Gulou or, Public Scholarship in the Digital Age

This post is long overdue, and if I hadn’t checked out for a couple of months in April and May it would have been blogged on the bava a lot earlier. In fact, it’s criminal it hasn’t been broadcast more widely around the UMW community because the fact that Sue Fernsebner, a Chinese history scholar and faculty member in the History department at UMW, has a blog that has become a spotlight page for news on Tumblr is a kind of a big deal. Sue lays out the whole phenomenon far better than I ever could in this post. I love the way she ponders the implications of her blog being featured alongside major mass media new outlets: It’s now introduced there alongside established media (Reuters, LA Times, CNN, USA Today, etc.) and also accompanies other, less traditional but equally popular sites for news consumption (e.g. The Daily Show) on the same page. I’m just beginning to ponder the implications. What does it mean that an individual’s site—one person’s own, simple Tumblr—is … [Read more...]

An Ode to UMW Faculty

An Architecture of Amazing Possibility Andréa Livi Smith, who’s a Historic Preservation professor at UMW, found time on her blog to write a little ode honoring UMW’s DTLT. She contextualized it with an explanation as to why she is so enamored with this cutting edge, highly attractive group of instructional technologists They set up the blog aggregator for my Paris class. I love this thing: it keeps all my students’ blogs in one place, making for easy commenting and grading [the aggregator was the handy work of Alan Levine, I believe]. They also set up the system for my scavenger hunt which will be held in Paris later in the summer. (And no, you can’t see it yet. It’ll be the star of another post) All I had to do was explain what I wanted, what had not worked last year (seriously, it deserved an #epicfail) and voila! Now I have a system that will make it easier on the students and on me, and will be ready for the next trip, too. I can just imagine how this would have … [Read more...]