This semester I’ve been helping Susan Fernsebner, UMW professor extraordinare, with her section of HIST 297: History Colloquium. This course serves as “an introduction to the methods historians use to analyze the past,” and all three sections, each taught by a different member of the department, are focusing on digital skills not as an add-on, but as a critical, integrated part of the course. Sue wrote a great post this past summer that outlines the structure and purpose of HIST 297, as well as the intentionality with which the department decided to spread what used to be a one-semester methods course into a two-semester sequence. You should go read her entire post on the subject (it’s not long! go read it now!), and I’m hopeful that she will have the time and opportunity to write more about this as the semester starts winding down. Seal of the Taiping Revolution, via Wikimedia Commons. The basic goal of HIST 297 is to introduce students to the methods … [Read more...]
Rosie the Riveter dot umw dot edu
So, it’s been over a year since UMW has had it’s main .edu website running on WordPress. DTLT has been experimenting with the possibilities of aggregating posts from UMW Blogs into umw.edu (in fact, this post will aggregate into DTLT’s site on umw.edu). But the cooler part is to start experimenting with bringing the work students and faculty are doing in the classroom to the university’s website, and to that end Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class last semester has done some really cool things. Every semester I come and talk to this particular class about the possibilities for creating an open, online space to share the documentary histories they create over the course of the semester. We look at a ton of sites, and imagine what’s possible for them. The final project/product for the entire class is to build a site and populate it with all the documentary media on the assigned topic they create, collect, and curate for the world to … [Read more...]
A Round-Up of Fall 2012 Projects at DTLT
The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) at UMW is a high-functioning, self-motivated group. We all know our roles, and we perform them with precision regularly. A well-oiled machine, if you will. We haven’t had a staff meeting in a few months, so today (the Monday before classes) we sat down to take stock of our current projects as the semester gets going. And the annotated picture below is a breakdown of the projects we came up with, all of which, mind you, are actually happening now: A Whiteboard of DTLT Projects Fall 2012 After the meeting, which was just a little over an hour, Andy Rush snapped a shot of the whiteboard which I figured I’d annotate and breakdown as an exercise in documenting what we’re working on as of Fall 2012. What’s more, it might be interesting to revisit this post at the end of the semester to see how everything played out, but I guess we’ll see about that. 1) Bluehost Migration I blogged about how we’ve … [Read more...]