Domain of One’s Own 2.0: the Manatee Release

Domain of One’s Own, the distributed, web-based sea cow everyone loves! In this wopping one hour and 26 minute video Martha Burtis and Tim Owens take you through two years of development on the UMW Domains project. It’s the most thorough record available of the work they’ve been doing since Summer 2012, and it traces the thinking, development, and deployment of how UMW is giving every student, faculty, and staff a domain and web hosting account of their own. We understand that an hour and 26 minutes is a very long time, so we’re breaking down the conversation according to specific topics so you can watch what might be relevant for you: 00:01:26 – 00:10:30 Domain of One’s Own 0.5: The Alpha Pilot Timeframe: Spring 2012 through Spring 2013 In the first part of the video Tim and Martha discuss the pilot of Domain of One’s Own. We start with some history. During the Fall 2012/Spring 2013 Academic year we used a dedicated server with MediaTemple … [Read more...]

Talking Domains All Semester Long

Image credit: Kin Lane – Reclaim Evangelist One of the many cool things Cathy Derecki did while at UMW was create EagleEye, a weekly faculty and staff online newsletter about what’s happening in the community. The site runs in the umw.edu in WordPress on our umw.edu install, and the posts are broken down into two basic categories: the first is professional notes, announcements about who presented, published, karate chopped someone, etc. The other is focused around events, news, awards, etc. I’ve tried to share as much of my presentations and other work not just on this blog, but also on EagleEye whenever posible. Turns out this semester was a bear, and I am just getting around to updating my last five talks on EagleEye. So, given I just spent more than an hour writing it all up, I figured I’d taken advantage of a little cross-posting. Since early March of 2014 Jim Groom has delivered numerous invited presentations about the work the Division of Teaching and … [Read more...]

Reclaim the Handout

Click image to download PDF Ryan Brazell shared the prep work he did last week framing UMW’s various digital projects for the AAC&U Diversity, Learning, and Student Success conference in Chicago. Just yesterday he presented alongside Tim Owens and Mary Kayler on UMW Domains, the Online Learning Initaitive, and, based on the document below, at least a nod to the nascent Digital Scholars Instititue. If the document Ryan created as a resource for attendees is any indicator, it looks to have been an amazing session. I really appreciate the way the handout balances the history and vision of DTLT’s work in the “Bags of Gold” section and then goes on to outline the convergence of the various digital initiatives happening at UMW. All of which is topped off with nuts and bolts resources for getting up and running with your own domain as well as a sidebar “Reclaim Toolkit.” I’ve been blogging about much of this work for over eight years now, and … [Read more...]

Faculty Focus: Andreá Livi Smith Teaches, Learns, and Lives By Design

DTLT Today: Episode 109 – Andreá Livi Smith from Jim Groom on Vimeo. It’s finals week and everyone is slammed for time right now on campus, but Historic Preservation professor Andreá Livi Smith was still generous enough to sit with me for a half hour and talk about the work she’s done as part of the Domain of One’s Own faculty initiative and beyond. Andi is a remarkable faculty member, and she is behind some of the most exciting work happening at UMW right now. She not only blogs like it’s her job at Digital Bridging, but she’s also designed a brilliant homepage for her courses, research, and social media presences, something we explore at length in this video. We also talk about the work she has done with Martha Burtis designing a database on UMW Blogs called Surveying the Burg. This site enables students to survey houses from around Fredericksburg on smart phones from the field. It’s remarkable in that it starts to demonstrate just how much more than a blog  this open source, … [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...]

Domain of One’s Own presentation at TEDxU SagradoCorazon

I already blogged a bit about both this presentation for TEDxUSagradoCorazon as well as a related talk I gave at Sagrado Corazon about how blogging informed my vision of media more generally, and edtech quite specifically, from the beginning of my career as an isntructional technologist. I literally stumbled into the field as a wayward literature Ph.D. candidate, and the ideas I discovered during the first days of personal blogging, namely creating, openly sharing, remixing, and archiving, continue to drive the work I am part of a decade later. For all that has changed, the ethos has stayed the same. The Domain of One’s Own presentation at TEDxUSagradoCorazon is actually four minutes shorter than the 18 minutes allotted, and I think I do a decent job of relating the Jon Udell’s idea of trailing edge technologies to the power of the web as a space that is predicated on open formats, free-for-all sharing, and distributed empowerment that scales globally yet is grounded in the … [Read more...]

Welcome to Cloud City…

Your domain is waiting for you Go to www.umwdomains.com to move in today. ______________________________________ The above poster is all Martha Burtis, and I love it! The visual is inspired by Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back, and I love the idea of marrying the idea of Domain of One’s Own to a futuristic advertising campaign for real estate in the cloud! Success with a  project like this is going to depend on getting the word out around campus, and there’s no better way than with some catchy advertising. And that’s where you come in. This is just the first of many posters we hope to be printing over the next fifteen weeks, and we want to invite anyone out there to share ideas they might have for awesome Domain of One’s Own posters. Email them to me (jimgroom_at_gmail.com), add them to the comments below, or use the #uwmdomains hashtag on Twitter. If we use your idea we will send you a framed version of the final poster autographed by the entire DTLT … [Read more...]