.Sisco, R.Alcendor, T.Walker, A.Sena, S.Brandt, S.Phillip, E.Kontzamanis, L.Cai, A.Aptekar, M.Gellar, D.Moody, J.Montgomery, D.Davis, D.Alter

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A new grant to promote study in the

geosciences has been awarded to New

York City College of Technology (City

Tech) of the City University of New

York(CUNY) by the National Science

Foundation (NSF). This two-year NSF

Track -1 Opportunities for Enhancing

Diversity in the Geosciences (OEDG)

grant, Creating and Sustaining Diversity

in the Geosciences among Students

and Teachers in the Urban Coastal

Environment of New York City, will create

and heighten awareness of geosciences

at the high school and middle school

levels, develop and implement

geosciences courses at City Tech, and

promote an undergraduate pathway

of study with the City College of New

York (CCNY) via articulation agreements

with CCNY’s Earth Systems Science

Engineering program. Dr. Reginald Blake

of City Tech’s Department of Physics is the

Principal Investigator of the grant. At City

Tech, Viviana Vladutescu, Department

of Electrical and Telecommunications

Engineering Technology (ETET), Janet

Liou-Mark, Department of Mathematics,

Reneta Lansiquot, Department of English,

and AE Dreyfuss, Learning Specialist are

co-PIs; at CCNY, Joseph Barba, Dean of

the Grove School of Engineering, and

Fred Moshary, Department of Electrical

Engineering, are both co-PIs.

The first goal of the grant is to advance

public literacy in earth system science.

This goal involves the development of

six earth science modules that feature

difficult areas of the Regents Earth

Science curriculum. Working with

teachers, administrators, and students in

Middle School 394 and two high schools,

City Polytechnic High School (“City Poly”)

and Urban Assembly Institute of Math

and Science for Young Women (“UA

Institute”), the modules will use the

virtual world of “Second Life” to create

environments in which critical features

of geosciences/geophysics can be

uniquely explored, examined,

experienced, taught, and understood.

The virtual world geosciences modules

will cover a variety of topics on the

hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the

cryosphere, and the lithosphere. Middle

and high school students from these

schools will be taken on field trips to

Brookhaven National Laboratories,

The National Ocean and Atmospheric

Administration (NOAA) NOAA CREST

center at CCNY, and NASA GISS at

Columbia University through the New

York City Research Institute (NYCRI)

program. Other elements will include

outreach activities to parents and to the

community. The outreach effort will be

in partnership with the NYCRI and the

NOAA CREST programs. Geosciences

research will also be supported for two

middle school and two high school

student and teacher teams during

the summer of 2012 at one of the

partner institutions. The fifth element

of geosciences dissemination will be

seminars for teachers from the three

schools.

In the second year of the grant, the six

modules will be tested in the classroom,

and modified as needed. NOAA already

uses “Second Life” virtual software to

model events on a virtual “island” and

these can be viewed at NOAA’s Virtual

Island: http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=is8YX32GAyQ.

The grant’s second goal is to prepare

the geosciences workforce of the future,

from both engineering and science

perspectives. Two courses are part of

City Tech’s course development. The

first course “Remote Sensing” is being

offered by ETET this fall 2011. The course

was developed and is being taught by

Dr. Vladutescu. The second course, “An

Introduction to the Physics of Natural

Disasters”, is being developed by Dr.

Blake and will be offered by the Physics

Department. By working with the Grove

School of Engineering and the Earth

Two-Year NSF Award for Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the GeosciencesCreating and Sustaining Diversity in the Geosciences among Students and Teachers in the Urban Coastal Environment of New York City

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and Atmospheric Science Department at CCNY, a first-year

objective is to have an articulation agreement in place that

will align the courses of the two institutions, allowing City Tech

students to receive credit for the geosciences courses offered at

City Tech. CCNY students will also be able to take the City Tech

courses toward their Baccalaureate degree in Environmental

Engineering or Earth and Atmospheric Science.

The grant has an added dimension of creating a network of

partners to accomplish its goals. The collaborative partners

include: NOAA CREST, NASA GISS (NYCRI program), Brookhaven

National Laboratory, the GLOBE program, the three schools in

Brooklyn (MS 394, City Poly, and UA Institute), CCNY and City

Tech.

ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVERemote Sensing

This course highlights the physical and mathematical principles

underlying the remote sensing techniques, covering the

radiative transfer equation, atmospheric sounding techniques,

interferometric and lidar systems and an introduction to image

processing. The lab component will introduce remote sensing

software HYDRA, and MATLAB which will be used for image

display and data analysis.

