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 [UMW Blogs, ds106, Domain of One's Own, and the ThinkLab] that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways.

Or….

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world.

And…

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education.

I’m verklempt!  It’s awesome to see the innovative work happening at UMW  for almost a decade now  get recognized more broadly. Leslie’s framing her brilliant article around our work is the highest of compliments, and it really means a lot coming from someone who has been doing this work from  both a support staff and faculty position for a long time now. People often ask “What’s in the water at UMW?” or “What are you all smoking?!” And while I don’t have a stock answer to that, I can say this: the simple process of openly narrating the work we do on our blogs has almost everything to do with our success. In other words, our willingness to regularly document the work we do, shared it openly, and even featured the work of others happening around the community has been what ultimately has made UMW’s DTLT that much better (and we are that much better). When you think about it, we’re not that different from a ton of other ed tech shops around the world: we support faculty, we run an LMS, we experiment with web-based tools, we pretend to understand what new media means, etc. For me, the one real difference is we have taken the time to narrate that process openly, which usually results in promoting the work happening around campus and injecting a little fun into the process (Andy Rush and I talk about this very thing all the time).

What’s most interesting to me about this formula is that it isn’t technical, it’s all cultural. Rather than squawking about MOOCs and the inescapable educational apocalypse, we went ahead and built our own networked online course (the ever irreverent ds106) that was very much inspired by the OG MOOCs, but was designed for our particular campus culture. Why aren’t more people doing this? Why are so many people wasting endless time writing about “MOOCs and the Latest Form of Autodidactic Rock Climbing Walls” rather then actually promoting the real work happening on the ground at their campuses. And I am not trying to be critical here because I have been to enough campuses the last four or five years to know there is a ton of awesome stuff happening at so many of them, it just so happens very few people are actually narrating it. The MOOC narrative has taken over, and we are all the poorer for it. Homegrown innovation on a university or college campus is not really all that complicated, it starts with the commitment to regularly tell the story about where you are and what you are doing rather than hanging to a bill of goods you are being sold about where you should be. Anyway, thanks Leslie, your article ruled, and it really made a bad month a little better. Big fan!

The innovative ThinkLab Makerspace in the Simpson Library of UMW has been featured in the latest publication from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s 7 Things series on rapid innovation. UMW is cited alongside Stanford, Rutgers, and Case Westerns among other institutions for recognizing early on the importance of makerspaces as a way to inspire self-directed and hands-on learning using emerging technologies like 3D printing, robotics, and e-textiles. DTLT and UMW’s work has been featured in past issues of the 7 Things series on a variety of topics including MOOCs, WordPress, and 3D Printing technology. The full paper can be found on the EDUCAUSE website in PDF and ePub format.

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 students are thinking (as expressed in blog posts and comments) before they convene for class.

Several years ago, UMW’s DTLT premiered UMW Blogs, termed “the Bluehost experiment” by the DTLT staff because in its first iteration, it was little more than a WordPress Multi-User installation on an inexpensive ($6.95 per month) shared server at Bluehost. Today, any UMW student, faculty, or staff can set up a blog for class or personal use on UMW Blogs—and 500 courses have been brought onto the platform since fall 2008.  Anyone can browse the courses using UMW Blogs or discover all kinds of non-course blogs by exploring the latest posts featured on the home page. The UMW archives, for example, recently put online a series of lectures by the late civil rights leader James Farmer, and Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class has createdRosie the Riveter, an excellent resource that includes “firsthand accounts of what people experienced on the American home front during World War II.”

Next to emerge from this innovation engine was DS 106, an open course on digital storytelling, originally taught by Jim Groom, but since taught by several different instructors, including noted ed tech thought leaders and innovators Martha Burtis and Alan Levine, and recently by instructors at other universities as well. Because of the strong networks of the instructors and students, DS 106 took on a life of its own, with students—both those enrolled at UMW and those following the course from elsewhere—providing daily fun assignments (“the Daily Create”) that stimulate participants’ creativity and stretch their technological savvy. DS 106 spawned ds106 radio, a free-form, streaming broadcast for which anyone could volunteer to provide content.  How popular is DS 106 and its apparently endless stream of creative multimedia content? In spring 2012, Groom launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a better web server for DS 106, and the campaign raised 600% of its goal in just a few days, providing funding for all kinds of course improvements and expansions.  While Kickstarter provided private funds for this project, I’m excited about this kind of crowdsourced funding—although I’d be even more enthusiastic about greater public funding—because it allows project creators greater future freedom than would, say, funding from investors whose motive is more likely to be profit than pedagogical revolution.

