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The upcoming issue of Revisions, QC's zine on writing, focuses on the writer's process: "inspiration, perspiration, and procrastination", says the call for contributions:
The writing process is highly personal, but strategies that work for one writer often work for others. All writers have, at times, struggled with the frustrations of the process, each developing strategies of overcoming the obstacles involved in producing written work. In this issue, members of the Queens College community will share these experiences with each other.
Topics and questions that could be explored include: inspiration, writer's block, the evolution of your writing process, writing and thinking, writing and learning, places for writing, and writing technologies.
Brief proposals are due December 15; submissions are due January 26. For more details, see the call for contributions.
From an email communication from the QC Registrar, dated 12/02/2008:
The City University of New York has revised the Uniform Grade Glossary and guidelines. The revisions include the establishment of a WN (Never Attended) grade and the discontinuance of the ABS (Absent from final), FAB (F grade when the ABS lapses into a final F), and the FPN (F grade when the PEN lapses into a final F) grade.
The INC (incomplete) and FIN (F grade when the INC lapses into a final F) grades will replace the ABS, FAB, and FPN, which will be discontinued.
Unofficial withdrawal grades are issued to students who have never attended or have stopped attending a course but who have not officially withdrawn. The grades which represent an unofficial withdrawal are WU and WN. The following guidelines are to be applied when issuing these grades:
- If the student has attended at least one class or if there is documented evidence of the student's participation in a course, the unofficial withdrawal grade reported would be a WU.
- If the student has never attended a class and there is no documented evidence of the student's participation in a course, the unofficial withdrawal grade reported would be a WN.
The changes will take effect this fall semester.
The WebGrade system will be available from Wednesday, December 17 to Tuesday, January 6, 2009. You can access the system at https://intaps.qc.cuny.edu/webgrade/. Grades will be available to students on the Registrar’s Web site the day after you submit them on the Web Grade system. (The system is not accessible from 1:30-5 am daily.) The deadline for submitting grade rosters is January 6, 2009.
If grades are not submitted by January 6, you will have to complete individual Change of Grade Forms for each student’s grade and submit to the Registrar’s Office.
Please chime in by leaving a comment about one or all three of the following questions.
1. What do you consider to be the most pressing problem facing Queens College students, with respect to quantitative reasoning?
2. What might help address the problem you identify in (1)?
3. How would you like to see the forum on quantitative reasoning move forward next semester?
If you prefer for your response to be private, feel free to send it in writing to Eva Fernández --- e-mail or s-mail (CTL, Razran 316).
You may recently have received an email informing you that Queens College will not be renewing its license for the Turnitin plagiarism detecting software. This message was neither sent nor approved by Queens College's administration. It is indeed true that, beginning in the Spring 2009 semester, instructors will no longer be able to set up Turnitin assignments through Blackboard; our license for the software will end on December 25, 2008. There's no need to worry, however. Integrated into the newest version of Blackboard, which Queens is launching in Spring 2009, is a product called SafeAssign. SafeAssign provides all of the plagiarism detection functionality of Turnitin, and integrates into Blackboard in an even more seamless way.
If you'd like to test SafeAssign or any of the new features of Blackboard 8, log into the CUNY Portal and click where it says "NEW Spring '09 Courses - Blackboard 8". If you'd like more information about the new version of Blackboard, keep an eye on the QC Educational Technology page and watch for upcoming Ed Tech workshops.
The deadline for evaluating courses online has been extended to December 16. Click here for more information.
The Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Centerawards two full-time residencies annually supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, along with eight course release-time fellowships and two dissertation fellowships. These awards aim to develop interdisciplinary working groups on various themes in the humanities.
The theme for the 2009-2010 Mellon Fellowships at The Center for the Humanities is "Family." Click here to download the application form and instructions.
The theme for the 2008-2009 Mellon Fellowships is "The Sacred and the Secular." Click here for a list of the 2008-09 Mellon Fellows.
In January, Queens College will be upgrading to Blackboard 8. What will change, and what do you need to do? Visit Ed Tech's Blackboard 8 roll-out page to find out!
Now is also a great time to make a backup of all your content on the old Blackboard 6.3. Some of your current classes on the old Blackboard have or will be transferred to the new Blackboard, but it's always a good idea, at the end of a semester, to backup your course data completely. Use "Archive Course" (Control Panel > Course Options) for each of your courses. If you want to look inside archive files, you can use a utility like bFree.