There is a remote sensing course website, through OpenLab

at City Tech: http://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/groups/remote-

sensing/

Two-Year NSF Award for Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the GeosciencesCreating and Sustaining Diversity in the Geosciences among Students and Teachers in the Urban Coastal Environment of New York City

AE Dreyfuss Reneta Lansiquot Reginald Blake Janet Liou-Mark

SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE An Introduction to the Physics of Natural Disasters

This course focuses on natural disasters, the processes that

control them, and their impacts to human life and structures.

State-of-the-art satellite remote sensing techniques will be used

to monitor the environment and for early detection of natural

disasters. The course will demystify “nature’s wrath” and provide

understanding of how the natural world behaves due to the

nature, causes, risks, effects, and prediction of natural disasters.

Such disasters result from the earth’s internal energy, gravity,

external energy from the sun, and impacts with asteroids

and comets, that is, the physics that governs these natural

phenomena. Ph

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Dr. Pa Her joined the Department of Social Science at City Tech in fall 2009, after receiving her PhD in developmental and biological psychology from Virginia Tech University. She received a dissertation fellowship there designed to increase faculty diversity in higher education from the Southern Regional Education Board. Last spring, Professor Her was selected to participate in the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program and has been invited to submit the resulting article for publication in a refereed journal.

Professor Her’s role in the Grants Office is to engage faculty members

in grants development activities to advance their scholarly interests and strengthen college programs. Later in the fall semester, we envision the formation of a research proposal working group that will provide a collegial environment in which professors from diverse disciplines may posit, develop, critique, and shape their ideas into competitive grant proposals.

Having been involved in the later stages of City Tech’s NSF ADVANCE IT Catalyst planning project, Professor Her’s first order of business will be to work with the ADVANCE team, led by Provost Bonne August, to develop a full proposal for submission in November. The goal of ADVANCE is to advance the professional status of women in STEM fields. Interestingly, Professor Her received her first training in grant writing under the direction of her research mentor at Virginia Tech as part of that institution’s ADVANCE initiative. When asked what she hoped to gain from her experience in the Grants

Office, Professor Her said, “While I’ve had experience in developing research proposals, one thing I hope to be able to do is to hone my practical skills in other areas of grants: for example, proposal budgeting, developing project timelines, and creating organizational charts.”

One of Professor Her’s current research interests is to understand more about the undergraduate student experience from a subjective point of viewtthat is, she plans to undertake qualitative research that deals with the many dimensions of diversity that exist among under-represented students navigating a pathway through the STEM disciplines.

I’m delighted to welcome Pa Her to our office and look forward to a great year.

Barbara Burke September 22, 2011

2 0 1 1 - 2 0 1 2G R A N T S O U T R E A C H C O O R D I N A T O R

Fuse Lab: Collaborative Education for Tomorrow’s Technology in Architecture, Engineering & Construction

Dr. Shelley Smith, Chair of Architectural Technology, and colleagues in the School of Technology and Design have won a three-year $877,000 grant from the NSF. “Fuse Lab—a metaphorical laboratory for interdisciplinary collaboration and integrative curriculum process—will provide a model for the integration of architecture,

engineering and construction (AEC) programs at the national level. In order to produce students who understand the importance of, and can continually adapt to the fields’ rapidly evolving key computation, construction and sustainability related technologies, this initiative will: provide students with a solid foundation in science and mathematics, infuse collaborative and problem-based learning strategies into the curriculum, and establish a continuous feedback loop for the

introduction of new technologies. The Fuse Lab will prepare students to be leaders in the AEC industry, and ease transition to the workplace by providing graduates with an understanding of the uses of technology in industry and collaborative teamwork, giving them an advantage over those with more traditional, discipline-focused skills and knowledge.” The project is starting up this fall and will receive extended coverage in future issues of Nucleus.

