Author: Jake Cohen (Page 1 of 3)

Hello everyone,

Apologies for so many emails from me today! But hopefully you will find the recommendations on your posts and website useful, and feel free to either adopt my suggestions or not, they are merely suggestions!

The peer assessment is here. Please complete this by this Friday at 5pm. In ranking your own and others’ contributions, use the numbers to indicate the amount of work put in by each member, but also please use the “explanation” box to elaborate on anything.

Feel free to direct any questions to Prof. Rosenberg.

-Jake

Hi everyone!

We were going to have you do this in class today, but we ran out of time focusing on the site, which is starting to look really great. So for tomorrow (Tuesday), we’d like you to complete a short peer review of one of your classmate’s posts. See below for the assignments. We’ve taken care to make sure that every post gets reviewed by at least one person, and also that no one is reviewing a post from their own group.

You will complete the peer review using this form. Please complete this by 2pm Tuesday, it should take you about 10 minutes to read the post at least twice, and then about 10 minutes to complete the peer review. Once the review has been submitted, you can view what others have said about your post by following this link which will take you to the “Entries” section of the “Peer Review” form under “Forms” on the Halal Carts dashboard. We’d like you to make revisions to your post by Tuesday night (let’s say by midnight) so that we can view them Wednesday morning before class and provide you with feedback.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this.

Search for your name on the left: you’ll be reading the post titled in “quotes” with author and section indicated.

Lexy: “Introduction” by Evan (Customers)
Katherine and Amanda Z.: “Halal Cart Owner and his Food Truck” by Haoxiang (Owners)
Eli: “Social Aspect” by Evan (Customers)
Brianna: “Economic Aspect” by Evan (Customers)
Eddie and Ban: “Halal Cooks and their Neighborhoods” by Will (Cooks)
Jackson and Raian: “The Secret Life of a Halal Cart Owner” by Annmarie (Owners)
Dil and Elina: “The Black Market” by Eddie (City Bureaucracy)
Will: “Economic Overview” by Dil (Owners)
Annmarie and Amanda C.: “Paperwork and Permits” by Katherine (City)
Belinda and Evan: “The History of the Halal Cart” by Brianna (Cooks)
Derek: “Letter Grades on Carts?” by Jackson (City)
Haoxiang: “NYPD” by Belinda (City)

Hi everyone,

Just a quick note that if you are doing any revisions to your text between now and Sunday, please re-upload it to the “Documents” section of the Halal Carts website (not this site). Follow the same directions as last time but this time, select your draft and click “Upload New Version.” When you upload the new version, you can remove my comments if you like, make any other changes/revisions, and then select “Second Draft” under workflow state on the right. This will indicate that you’ve uploaded a newer version than what you submitted last Monday.

Please, as always, email me with any questions if you are having trouble with this. Later today the tech committee should have the theme finalized and they’ll let you know what theme our site will have.

-Jake

Hi everyone!

Soon you should be hearing from the member of the tech committee in your group about how the website is going to take shape.

For Monday, you’ll be submitting the rough draft text for your topic of the website. All you need to do for this is to submit the text, but if you know you are going to be using specific images or video, you can embed that too. Within your group, you have to decide how you’re going to present your topic. Are you going to write a few different short essays/articles? Are you going to write one long story? Are you going to have an introduction and then a number of case studies? The choices are up to you. The point of this is to see where you’re at and for Prof. Rosenberg and I to make suggestions for you as we move ahead with the project. This is not final — this should be a chance for you to figure out how to organize your interviews, your individual research, and your media.

1. Go to the dashboard of the Halal Carts website (http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/halalcarts). If you’re not a member of the site yet, you’ll have to join by clicking the “Add Me” button on the left hand side, and then have your tech committee person make you an administrator.
2. On the left side, you’ll see “Documents”
3. Click “Add Document”
4. Under title, be sure to indicate which group you are (city, cooks2, owners, etc.)
5. Under “Visibility” on the right hand side, you must select “Public” or else we can’t see it!
6. Select “rough draft” from the “workflow state” dropdown menu.
7. Upload new version, and then click the green “Update” button
8. Make sure you bring your laptops, charged, to class on Monday!

Especially now that we’re working on the website as a class, please reach out and ask me any questions you might have. One thing I told the tech committee people today: it almost always takes a lot longer to do something that you think when you are creating a website, so be sure that the work is divided evenly within your group, and be sure to Start. Things. Early!

-Jake

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a nice break.

