In this episode of DTLT Today, Ryan Brazell and Jim Groom sit down with History professor Sue Fernsebner to talk about the vast array of awesome projects she’s been working on over the last year. The work discussed includes, but is not limited to: her experimentation with Twitter in the classroom; the immensely popular Tumblr, Gulou, on contemporary China she manages; GIFs as analysis in her Chinese History through Film course; the resource site on the Taiping Civil War designed alongside Ryan as part of her re-imagined History Methods course (read more about the course design here and here). The work Sue Fernsebner is doing in digital history is truly remarkable, and we hope this video starts to give you some sense of her process and approach as she takes us through how she’s re-imagined her curriculum for the digital age over the last several years. … [Read more...]
Course Domains
You can blame Brian Lamb for this post, he encouraged me to go for the trifecta. My last two posts were about 1) the possibilities public university publishing platforms offer institutions of higher ed to align their mission with the web, and 2) (if you can look beyond the nudie bombs and GIFs long enough ) how communities like Tumblr can be amazing open educational resources. So, for the third and final installment of this unplanned and rather haphazard series, I want to talk about an emerging trend at UMW that has me pretty excited: course domains. Although, to be honest, this post has in many ways already been written by Ryan Brazell. In “Mapping the Taiping Civil War” he lays out the amazing work he is doing alongside History professor Sue Fernsebner (speaking of educational Tumblrs!) and her students for the re-imagined research methods course she’s teaching this semester focusing on the Taiping Rebellion. In short, they have gotten a domain for the course … [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...]
Ryan Brazell Joining UMW’s DTLT in July
It is my distinct pleasure and honor to announce that UMW has officially hired Ryan Brazell as UMW’s newest Instructional Technology Specialist for the Humanities. He will be starting at the University in July, and we are unbelievably excited about the prospect of brining in such a uniquely qualified candidate to further bolster the awesome that is DTLT. Ryan has had extensive experience in instructional technology over the last eight years at both Oberlin College and the University of California, San Francisco. What’s more, he’s experimented wildly with applications like WordPress—a platform we love at DTLT—for creating portfolios (something that’ll be key for the Domain of One’s Own project we’re unleashing camus-wide in Fall). I am glad Ryan seems excited about the prospect because he’s going to have some of the best faculty in the country to partner with to frame a whole new vision for what ed tech means to the liberal … [Read more...]