Barbara Burke

City Tech Wins Second NSF Advanced Technological Education Grant

Pa Her

Pa Her


P S C C U N Y G r a n t A w a r d e e sAwardee

Adrianne Wortzel

Sarah Standing

Karl Botchway

Andrea Ferroglia

Lei Cai

Cathy Santore

Tatiana Voza

Jenna Spevack

Genevieve Hitchings

Barbara Mishara

Andrew Douglas

Olufemi Sodeinde and

Ralph Alcendor

Tony Nicolas

Peter Spellane and

Diana Samaroo

Roman Kezerashvili

Zory Marantz

Amit Mehrotra

Soyeon Cho

Xinzhou Wei

Jierong Zhang

Ralf Philipp

Justin Davis

Giovanni Ossola

Victoria Gitman

Xiangdong Li

Hans Schoutens

Luz Amaya-Bower

Lisa Pope-Fischer

Maura Smale

Carole Harris

Laina Karthikeyan

Mark Noonan

Thomas Johnstone

Department

ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY

HUMANITIES

AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

PHYSICS

ADVERTISING DESIGN AND GRAPHIC ARTS

HUMANITIES

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES



ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY

MATHEMATICS

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

CHEMISTRY

CHEMISTRY

PHYSICS

ELECTRICAL AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT

HUMAN SERVICES

ELECTRICAL AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

BUSINESS

COMPUTER ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

HUMANITIES

PHYSICS

MATHEMATICS

COMPUTER SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY

MATHEMATICS

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY

SOCIAL SCIENCE

LIBRARY

ENGLISH

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

ENGLISH

MATHEMATICS

Title

Whirled War

R. Murray Schafer’s Eco-Theatre

State Capacity and Development in Africa: Public Sector Reforms in Ghana

Two Loop Corrections to Top Quark Pair Production

Typographic Experiment: Fusion of Type and Symbol

Trademarks

Revisiting Two Antimalarial Drugs

Birds of Brooklyn

Great Pollinator Project

The Row House in Brooklyn and Queens 1920 - 1960

Indecomposable Representations of the Euclidean Algebra e(n) from Irreducible

Representations of so(n+2,C)

Variation in 18s Ribosomal DNA Sequence in Different Populations of Zonocerus

Variegatus

Investigation of the Mechanism of the Addition of Silyloxyfurans to Benzoquinone

Monoketals

Coupling New Aniline Oligomeric Compounds to Tetraphenylporphyrin

One- and Two-Dimensional Graphene-Based Photonic Crystals

Utilizing a Software Defined Radio for Efficient Resource Utilization in Wireless Systems

An Examination of Tourism’s Impact on Native Americans – Pueblos of the Taos Region

Physical and Mental Health Literacy

A Practical Data Protection Scheme for Medical RFID System

Adaption of New Lease Accounting Standard – Financial Market Reaction and Impact

Image-Based Bleeding Detection and Localization for Minimally-Invasive Surgery

Environmental Discourse and the Transformation of the Environmental Debate

Calculation of One-Loop Scattering Amplitudes with SAMURAI

Indestructibility for Ramsey-like Cardinals

A Software Approach for the Architecture Study of Quantum Computer

The Group Scheme of an Artin Algebra

Numerical Simulation of Michochannels

Elderly Hungarian Women’s Reinterpretation of Post Socialist Change

The Scholarly Habits of Undergraduate Students at CUNY, Phase III

Flannery O’Connor: The Politics of the Cliché

Effect of Proanthocyanidins and Cranberry Juice on the Loss of Rotavirus Structural

Integrity and Virus Particle Aggregation in Cell-Free Suspension

Water and Work: A Literary History of the Brooklyn Waterfront

Set Theory Without Power Set--Should We Add Collection


FACULTY COMMONS CALENDAR HIGHLIGHTS

FALL 2011

10/4 NSF/ NIH Research Proposal Writing 3:00pm – 4:30pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/6 Wiki & Blog 1:00pm – 2:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/12 Copyright and Fair Use in the Digital Teaching Environment 1:00pm – 2:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/13 City Tech Surveyor Workshop 9:30am – 11:00am RSVP: [email protected]

10/17 Grade Center 2:00pm – 3:30pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/20 Interdisciplinary Creativity: Tools, Experiments, Science 12:45pm – 2:15pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/25 Data Dashboard Workshop 2:30pm – 4:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

10/26 Open Access Happy Hour: Your Rights as an Author 5:30pm – 7:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

Open Access Week is October 24-30 – learn more at http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

10/26 WAC - “Helping Students Review and Respond to Sources” 3:00pm – 4:30pm RSVP: [email protected]

11/3 Test Blueprint Construction 3:00pm – 4:30pm RSVP: [email protected]

11/7 Black Solidarity Day 10:00am – 2:00pm All welcome

11/15 WAC - “Getting Students Started with Writing” 1:00pm – 2:15pm RSVP: [email protected]

11/16 PSC CUNY Grant Proposal Writing 2:00pm – 3:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

11/17 9th Annual City Tech Poster Session 1:00pm – 4:00pm RSVP: [email protected]

12/1-2 CUNY Annual IT Conference Venue: John Jay College

12/2 WAC - “Minimal Marking and Efficient Grading Strategies” 3:00pm – 4:30pm RSVP: [email protected]

Contact us at extension 5225 • [email protected] • http://facultycommons.citytech.cuny.edu/

nucleus vol.3 issue 1

Documents

e g e o f t e c h n

c o n t e n t scover

c i t y c o

college assistantassessment

college assistantkevin

barbara burkeliving

service julia jordan

lei caipsc cu