Author Archives: Olivia Wood

Nic’s Presentation

Nic asked if she could send a paragraph about her project to share since she was absent for the in-class presentations. Below is what she sent:

“The project I have been working on is about false reports & how they are handled. I feel as though false reports are not taken as seriously, especially since there is no statistics on how many reports were reported as false. Due to my personal experience with wrongful reports I feel as though this is something that should be brung to light, especially with the amount of wrongful incarceration thats going on which also ties along to false reports since it is considered on of the most known effects.”

Embed Any Document Plugin Example

I embedded this file using the “Embed Any Document” plugin, which you can access by going to your site dashboard, clicking on “Plugins” on the lefthand side, scrolling down until you reach Embed Any Document (it’s alphabetized) and clicking “activate.”

Once you’ve clicked activate, go to your post or page editor.  If you are in Classic Editor mode, a new button will appear underneath the title of the post/page that says “Add Document.” Once you upload your file, you will see some HTML code appear in your post/page editor. Don’t worry! Click the Preview button (or the Publish button) and see how it looks once it’s on your site– your document should appear, as you see below.

Download

Very Optional (And Very Scary) Reading

Hello All,

I’m researching online articles to assign next semester that cover the same material as Weapons of Math Destruction so that students can read more in-depth about specific circumstances and don’t have to spend money on buying the book, and I found something very scary that I had forgotten O’Neil talks about in Chapter 8.

In addition to credit scores, which you all have at least heard of, there are also secret “e-scores” that use as much internet and financial data as they can find about you to determine what ads you receive. Link to the story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198

Another here: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/electronic-scores-rank-consumers-by-potential-value.html

That particular WSJ article talks about how credit card companies use the escores to decide which card offers to market to consumers, but it also talks about how car companies and other businesses (especially online businesses) might use them.

Also almost 50% of employers use credit score data in deciding who to hire, so….good credit is not just important for getting apartments and cars.

How to Add Pages, Adjust Menu Items, and Edit Portfolio Appearance

Someone requested more step-by-step instructions on how to design/edit the portfolios, so here we go!

Adjusting Portfolio Appearance

On the lefthand side of your Site Dashboard, you will see a tab that says “Appearance.” Under that tab, there is a submenu with many more options to click on.

To change the overall design of your Portfolio, click on “Themes.” There are a variety of free themes that you can choose from. Then, once you choose a theme, you can click on “Customize” to change particular elements of the theme design like the site title, site tagline, menus, etc. The remaining items under “Appearance” are also things you can change under “Customize,” so it just depends on which editor you like better.

“Widgets” are pre-designed items that you can add to the sidebar of your portfolio. Or, you can delete the ones that your theme came with! For example, the widgets on our course site are Recent Posts, Categories, and Tags. You can add whatever you want here.

Under “Menus,” you can change which pages appear in the top menu on your portfolio site, add things, rearrange their order, and create submenus. Just by clicking and dragging! On my Sample Portfolio here (which is very incomplete!!!), you can see that I chose to put the “This I No Longer Believe” paper as its own menu item and then have all of the assignments related to the Final Paper as subitems under the Final Paper tab. However, notice that when you click on those items, I still need to edit the pages they take you to to make them match the menu.

Adding and Editing Pages and Posts

On the Dashboard, you will see a tab on the lefthand side that says “Pages.” This is where you can edit existing pages to make them say what you want, and also add new ones.

“Posts” are a lot like pages, except they will go into the blog/news/posts tab of your site. You may choose to use posts for all of your portfolio materials, but you may also choose not to use posts at all and just do pages for everything. It’s up to you!

Within posts, you can assign both tags and categories. This helps people find related material on your site.

Doing More Complicated Things

Feel free to get adventurous as you want with your web design! When I created our course site, I went to the “Plugins” tab (lefthand sidebar on the Dashboard) and just looked through all of the available plugins. If you see something you want to try, click on “Activate.” Depending on the plugin, you may see a new menu option on the lefthand side, or a new button when you are editing a post or a page. Plugins all come with their own Help pages.

If you do any web design experiments, feel free to write about them in your portfolio reflections.

Need More Help?

The Open Lab at City Tech has some helpful documentation that explains (with screenshots!) how to do different things on your course site. Click here and look through the options under the “Building Your Site” heading. The Open Lab looks different from the Commons on the main page/profiles, but the portfolio/course site/Wordpress aspects are the same.

How to Insert Your Assignments Into Your Portfolios

Somebody requested a post with instructions on how to insert your assignments into your portfolios, so here it is! There are several different ways to do so, and you should choose whichever one you prefer.

Method 1: Paste Directly Into WordPress

You can just paste your paper/other assignment directly into the Post or Page editor in WordPress. Then, use the Preview function to make sure all of your formatting still looks good, and fix anything that doesn’t look right. The advantage of this method is that it is very easy! The disadvantage is that you will necessarily lose some formatting, and formatting a blog post or web page like an academic essay usually looks bad.

Method 2: Include a Link to Your Word Doc or PDF

This is the method I recommend as a balance between ease and looking nice on the web.

If you choose this method, I might write your reflection on a given assignment as a blog post or web page on your portfolio, but include a link in the post/page to the assignment itself.