I’m writing to remind everyone that we are using Slack to communicate about the final project and everyone needs to be checking it regularly in order to make sure that you are staying in touch with your team as things develop. You’ll find that this is a great way to coordinate, to find out who has done what and what needs to be done, and to generally discuss what’s happening with your group’s project. The key is that you need to have this app 1) on your phone, and/or 2) on your computer, with notifications set up so that you can see when people are talking, and sometimes talking directly to you.

Slack is an app available for both iPhones and Androids. I strongly encourage you do download it (it’s free!) and use it. It’s also available as a Desktop app for your laptops, and I strongly encourage to you install it. Once you’ve installed it, you can turn on notifications for just your team channel, or for just your team channel and the #general channel, or for any activity. This way you’ll limit how and where you get notifications, but still keep abreast of developments within your group.

If you have any questions about using Slack or turning on/off notifications, please email me and I’m happy to help you out. I still need someone from the customers group to join the tech committee, and that needs to happen ASAP.

Finally, the blog schedule on the website has been updated on the right hand side–sorry I didn’t get to it earlier this week but everyone who has something due this week should have known about it since the schedule was posted during the first weeks.

-Jake

Hi everyone,

A reminder to please join the Slack team for our class, and then if you haven’t already, please join your group.  We are going to use Slack to coordinate for this project, so please turn on notifications or check it regularly (as you would email) moving forward. If you were absent today, you can see which group you are in by clicking on the channels on the left hand side. The handout from class today, as well as additional info about the project, is here.

Also, please email me with the member of your group who will be on the tech committee, and join the #tech Slack channel.

Have a good spring break!

-Jake

Hi all,

Thanks for your participation in the website assessment activity in class today, and sorry that we were a bit pinched for time at the end.

A reminder to please write your brainstorm answers into the Google Doc. Just follow the format that’s already there. No need to replicate information, but we’re trying to compile everyone’s thoughts into one central place. From this, we will determine working groups and those groups can use these issues that everyone has come up with to do questions.

Also, one more reminder to please embed your prezis! Detailed instructions are in the last announcement that I sent, so please check there. With ALL posts, it is very important to view your post from the public-facing side of the site (or preview it before publishing) so that you can see whether it looks right or not. Some of you aren’t doing this, since obvious errors are being left in. Remember, your names are attached to these, so you want them to look good!

-Jake

Hi everyone,

I just scrolled through the neighborhood visit posts on our site and it looks like only one group managed to get the embedding correct for the prezi (thanks Evan and Elina!). The whole point of this is that you can embed your prezi right into the post without having to click on a link to other sites, which is what we want. So again, please edit your posts as follows:

On a single line of text, type [prezi id='______']. Check that you are using square brackets and single quotation marks. In the blank space, type your prezi id. To find this, just go to your prezi and copy just the letters and numbers that follow prezi.com/ in the browser address. Do not include any words that follow the next /. Your prezi address should be something like prezi.com/_________/your-title-here. You should only use the stuff in that blank space. Preview your post and make sure it looks right. If you’re having trouble, please email me.

Please do not just paste a link to your prezi, we want them embedded in the post. Also, make sure that your prezi is set to public viewing, which can be adjusted on the main page of your prezi (Annmarie and Lexi, I think this is the issue with your post).

For tomorrow’s class, please everyone bring your laptops, as we’ll be doing some online work.

-Jake

Hi class,

Please upload your Prezi and maps to the same post on the website. To put your Prezi online, just type the shortcode [prezi id='your id'] into your post. Remember, your id is the combination of letters and numbers that follows prezi.com/ in your URL browser bar.

If you have already uploaded a map, just edit the post and add in the Prezi shortcode. If you have not yet uploaded a map, create a new post and be sure to use the category “Presentations.” And if you have made a post but didn’t give it the correct category, just edit your post and change the category to “Presentations.”

If you have any issues with this, please let me know.

-Jake

Hi everyone,

A reminder that today is the last day I’ll hold office hours before your Neighborhood Visit projects are to be presented. I am away at a conference at the end of the week, so I won’t be around to meet with you after today. If you would like any help using our mapping software, Maps Marker Pro, please come by office hours today (12:30-2 in the honors lounge at 17 Lex) and I’ll be happy to walk you through the plugin.

The tutorial for Maps Marker Pro is here and you should feel free to go in and start creating a map to see what you are able to do and whether you run into trouble. I will, of course, be accessible via email all week.

-Jake