Springing next from the mind of the DTLT geniuses was Domain of One’s Own, in which each first-year student at UMW receives a domain name and space on a web server. The project encourages each student  to “reclaim the web” by “taking control of your digital identity,” gathering its artifacts “in a central place that you own and control.” And it’s offered in collaboration with the university’s Office of Information Technology Services,

The pilot gave 400 students and faculty their own domain name and web space to install a portfolio of work or map onto existing systems. In Fall of 2013 every incoming student at UMW will have the opportunity to choose their own domain and receive a web hosting account with the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases, email addresses and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control.

Then, as if granting students this creative freedom and technical autonomy wasn’t enough, this spring UMW launched Thinklab, amakerspace. According to its About page:

ThinkLab is the exciting new makerspace located in the Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington. As a collaboration between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, the College of Education, and the Library, ThinkLab hosts a variety of emerging technologies and tools for students and faculty across all disciplines. 3D printing, robotics, and electronics work using Arduinos and simple breadboard kits are just some of the many exciting things happening at ThinkLab.

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world. Channeling George Kuh, Randall Bass emphasizes that such “high-impact practices” lead to “meaningful learning gains” as well as “high retention and persistence rates” because they encourage these specific behaviors:

• Investing time and effort
• Interacting with faculty and peers about substantive matters
• Experiencing diversity
• Responding to more frequent feedback
• Reflecting and integrating learning
• Discovering relevance of learning through real-world application

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education.

On May 6th an interview with Jim Groom was aired on the Ohio State University’s radio program Writers Talk. The discussion focuses on the work he has done as part of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology: ranging from the formation of UMW Blogs, the popular appeal of the Digital Storytelling class affectionately known as ds106 and its relationship to those confounded MOOCs, as well as DTLT’s current groundbreaking project Domain of One’s Own. The interview runs 30 minutes and you can listen to it below.

OSU Writers Talk

*** Basic View is still fully functional for introductory math students and courses.

A ceremony and reception on Friday, April 12 celebrated the work of faculty members in the realm of digital pedagogy.

Professor of Spanish Elizabeth Lewis and Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation Andrea Livi Smith were awarded the Innovative Digital Pedagogy Fellowship. Assistant Professor in the College of Education Janine Davis, Associate Professor of History Susan Fernsebner and Assistant Professor of Music Mark Snyder received honorariums for their work in digital pedagogy and scholarship. Faculty who participated in UMW’s first Domain of One’s Own Faculty-centered Initiative also were recognized at the ceremony.

President Richard V. Hurley was on-hand to congratulate the award recipients and to express his support for the initiatives. The Innovative Digital Pedagogy Fellowship Award Ceremony was a collaboration between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and the Center for Teaching Excellence.

As part of an attempt to start imagining what open systems for publishing and sharing a community’s work—as UMW has done exceptionally well with UMW Blogs, ds106, and Domain of One’s Own—Jim Groom (the Director of the Division of teaching and Learning Technologies) has been invited to the Open Learning Hackathon at MIT this weekend to work with a range of thinkers to start framing an architecture that might harness and expose the power of loosely coupled syndication systems modelled on the qweb rather than monolithic information systems..

The night before my presentation I was breaking bread with OSU’s Provost Joe Allutto, Social Work Dean Tom Gregoire,  Undergraduate Dean Wayne Carlson, math professor James Fowler, Chemistry professor Matthew Stoltzfus, Communications professor Nicole Kraft, and English professor Kay Halasek—and all of them to a person were deeply engaged in the questions of how OSU as a learning community will engage the world of online learning. And while they are experimenting with Coursera, that is just one avenue they are imagining—and Jim Fowler who is currently teaching Calculus 1 through Coursera has been programming  his own online course platform—which is exciting. What’s more, a community of faculty is thinking hard about what this means for a school that operates on the scale of OSU—and the experimentation is happening.

