2 Annotated Bibliography: CUNY Manifold

Brown, J. (2019, October 1). The Digital Story: Integrating the Personal and Academic through a Multimodal Approach. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Assignments. 

This assignment was created for a First Year Writing Inquiry Seminar (FIQWS) at City College of New York. FIQWS is based on the principles and pedagogy of the learning community. Students are enrolled simultaneously in a topic course in which they learn about a specific subject, in this case “Truth, Fiction and Photography,” and a composition course in which they learn and practice composition skills. This assignment for the composition section asks students to apply what they are learning in the topic section to their personal experiences through a personal photograph and compose a digital story.

Byosiere, S. (2020, November 19). Twitter for Academic Purposes: How to Guide Students. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Assignments. 

This article presents a semester-long, low-stakes, scaffolded assignment I developed for a master’s-level course titled Companion Animals in Society at CUNY Hunter College (Fall 2019). The ultimate goal of the assignment was to provide students with a comprehensive guide to developing skills and understanding in science communication, as well as furthering their professional development online, specifically by using Twitter.

Byosiere, S., Blackwell, E., Gordon, M., Ventura, B. (2021, August 31). MEME: Motivating Engagement using Meme Examples. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Assignments. 

This piece illustrates how a low-stakes meme assignment can increase student engagement and comprehension of course material.

Calado, F. (2019, May 16). “Imagining what we don’t know”: Technological ignorance as condition for learning. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 15.

This article explores how digital interfaces matter in literary analysis. It takes “critical reading interfaces” as a set of criteria that engage a text’s formal aspects in order to facilitate the close reading of literature in electronic environments. The author examines two digital projects, Women Writers Online and Voyant-Tools, which change the way that readers “see” literary texts to reveal new interpretive possibilities. This examination finds that the pedagogical benefits of digital resources stem from an interface that both makes explicit the text’s formal elements and encourages the reader to interact and experiment with these elements. It also finds that, though exposure to the project’s technical modeling (its digital encoding and formatting) allows readers to gain purchase over the formal structures that determines meaning-making, technological ignorance (if harnessed thoughtfully) might propel readers toward novel and unforeseen interpretations about a text’s formal aspects. The differences between the two projects present a space for teachers to consider the effects of critical reading interfaces in the English classroom.

Controlling images: What they are and how they affect black women. (2022). Project.

Historically, socially, and culturally, American society has always propagated that Black women should always be seen and identified in a certain way that impacts and affects them negatively. This project will attempt to explain what each of these controlling images are, how they affect Black women, and why they have had such a negative impact on how Black women are able to navigate their lives within American society.

Foasberg, Nancy. (2021, August 16). English 130 Library Tutorial Modules.

This is a modular series of lessons and exercises to introduce the basics of literary research. It is designed for students enrolled in English 130 at Queens College, but includes useful information for anyone beginning to think about literary research.

Duncan, R.O. (2019, May 16). Confidence and critical thinking are differentially affected by content intelligibility and source reliability: Implications for game-based learning in higher education. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 15.

Game-based learning can foster critical thinking in undergraduate students. However, less is known how cognitive and metacognitive factors interact to support critical thinking in games. The intelligibility of information and the reliability of its source were manipulated to affect performance and confidence in a simple critical thinking game. Undergraduates (N=864) were presented with questions in a four-alternative forced-choice paradigm.

Kinniburgh, M.C. (2019, January 7). The Space Between Researcher, Object, Institution: Building Collaborative Knowledge with Primary Sources. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 14.

