Faculty Focus: Andreá Livi Smith Teaches, Learns, and Lives By Design

DTLT Today: Episode 109 – Andreá Livi Smith from Jim Groom on Vimeo. It’s finals week and everyone is slammed for time right now on campus, but Historic Preservation professor Andreá Livi Smith was still generous enough to sit with me for a half hour and talk about the work she’s done as part of the Domain of One’s Own faculty initiative and beyond. Andi is a remarkable faculty member, and she is behind some of the most exciting work happening at UMW right now. She not only blogs like it’s her job at Digital Bridging, but she’s also designed a brilliant homepage for her courses, research, and social media presences, something we explore at length in this video. We also talk about the work she has done with Martha Burtis designing a database on UMW Blogs called Surveying the Burg. This site enables students to survey houses from around Fredericksburg on smart phones from the field. It’s remarkable in that it starts to demonstrate just how much more than a blog  this open source, … [Read more...]

Domain of One’s Own discussion on Chronicle’s Tech Therapy

One of the many awesome Gary Larsen’s The Far Side comics Earlier this week Jeff Young and Warren Arbogast (a UMW alumni!), of The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast, invited me on their program to work through some of the ideas at the heart of University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own project. You can listen to the half hour long episode here. What I’m enjoying about conversations like this about Domain of One’s Own is that the concept is starting to make a bit more sense in my mind as people push me to frame it as succinctly as possible. It’s not easy because, as Jeff and Warren note, at its core Domain of One’s Own is “heady stuff” —it’s a conceptual shift in how we think about controlling data, syndicating content, aggregating ideas, and, more importantly for UMW’s purposes, empowering faculty and students alike. There’s no one easy way to frame this project as an elevator pitch because … [Read more...]

Eduglu Revisited: The Syndication Bus 2012

It’s been more than a year since I’ve really thought, no less written about, the syndication bus as it relates to ds106. For any of you who might be new to the idea of the syndication bus, it’s an approach to syndicating posts from various blogs or other social media sites into a space that can be filtered by tags or categories in order to help manage the flow of data so that it can be discovered, explored, and aggregated into a space that helps build community. On and off over the past 5 years I—as well as many others for much longer—have been obsessed with the idea of designing such a space. In many ways it’s the philosophy that undergirds the design logic that made UMW Blogs a syndication rich platform for aggregating course sites, study abroad blogs, clubs and organization sites, etc. So, it’s interesting that George Kroner should tweet earlier today that a post back in 2007 contained a lot of interesting conversation about the idea of the … [Read more...]