All Aboard!!!

More than a week ago the President of UMW, Rick Hurley, published a piece in The Huffington Post explainging how and why UMW was “Getting Aboard the Hightech Train.” What’s crazier than anything, is why it’s taken me over a week to blog about this article! What’s wrong with me, this is an article in which UMW’s president openly acknowledges that the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology is essential to the future of UMW. More than that, he publicly says things I think are totally awesome, such as the following: …about eight years ago, the University of Mary Washington created a Division of Teaching and Learning Technology and staffed it with the brightest, most creative people we could find. At the time, a lot of schools were investing in software, in learning management systems, programs and platforms. But we invested in people. We wanted them to be our braintrust, to work with our faculty to find interesting and innovative ways to use … [Read more...]

Wrigley Ivy: Jack Bales on the Chicago Cubs

I've been meaning to write a post about Jack Bales's amazing work as part of the Domain of One's Own faculty initiative this past Spring, but somehow a post seemed inadequate. For more than three years now I've been bothering Jack, telling him he should get a domain to feature all the amazing research he does. An effort which resulted in his first domain: jackbales.com. And by no means was I pandering to Jack's ego (if he even has one), he has eight books under his belt, and his magnum opus---a multi-volume tome on the history of the Chicago Cubs---is being written presently. Jack is a titan amongst librarians, and a veritable icon at Mary Washington. He's been at UMW for 33 years now, and in addition to his copious research and stellar publication history, his work ethic with faculty and students on a day-to-day basis is the stuff of legend. Like Jack, I support faculty as part of my job here at UMW, so I have a very good idea how much time and energy goes into supporting more than … [Read more...]

Domain of One’s Own, Digital Liberal Arts, and the Popular Imagination

When I saw UMW’s Faculty and Staff Newsletter (a.k.a Eagle Eye) today, the top story was about the fact that UMW was being featured in Virginia Living magazine’s 2013 Educational Supplement as one of Virginia’s innovative schools. The two things responsible for getting UMW mentioned are Domain of One’s Own and the Information Technology Convergence Center (which is coming online next year). This is a very cool day for DTLT for a few reasons: First, while we’ve been referenced by the Chronicle a number of times over the years for various projects, focus on the work we’re doing in Virginia Living (the state’s most popualr lifestyle magazine) suggests we’re crossing over. More than just being seen as a fringe “blog” shop, the work we’re doing is starting to impact the broader identity of UMW. We’re becoming a mecca for innovative technologies when it comes to teaching and learning around the state for the average, … [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...]

Tracking Over Four Years of Traffic on UMW Blogs

I’m working on presentation about assessment on another front, and as an excuse for a break I decided to post some recent UMW Blogs traffic statistics from the last four years. I know analytics and data is all the rage currently, and these numbers should somehow enable me to better articulate UMW Blogs’ usefulness. Nonetheless, they always seem at once massive and paltry. Massive in that various work produced on UMW Blogs by thousands of students have been viewed 13+ million times over the last four years by milliosn of people. Paltry in that 13 million views is a middling viral YouTube video at best. Probably like most people in the era of “big data,” I often feel lost in a malaise of statisitcal aggregates—data that ultimately means less than nothing without a context. The only hope I garner from this is that people are finding our work, but not at the aggregate. Seems to me it’s at the ground level—thousands of sites with tens and hundreds … [Read more...]

PediaPress

Over a week ago the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) met with the six faculty in this year’s cohort of the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) here at UMW. The OLI provides a framework for faculty over the course of a year to try and integrate the values of a liberal arts education into an online learning experience. Martha Burtis has this year’s cohort running like a well-oiled machine, and I think this initiative is really finding it’s groove. (And for that matter so is Martha, full time suits her well, the planet’s must be aligning .) But none of that is what I really wanted to blog about, the OLI just happened to be the occasion for me to catch up with Biology professor Steve Gallik—one of UMW’s finest faculty innovators—who turned me on to yet another awesome service of the open web I hadn’t been aware of, namely PediaPress. This is a service that allows you to collect and collate Wikipedia articles into a book … [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...]

Paris is Burning through Syndication

Have I ever mentioned how awesome #UMW‘s Study Abroad blog aggregator is? More than 200 posts since June. #4Life — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) July 20, 2013 When I tweeted out how awesome UMW’s Study Abroad aggregator blog is a few folks asked me how we’re doing the syndication. Aggregation is something I’ve written about so often on the bava blog that I’m afraid I take for granted. That said, I really don’t want to because I truly believe it is the best way to foster distributed communities, enable ownership of one’s own work, and keep a centralized archive all at once. Aggregation by way of RSS-enabled syndication is still the simplest way at this stuff, and I’m gonna try and prove that once again So with the aforementioned Study Abroad blog aggregator we have almost 90 feeds that have been added (self-service style) over the last two and half years that have syndicated more than 2300 posts. We do this using the plugin called … [Read more...]

DTLT Today: Episode 104, UMW’s Domain of One’s Own

Note: At two points in the above video (roughly at 12 minutes and 22 minutes) there’s cacophonous feedback when we go to the shot of the laptop. Andy picks it up and fixes it soon after the 22 minute mark. I’ll be editing this out sometime soon, apologies in the meantime. Those clips with heavy feedback loop have been edited out. After a year and a half hiatus DTLT Today is finally back in action with episode 104. Even better, we had the whole old gold crew together (i.e. Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Tim Owens, and myself) to talk about the Domain of One’s Own project we’re kicking off this Fall for 1000 freshman. I pushed for this episode because I was blown away by how streamlined Tim Owens and Martha Burtis had engineered the sign-up using the client management software WHMCS. It’s extremely slick; a two step process that gives students and faculty alike their own domain and web hosting immediately. What’s more, the domain propagates in less than 10 … [Read more...]

DTLT Today: Episode 104, UMW’s Domain of One’s Own

Note: At two points in the above video (roughly at 12 minutes and 22 minutes) there’s cacophonous feedback when we go to the shot of the laptop. Andy picks it up and fixes it soon after the 22 minute mark. I’ll be editing this out sometime soon, apologies in the meantime. After a year and a half hiatus DTLT Today is finally back in action with episode 104. Even better, we had the whole old gold crew together (i.e. Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Tim Owens, and myself) to talk about the Domain of One’s Own project we’re kicking off this Fall for 1000 freshman. I pushed for this episode because I was blown away by how streamlined Tim Owens and Martha Burtis had engineered the sign-up using the client management software WHMCS. It’s extremely slick; a two step process that gives students and faculty alike their own domain and web hosting immediately. What’s more, the domain propagates in less than 10 minutes. It’s amazing to see how cleanly and … [Read more...]