As archival and special collections resources become increasingly available in digital environments, our need to understand these documents in the context of their original material forms remains. As a result, techniques for teaching primary source literacy are a topic of rich discussion in special collections, archives, and library institutions, especially as information professionals consider ways to expand both research and readership. In light of the significant focus on undergraduate populations in many case studies on special collections pedagogy, this article discusses a year-long pilot program titled “The Collaborative Research Seminar on Archives and Special Collections” between the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the New York Public Library. To frame this interdisciplinary graduate seminar, which addressed both the theory and praxis of primary source research, I first discuss pedagogical frameworks, including Jacques Rancière’s critique of explication and Paulo Freire’s “banking model,” alongside Adrienne Rich’s teaching notes from her time at CUNY and Patrick Williams’ work on embodiment and archives. I then explore participant responses that address imagination, experimentation, and identification in the reading room—especially after the methods of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a key contributor to this program. By enumerating the practices that informed and constituted the Seminar, I suggest that we might consider conversation, experience, and experimentation as fundamental values in special collections pedagogy.

Kreniske, P., Goodlad, K., Sears, J., Cheng, S. (2018, October 9). Our Stories of Becoming a College Student: A Digital Writing Project for First Year Students. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Assignments.

This blogging assignment serves as a low-stakes activity that encourages students to make sense of the social, emotional, and bureaucratic challenges in their transition to college, and to simultaneously develop digital literacy.

LILAC. (2024). Information Literacy Toolkit.

This toolkit has been developed by LILAC (Library Information Literacy Advisory Committee) to be a one-stop resource for information literacy resources and teaching materials for use throughout CUNY. The project consists of descriptions of basic subjects in information literacy, alongside downloadable lesson plans and handouts, embedded video tutorials, and links to more resources organized by campus.

Miles, L., Lyons, K. (2019) Cross-Indexing Game Characteristics to Test Media Literacy Game Design. Touchstone 2019. 

We have received PSC-CUNY funding to investigate which game and gameplay characteristics are most effective for student engagement, knowledge transfer, and skill development in media literacy instruction. Reporting on the initial exploratory phase of research, this paper presents a novel method for cross-indexing existing and potential games according to specific media literacy objectives, the kinds of learning experiences that happen during gameplay (Gee, 2003; Abdul Jabbar & Felicia, 2015), game type (Grace, 2005), and means of play (such as game board, cards, dice, digital platform, etc.). This cross-indexing will help determine the game and gameplay characteristics to be tested in later phases of research.

Richardson, E. (2020, January 15). The Trouble with Tags: The Challenges of Collaborative Metadata and Participatory Culture in Class Blogs. Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Teaching Fails. 

This piece describes how I tried to get students in an introductory world literature survey course to link similar ideas and themes in their blog posts by asking them to create tags. I envisioned that these tags and the corresponding connections made would form an evolving archive of literary themes and cultural issues. However, the resulting tags were overly specific to each student’s individual blog post, which obscured connections rather than forming them. Ultimately this piece illustrates the challenges and potential of tags as a form of collaborative metadata that frames and develops student understanding of literary criticism.

Sossi, D. (2022, November) Media Literacy Visuals. Transforming Corporate Communication. 

In this exercise, students were asked to create a visual to communicate various aspects of media literacy that can help people in their commmunity.

Stadler, D., McDermott, I. (2018, June 11). Advancing Information Literacy in a Semester-Long Library Instruction Course: A Case Study. In Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, no. 13.

The following case study investigated the efficacy of Information Literacy (IL) pedagogy on undergraduate research in a credit-bearing library instruction class. More specifically, the study analyzed student success and sought to determine whether written reflection and practice strengthen IL skills, including the fundamental ability to develop a research question and thesis statement. Developing research questions and formulating thesis statements are among the most challenging duties of a young researcher. From high school through undergraduate, students often have minimal experience conducting research. They may not know where to begin the research process and what steps are necessary. Student frustration is exacerbated by the fact that typically IL instruction is one-shot guidance, given only once in a semester, making it difficult for a librarian to cover all that is needed. Can a semester long, credit-bearing course aid student success in research and improve IL skills? The instructors introduced several techniques to improve IL skills, and instructors evaluated three class assignments based on their college’s core competencies. Additionally, instructors collected and analyzed students’ written reflections of their progress and an end of semester survey as both qualitative and quantitative data.