Review: New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg

Review of Heather Lewis\u27s 2015 book, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg, which explores the historical and educational policy context of the struggle for community control of the New York City public schools from the 1960s to 2000, the year Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control over the city\u27s public school system

Where’s the Pedagogy? The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities

The Digital Humanities (DH) has focused narrowly on digital research methods and projects and digital publication efforts. Yet DH has also had a significant, if under recognized, impact on classroom pedagogy. This chapter evaluates the ways DH practices, embodied in a series of pedagogy projects at the City University of York (CUNY), have been used to reshape teaching and learning in college classrooms

History, Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: Past Successes and Future Directions

Based on a keynote presentation at the 2012 Canadian Historical Association conference, this paper surveys the state of digital technology and its impact on academic publication and teaching in the contemporary university. Focusing on the dramatic rise of the Digital Humanities in the last few years, the paper examines alternative forms of peer review, academic scholarship and publication, and classroom teaching as they have been reshaped by the adoption of a variety of digital technologies and formats, including open-access, online peer reviewing, use of data- bases and visualization techniques in humanities work, online journal publication, and the use of blogs and wikis as teaching tools. Examining the digital production and education work of the American Social History Project at CUNY, which he co-founded, and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy doctoral certificate program that he heads at the CUNY Graduate Center, the author discusses a range of digital projects and approaches designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning in college classrooms

The Ideological and Organizational Origins of the United Federation of Teachers\u27 Opposition to the Community Control Movement in the New York City Public Schools, 1960-1968

This article explores the origins and ideological practice of public school teacher unionism as it was articulated and revealed in New York City before and during the epochal strike against an experiment in community control of neighborhood schools undertaken by the United Federation of Teachers in the fall of 1968 that closed down the city’s massive public school system for weeks and put almost 1 million school children in the street. How and why did unionized New York City public school teachers support the particular kind of trade unionism that the UFT and its president, Albert Shanker, embodied and practiced in the 1960s? This article examines the ways that a particular form of labor organization and trade union ideology led the UFT and its members to bitterly oppose the community control experiment, an initiative that the union had once supported

Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past

This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article reviews that history, focusing on the postwar expansion of the city’s tuition free municipal college system and the subsequent birth of the CUNY system in 1961. CUNY’s growth helped launch a student-led fight for open admissions at various CUNY campuses in 1969-70, which resulted in the dramatic expansion of the undergraduate student body, including the admission of large numbers of working-class students of color in the early 1970s. The article ends with a discussion of impact of New York City’s 1976 fiscal crisis, which led to the elimination of free tuition and a cutback in CUNY’s plans for expansion and growth, a consequence that CUNY still has to deal with

Why the History of CUNY Matters: Using the CUNY Digital History Archive to Teach CUNY’s Past

This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article reviews that history, focusing on the postwar expansion of the city’s tuition free municipal college system and the subsequent birth of the CUNY system in 1961. CUNY’s growth helped launch a student-led fight for open admissions at various CUNY campuses in 1969-70, which resulted in the dramatic expansion of the undergraduate student body, including the admission of large numbers of working-class students of color in the early 1970s. The article ends with a discussion of impact of New York City’s 1976 fiscal crisis, which led to the elimination of free tuition and a cutback in CUNY’s plans for expansion and growth, a consequence that CUNY still has to deal with

Review: Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics

Review of Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics, edited by Brett D. Hirsch, multiple authored collection of articles on the theory as well as the practices and principles of the digital humanities and how DH can and has begun to reshape pedagogy in college teaching and learning

The September 11 Digital Archive

This article focuses on the creation and subsequent development of the September 11 Digital Archive (www.911digitalarchive.org), currently one of the largest digital repositories of historical materials on the September 11 attacks. The article reflects on archival and methodological questions and on issues raised by the efforts of staff members at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University and at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP) at the City University of New York Graduate Center to preserve and present via the Internet digital resources related to the epochal events of a decade ago. The authors, two of the project\u27s three executive producers (the third being the late Roy Rosenzweig), discuss various collecting and organizational issues involved in building a digital archive. They also discuss the effort to balance the development and deployment of an open and accessible Web interface for individual online submissions of digital materials with targeted outreach to and solicitation of contributions from members of underrepresented communities, including the Arab, Chinese, and Latino communities. The article proposes that historians must also function as archivists and preservationists in an era of fragile and ephemeral digital communications

Historia e hipermedia: las posibilidades de mejorar la enseñanza y el aprendizaje

El desafío al que nos enfrentamos como docentes y directivos es evaluar críticamente el potencial de la tecnología educativa para mejorar la enseñanza y el aprendizaje, a la vez que reconocer las cuestiones de equidad y acceso planteados por la desigual distribución de las nuevas tecnologías a lo largo del universo educativo. Un escepticismo saludable acerca de los propósitos de utilizar dicha tecnología no debería malpredisponer nuestro ánimo a buscar caminos adecuados para el diseño, producción e implementación de nuevas formas de tecnología educativa que puedan ayudar a los estudiantes a transformarse en aprendices activos y críticos. En lugar de negarse desde el desconocimiento, los educadores deberían enfrentarse a los desafíos y posibilidades inherentes a la tecnología y encontrar caminos educacionalmente apropiados para usarla, a fin de mejorar la calidad de la enseñanza y el aprendizaje en el aula.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Quantitative signal properties from standardized MRIs correlate with multiple sclerosis disability

OBJECTIVE: To enable use of clinical magnetic resonance images (MRIs) to quantify abnormalities in normal appearing (NA) white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) in multiple sclerosis (MS) and to determine associations with MS-related disability. Identification of these abnormalities heretofore has required specialized scans not routinely available in clinical practice. METHODS: We developed an analytic technique which normalizes image intensities based on an intensity atlas for quantification of WM and GM abnormalities in standardized MRIs obtained with clinical sequences. Gaussian mixture modeling is applied to summarize image intensity distributions from T1-weighted and 3D-FLAIR (T2-weighted) images from 5010 participants enrolled in a multinational database of MS patients which collected imaging, neuroperformance and disability measures. RESULTS: Intensity distribution metrics distinguished MS patients from control participants based on normalized non-lesional signal differences. This analysis revealed non-lesional differences between relapsing MS versus progressive MS subtypes. Further, the correlation between our non-lesional measures and disability was approximately three times greater than that between total lesion volume and disability, measured using the patient derived disease steps. Multivariate modeling revealed that measures of extra-lesional tissue integrity and atrophy contribute uniquely, and approximately equally, to the prediction of MS-related disability. INTERPRETATION: These results support the notion that non-lesional abnormalities correlate more strongly with MS-related disability than lesion burden and provide new insight into the basis of abnormalities in NA WM. Non-lesional abnormalities distinguish relapsing from progressive MS but do not distinguish between progressive subtypes suggesting a common progressive pathophysiology. Image intensity parameters and existing biomarkers each independently correlate with MS-related disability