Mike Hofher and Steve Lieb setting up for innovateOSu

I guess this is where I am feeling buoyed by this trip, a big 10 university like OSU is actually investing a significant amount of resources in people like Mike Hofherr (the newly minted Associate Vice President of Distance Education and eLearning), Liv Gjstvang (the Digital First Director) and Steve Lieb to name just a few. And the leadership Mike Hofher has provided this group over the last two years is remarkable, he has a staff that is ready to re-imagine the work they do—-and everyone to a person I talked to was genuinely excited about the direction they are heading in. That is no small thing.

I think what is happening at OSU right now, will soon be happening in a lot of places, re-aligning resources and making a push to develop and work with faculty to engage online learning head-on. The fact that OSU is being proactive about this is smart, and, at least for me, that might be the silver lining of the MOOC craze as of late. Universities and colleges start to take the possibilities or engaging online learning seriously, we invest in experimenting wildly in this space, and ultimately realize we’ve only just begun and universities can build and design these spaces better than the venture-capital driven companies out of Silicon Valley (but that’s just me ). A new movement to invest in people not gamble on futures and shares.

Chris and Anand at innovateOSU

An educational community that is locked in can really make a difference in this space right now, and OSU is on the way to demonstrating that in spades. Not only do they have the centralized learning technologies support, but folks like Chris Hill represent a grass roots movement of edtech happening on campus, and seemed to me the two were working together to make the transformation that much more of a cultural shift.  It’s really exciting to go to a community in which you can actually see the community transformation occurring, and it’s funny how often that is coupled with an educational technology conference. There’s something to that. In fact, E. Gordon Gee was even tweeting at me! That is pretty amazing, and as someone in this field to have a president of such a high-profile institution reach out and give you a virtual high five is powerful! He is doing something very right.

Ohio State’s 4th annual #innovateosu conference began today—great to have @jimgroom on campus for keynote. @osudigitalfirst

— E. Gordon Gee (@presidentgee) March 26, 2013

I had a the pleasure of meeting with folks, sharing what I thought (always surprised to find folks listening ), and always honored to represent the work we are doing at the University of mary Washington. There is something really exciting about a big, public research university like OSU being deeply interested in what a small, public liberal arts college is doing with online teaching and learning communities. UMW is the little school that does.

Anyway, I had nothing short of a blast, I was injected into a community that is firing on all cylinders, and I shared the culture of experimentation we’ve been cultivating here at UMW for years as a means to hopefully inspire the folks at OSU to keep doing the awesome stuff they’ve started, experiment wildly, shave their heads , and not be afraid to take the amazing work they do as a teaching, learning, and research community and open up what they can to the public. An ethos of open that I ‘ve been pushing in my last three presentations.

On that note, I have been working through a presentation over the last two months, since SUNY’s Online Learning Summit Conference to be exact, wherein I have been trying to spell out what the field of “open” looks like currently, how I understand UMW’s approach to that has been, and what this means for truly rethinking teaching, learning, and IT infrastructure. It’s been a real pleasure to start fresh with a brand new presentation two months ago, and fine tune it at Virginia’s ACCS conference in mid-March, and then present my finalized version at innovateOSU. I’ll now move on to a new conceit, otherwise my talks tend to get routinized and uninspired (which I never let happen ), I kinda liked this new method. Focus in on a talk for an intense period of time, try and fine tune it, and then try something new after two or three passes. Anyway, I’m happy where this one ended. You can see the slides below and an archived video of the entire presentation here:

And, at the end of my time when I was back in Fredericksburg what do I get? A follow-up tweet from President Gee!

@jimgroom Do hope you enjoyed your time with us!

— E. Gordon Gee (@presidentgee) March 27, 2013

I most certainly enjoyed my visit, and in no small part thanks to an engaged community that understands online learning is here to stay, MOOCs are one small part of that, and the experimentation within institutions needs to start now!