This past Friday I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of CUNY faculty at the City College of Technology who are embarking on multi-year experimentation with open publishing platforms in their classrooms. The push is being spearheaded by Matt Gold—a longtime friend and unbelievably cool guy—who has brought CUNY all kinds of goodness from Looking for Whitman to the Academic Commons to an insanely big grant from the Department of Education that will focus on the Brooklyn Waterfront as a “Living Laboratory”—the man is a force of nature in his own right. So, when he asked me to speak to the faculty preparing to embark on a mission of bringing their classroom experience to the open internet I jumped at the chance.

Now, this presentation is kinda cool for me in two ways:

1) It was completely improvised and basically a riff off what Matt framed for me only minutes before the talk (I promised Matt new material, and in some ways he got it ). What’s becoming clear to me is that I speak so often and to so many people that my presentation style is really coalescing apart from any predetermined themes, tropes, or even slides. It’s a kind of jazz presentation style that I am really having fun with—at the same time I have to recognize the extemporaneous nature of these talks may get me in trouble sooner or later.

2) It’s the first time I’ve talked about ds106 in a presentation—it comes about 35 or 40 minutes in. And my exuberance for ds106 was bolstered even more—if that is possible—by the fact that I was coming off one of the best class meetings I had ever been a part of. Just the night before Martha Burtis and I turned our combined sessions into a live radio show with student work driving the engine of the class. In short, I was genuinely fired up about the beautiful, insane, distributed happening that is ds106.

Anyway, here is the presentation “Going Looney at CUNY”:
 http://wpmued.org/wp-content/audio/cuny_…