The Great Martha Burtis I have been remiss in mentioning that one of my favorite people this side of the Rappahannock, Martha Burtis, was awarded the 2015 Hurley Award. This award is presented to an administrative/professional faculty member who performs exceptionally meritorious service to the University; demonstrates strength of character; and maintains steadfast dedication to the University’s mission. Martha does all that and more. So when Jeff McClurken asked me to write a letter in support of Martha (he was a genius for nominating her), I knew it was going to be a long one. There’s so many good things to write, and I think of her as my mentor during these past four years of DTLT directorship. What’s more, Martha has been so central to every creative, crazy thing we’ve done at DTLT these last years—I’m thinking her about ds106 in particular, Summer of Oblivion #4life. Despite the fact that so many folks associate me with DTLT’s success because I … [Read more...]
UMW Domains-Now with More Community!
Domain of One’s Own has been an unqualified success, and Martha’s post on this project provides a nice summary of where we are at six months in. We’re on track to have more than 700 folks in the UMW community with their own domain and web hosting this academic year, and for 2014/15 we’re shooting to double that number with an additional 1500 domains. Just think of it, 2200 people with their own domain by year two. That’s almost half our campus community—that’s absolutely awesome. Unparalled in the known world—we’re the god damned Magellans of edtech! But like any age of exploration, we have to start mapping this brave new worlds for beauteous mankind, and that’s just what Martha Burtis and Tim Owens have been doing. Since the beginning of the semester they’ve been building a community hub for all of the distributed working happening on UMW Domains. Tim wrote about creating this space in some detail already, and … [Read more...]
The Domain is Right
This past week UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learnign Technologies rolled out what’s most certainly our most ambitious project yet: Domain of One’s Own. I’ve written a lot about this project over the last year or so, and it’s surreal to think it’s up and running. Domain of One’s Own provides any interested Freshman at UMW with his or her own domain and web hosting to start taking control of their identity on the web. The first week didn’t come without it’s highs and lows, and Martha Burtis’s awesomely comprehensive post recaps what’s transpired thus far. While we dreamed 1000 Freshman would sign-up day one, at the same time we knew it was gonna take a lot of work to make this fly. We’ve been through this all before with projects like UMW Blogs and ds06, great things need to grow organically as part of a community. And that’s what we have to focus on this year, and I have no doubt it will be a resounding success because Domain of One’s Own is pure and good and RIGHT. Which … [Read more...]
DTLT’s Innovative Work featured in The Blue Review
Leslie Madsen-Brooks featured the long history of innovative work coming out of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology in her article “Beyond Disruption” for The Blue Review. Below is a somewhat extensive quote from the article: Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At theUniversity of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways. For one, evidence of student learning appears on the open web, and I encourage you to check out the current blogs developed for courses. Faculty, too—and I know this from first-hand experience—benefit from knowing what … [Read more...]
DTLT Presents at ELI Fall Focus Session
A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo. Martha Burtis, Jim Groom, Tim Owens and Andy Rush of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2 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 seven 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 … [Read more...]
The Credit She Never Gets
Earlier today I posted a quick video about using the ds106 assignments repository to create engagement in an online learning experience. To be clear there are many things that go into such an experience, but I’ve found the ds106 assignment repository has allowed me to re-think ds106 over the last year and a half. The ability to syndicate filtered assignment posts, rate the difficulty level, relate tutorials, and create new assignments puts the course in the unique position to allow students to shape the experience. The simple act that has proven powerful, fun, and created a sense of community. The current state of the assignment repository came out of an experimental model Martha Burtis has been iterating on since December 2010. It’s pretty amazing because that was the beginning of the idea of ds106 as open architecture, a space that others can build sites onto, like Alan Levine’s Remix site, Tim Owens’ Daily Create, and Linda McKenna and Rachel McGuirk’s … [Read more...]
DTLT Controls the Vertical and the Horizontal
In January the DTLT group presented at the Educause Midatlantic Regional Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The panel discussion covered the Digital Storytelling class being taught here at UMW, affectionately know as ds106. Martha Burtis provided an overview of the course, Tim Owens the technical framework, I featured the radio, and Andy Rush closed with our experiments with live, streaming video. It’s not only a great overview of ds106, but it is also a great overview of the chemistry that drives the creative, innovative machine that is DTLT. … [Read more...]