Last week Tim Owens and I mapped out the technical infrastructure of Domain of One’s Own as we prepare the purchasing request and generally ramp up for the roll out in Fall 2013. The image below is the result of our brainstorming: Let me try and lay it out for anyone interested in the technical details of how we’re planning on doing this thing, and for how much money. In the center of the image you see the server, at least immediately it will be a hosted, managed server through a serve like Rackspace. For roughly $350 /month we’ll get 8 GB RAM (4 virtual CPUs) and 320 GB storage, and we’ll be charged roughly .18 cents per GB of bandwidth each month. That server setup is roughly twice what we are running currently, and for another $100 a month we can get it managed, which means OS updates, general server maintenance, and someone who will listen to our issues. So, for a managed server with 1 TB of bandwidth each month we are looking at $630 a month just for the … [Read more...]
Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own
Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own will be held on November 15th, 4:00-5:30 in the Red Room. Also, given the recent addition of a faculty forum at that time we will be also hosting this session again on Thursday, November 29th from 4:00-5:30 in the Red Room. Attend Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own to learn about a groundbreaking UMW digital initiative sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation (CTE & I) and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT). President Hurley recently provided support so that a number of new domains and hosting can be established along with funding to provide technical support for this new initiative. There are now over 200 UMW students who have established their own domain names and bound their personal learning spaces to them. What’s more, there are ten professors who have piloted the initiative this semester by integrating it into their curriculum to varying degrees. Martha Burtis and Alan Levine have their … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own has been funded!
Man, when I think about how much blogging I haven’t yet done tonight that I need to, I begin to realize just how awesome a moment it is at UMW right now. Not only are we part of the visioning committee for a statewide conference for thinking how Virginia’s educational resources might be shared more effectively, we are also working on developing an online learning initiative designed from values (which also has been been funded for next year); we’re rocking the makerspace; we’re making kickass videos about how awesome we are; we’ve had a hand in this little thing called ds106; and more generally we are swaggering like Mick Jagger…. But in addition to all that we got news earlier this week that the Domain of One’s Own will be fully funded moving forward! This is huge for our group on a few counts: 1) it includes a half-time position that can help us get fully staffed again, 2) it illustrates the administration at UMW is fully committed to … [Read more...]
A Culture of Innovation
A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo. UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2nd at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Online Fall Focus Session on the theme of innovation in higher education. The basic question guiding the presentation, which was centered around the 7 minute video above, was the following: how does a university like UMW consistently foster innovative projects like UMW Blogs, ds106, and, more recently, A Domain of One’s Own? There’s no one adequate stock answer to such a question, so when preparing the presentation DTLT decided to interview students, faculty, and staff around campus to get a broader sense of the culture of innovation happening at UMW. What DTLT got in return for its labors was quite compelling. The video was shot and edited by Andy Rush, and it’s just a teaser for a much larger documentary that DTLT is planning on making this semester to start chronicling and narrating the culture of … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own as Legacy Archival Project
Image credit dolescum’s Archives’ stacks In the seven years I have been at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies we’ve done a fair bit of experimentation. Most of that has been centered around commodity web hosting, domains, and one-click install open source applications. That method has paid off for us beautifully, so much so that the experimentation we did early on resulted in a successful blogging platform, a cutting-edge university website run on WordPress, and even an extensible framework for a course like ds106. Our experimentation has resulted in grassroots projects that have become official platforms that the campus interfaces with on a daily basis. None of this happened because it was forced on people, but rather because people found the various services we provided useful. This, for me, is the ultimate sign of success for an outfit like ours. The other, uglier side of the early experimentation is that it can be messy. Early on there was the exciting … [Read more...]