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...]
Converging
Image credit Andy Rush Yesterday I took a tour of the nearly completed Information Technology Convergence Center (a.k.a, ITCC and the Convergence Center). The building will be opening mid-Summer, which is hard to believe. I’ve been at UMW long enough now that I can say “I remember almost eight years ago when that building was just a twinkle in Chip German’s eye.” Well, the vision has been poured into concrete, and in two short months DTLT will be moving into our new digs in a pretty amazing building that will have an editing lab, production studio, a cyclorama, an incubator classroom, an active learning classroom, a digital auditorium, a digital knowledge center?, a media wall, a digital archiving lab, and much, much more. Tim Owens hard at work building the video production studio. Image credit Andy Rush In other words, we’re heading into a state of the art physical hub for all things digital. The move will bring our group into a building that will share … [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...]
Virtualization
Since I wrote a post last month about agile edtech, I’ve been thinking and talking with Tim Owens a fair amount about what a virtualized sandbox for DTLT (through something like Amazon Web Services) might look like. What would it mean for our group to have the ability to fire up a variety of server environments and corresponding applications (such as EdX’s MOOC platform) in minutes? As Tim noted, this could be the next chapter of the BlueHost experiment UMW’s DTLT embarked on a decade ago now. I knew I’d read about these virtualized environments sometime last year on Brian Lamb’s Abject blog, and after a bit of digging I found his “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind” post in which he points to an approach, with prodding from Boris Mann, that might provide another way of thinking about deploying applications within educational environments. A couple of days after Brian wrote that post, Stephen Downes OLDaily’d it, noting the following: The … [Read more...]
DTLT Today Episode 111: Jon Pineda’s Open Doors
This episode of DTLT Today features UMW Creative Writing professor Jon Pineda. It’s Jon’s first year at UMW, but that didn’t stop him from jumping into the Domain of One’s Own fray with both feet. He’s been experimenting with domains in the classes he teaches, and as well as a space to imagine various creative projects as part of his own work. He’s even bringing the literary journal Font: Poetry he created for high school students in Chesapeake, Virginia into the virtual world as a part of his work with the Domain of One’s Own faculty initiative. So, when Jon and I sat down this afternoon to talk I imagined we would spend most of out time talking about these various projects, but in the end we didn’t. We talked about his work. We talked about his memoir Sleep In Me—which sounds devastatingly brilliant. We talked about skateboarding. We talked about Michelangelo as bad teacher. We talked about demystifying the process of writing. We talked about the wonder of memory. We talked about … [Read more...]
DTLT Today Episode 110: Sue Fernsebner’s Digital History
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...]
UMW Domains-Now with More Community!
Domain of One’s Own has been an unqualified success, and Martha’s post on this project provides a nice summary of where we are at six months in. We’re on track to have more than 700 folks in the UMW community with their own domain and web hosting this academic year, and for 2014/15 we’re shooting to double that number with an additional 1500 domains. Just think of it, 2200 people with their own domain by year two. That’s almost half our campus community—that’s absolutely awesome. Unparalled in the known world—we’re the god damned Magellans of edtech! But like any age of exploration, we have to start mapping this brave new worlds for beauteous mankind, and that’s just what Martha Burtis and Tim Owens have been doing. Since the beginning of the semester they’ve been building a community hub for all of the distributed working happening on UMW Domains. Tim wrote about creating this space in some detail already, and … [Read more...]
Tim Owens: Making it Happen
There’s an article by Lindley Estes in yesterday’s Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg’s local newspaper) about UMW’s makerspaces. It chronicles the work Tim Owens has done, alongside education professor George Meadows and library director Rosemary Arneson, to create UMW’s Thinklab—a makerspace in the library that provides an “interdisciplinary hub of activity” where students can create stuff both for and beyond a given course. I’ve said this before, but of all the work DTLT has done in educational technology for the last decade, you could argue the collaborative endeavor to introduce 3D Printing, build a makerspace on the cheap , and collectively architect a freshman seminar (“Makerbots and Mashups”) may be the most powerful demonstration of the amazing fruits that can result from cooperative work between departments. What’s more, for all my UMW Blogs boosterism over the years (and I do love that publishing … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own is ALL BUSINESS
Somehow I missed the fact that the article about Domain of One’s Own published in University Business has already been out for a week. I’m slipping. I love that this article was published in an IT management-centered publication. IT management might not be our particular focus at DTLT—we’re all about the teaching and learning—but that’s part of the genius of Domain of One’s Own: it’s protean. And this isn’t the first time a more business-centered publication picked this initaitive up, last semester by Nicole Henderson wrote an article about UMW Domains on the Web Host Industry Review. The author of the article for University Business, Matt Zalaznick, talked with Tim “the wizard” Owens about the project, and it all sounds so good: The tools provided by the “Domain of One’s Own” initiative make it easier for students to carve out their own space on the web, and control and customize it… “Students want to make … [Read more...]
Digital Scholars Institute
Image by Kyle Bean: “The Future of Books.” One of the more exciting things to grow out of the Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative—the second cohort starts this week!—is Mary Kayler’s beautiful brainchild the Digital Scholars Institute. The Digital Scholars Institue is a way to continue the work started in the faculty initiative for those interested in sharing out the digital projects they are working on. It’s a way to bring a small group of faculty (5-7) together to talk about what they’re currently working on in the digital realm. The institute can provide a space for faculty to share the details of their work, get feedback from their peers, and publish their ongoing reflections at the end of the year. We’re roughly thinking of this being a series of 5-7 meetings a semester, each of which discusses one faculty member’s digital project (kind of like a dissertation group). They’ll be a cohort of faculty that continues to provide … [Read more...]