The Open Knowledge Fellowship team is excited to announce that there is a new website for all things “Open” at the Mina Rees Library. We’re pleased to present a central showcase for the Open Knowledge Fellowship, our ongoing multi-week intensive for doctoral students teaching at CUNY. Over 200 individuals have participated since the Fellowship’s inception in 2020, and you can see the wide variety of their disciplines and research interests, through biographical descriptions listing their projects. For a deeper dive, take a look at the series of short essays created as the students reflect on their work (i.e., Waist-deep in OER, Towards a Collective Pursuit of Knowledge, Teaching (and Reforming) the Next Generation of Pirates and Copyright Violators).
Aside from information about the Open Knowledge Fellowship, the new website provides comprehensive resources for accessing and utilizing OER across CUNY. There are links to all of CUNY’s Open Publishing platforms, as well as to helpful resources regarding accessibility and campus OER representatives. We have also included a page of publications & presentations, including a Manifold publication exploring the poet Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials from her time at CUNY.
The Open Knowledge team consists of founder of the program and Head of Reference, Elvis Bakaitis; Scholarly Communications Librarian & University Liaison, Jill Cirasella; Adjunct Reference Librarian, Margaret Miller; Open Educational Resources Specialist, Patrick McGee; and Chief Librarian Maura Smale. You can learn more about their research and scholarly backgrounds here. In recent years, the program has also hosted guest lectures from CUNY faculty such as Prof. Shawna Brandle; Prof. Ian McDermott; Prof. Junior Tidal, as well as GC library faculty colleagues.
The Open Knowledge Fellowship is supported through robust funding from New York State, administered by the CUNY Office of Library Services. The Open Knowledge Fellowship was started as the Open Pedagogy Fellowship in 2019, organizing a series of symposia that interrogated the question of “Open” from critical perspectives, with contributions from speakers such as Clelia Rodríguez (author of Decolonizing Academia: Poverty, Oppression and Pain), Nora Almeida. In 2021, the Open Pedagogy Fellowship became the Open Knowledge Intensive, hosting events on the emerging field of black girlhood(s) and the possibilities for abolitionist STEM education. In 2022, the Intensive became the Open Knowledge Fellowship and has run at least two cohorts a year ever since.
We are additionally proud to share that since 2019, the library’s Open Knowledge project has assisted nearly 250 fellows in the conversion of course syllabi to Zero Textbook Cost courses, saving students thousands of dollars and simultaneously contributing to CUNY’s digital publishing ecosystem. During this time, Fellowship participants have been sustained by over $500,000 in support via OER funding from New York State.
The new website was designed by our Open Educational Resources Specialist, Patrick McGee. All of the images are sourced from the Wikimedia Commons (referenced in the alt text), and we encourage you to take a closer look as you explore the landing page for Open Knowledge at the Mina Rees Library. You can expect the page to be consistently updated with the latest CUNY OER news and resources. Please reach out to Patrick McGee ([email protected]) if you have any questions or suggestions for the new site.
Visit the site: Open Knowledge at the Mina Rees Library
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