For example, take a look at most of my Assignment blog posts this semester– I reformatted the rubric and assignment sheet to look nice for WordPress, but most of the posts also have a link where you can download a Word Doc version of the assignment.

For assignments that don’t also require a reflection, just write enough on the page/post so that it doesn’t look weirdly blank.

Instructions

  1. If you are in the Classic Editor, click on “Add Media” (it appears as the first button below the post/page title). If you are in the Block Editor, look for the button in the formatting bar that has a music note and camera– when you mouse over it, that will say Add Media too.
  2. Clicking on Add Media will take you to the Media Library for your portfolio. Click over to the tab that says “Upload Files.”
  3. Upload your file.
  4. Once your file is uploaded, you will be automatically redirected to the Media Library page for that file. On the right hand side of your screen, you will see some spaces to fill in information about your file– change any of these that you wish.
  5. Click the blue “Insert Into Post” button.
  6. Whatever you had as the File Title will automatically appear as the text in your post/page. Once you’ve inserted the link, you can change the text if you want.

Method 3: Use a PDF Embedder Plugin

This method is the most complicated, but also the nicest-looking.

On the Resources Page on our website, I’ve included a link to a site that explains different plugins you could install to your portfolio site (using the Plugin tab in the lefthand sidebar) to embed files directly– that will make them display in a special window while retaining all of your formatting.

 

Portfolio Reminder and Practical Guide

In case you were absent one or both of the days we went to the computer lab to work on our portfolios, I wanted to write a post with instructions and recommendations.

How to Create Your Portfolio

  1. Log in to the CUNY Academic Commons home page. Click on “Sites.”
  2. You should see a button that says “Create a Site.” Click on that.
  3. You will see 3 options: Group, Site, and Group + Site. Choose the one that is just “Site.”
  4. Fill out the info and choose your settings however you like. The “site domain” is the URL you type in to get to your site. Choose “Portfolio” under the “Primary Purpose” option.
  5. For the privacy settings, choose whatever you want, but know you will need to give me access to your portfolio at the end of the semester in order for me to grade it.
  6. For the template, choose either “default” or “academic portfolio.” The portfolio template is designed for professors, not students, so you will still need to make changes.

How to Edit Your Portfolio

Once you create your site, you will see the same black CUNY Commons menu at the top of your screen just like you see when you’re on our course site.

  1. Click on the name of your site in that menu to access your dashboard. Or, click “edit” on any page on your site.
  2. The dashboard will look like the editing dashboard you used to write your “Analysis of an Ad” and “Data Collection” posts for our site, but with a lot more options in the sidebar. That’s because you’re the owner of your site!
  3. In the lefthand sidebar, go to “Appearance” and then “Customize.”
  4. Make whatever changes to your site that you want!
  5. To add pages or posts, use the “pages” and “posts” options in the dashboard lefthand sidebar instead of Appearance.

How Do You Know What To Do?

Instructions and a rubric for what to include in your portfolio are here.

Links to examples of other students’ English 101 portfolios are here. 

You can design and organize your portfolio however you want– your assignments don’t need to be in a specific order. It should be what you think looks good, makes sense, and is easy for a user of your website to understand.

For WordPress Help

Just Googling your questions will likely yield a lot of helpful instructions, since WordPress works the same no matter what website is using the software. However, for WordPress help explicitly geared toward students, the Open Lab at City Tech (similar to CUNY Commons) has a lot of Help documentation specifically geared toward students and faculty. Click here for instructions on how to do many common tasks on your site! 

You will see my face in the sidebar there– working on the Open Lab is my other job! Feel free to also ask me or your classmates if you continue running into trouble.

Reading/Thinking Questions for 12/4

**I edited these from when I originally posted them. If you’ve already answered the original version, no worries**

1. What do you already know about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal?

2. How do Information bubbles affect people’s political views?

3. What information bubbles are you in, as far as you know?

4. Based on your social media activity, what kinds of political ads would you choose to show yourself (if you were in charge of targeted advertising)?

5. What responsibilities do social media platforms have with regard to news and politics?

6. Clinton’s campaign models showed that she would easily win in Wisconsin and Michigan, so she did not campaign much in those states. What do you think went wrong in those algorithms? What should she/her team have done differently?

 

Descriptive/Reverse Outlining (Class 11/27)

More detailed directions here: Descriptive Outlining Instructions (from Kim Liao)

For this Peer Review Day, you and your group will be making “descriptive outlines” or “reverse outlines” of each other’s papers. It’s called “reverse outlining” because instead of outlining a paper before you write it, you are outlining a paper that already exists. It’s “descriptive outlining” because in addition to outlining the content of the paper, you also describe the rhetorical purpose of each paragraph.

Choose whose paper you will outline first. For EACH paragraph, the other group members should collaboratively discuss two things/answer two questions:

  1. What is the paragraph SAYING? (One-sentence summary of the paragraph)
  2. What is the paragraph DOING? (The paragraph’s role/purpose in the paper as a whole)

The writer should write down what the group members decide for each one, even if the writer disagrees with their answers. The writer will then have a reverse outline of how their paper comes across to readers.

AFTER that, if you still have time, you can discuss other aspects of the paper as a group.