It’s been an exciting time at DTLT for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that the Domain of One’s Own project, much like the Death Star, has been fully operational for more than a semester now. We’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, and we have much more to learn this semester. We’ll be sharing out what we learned in more detail shortly, but in short: curricular integration is king. Moving beyond the cultural work we’re working towards with Domain on campus, there’s some technical stuff we’ve been exploring that’s pretty exciting. I’ve already wrote about the student coding projects we’re working on with professor Karen Anewalt’s Software Engineering course which should bare much fruit in the way of WordPress plugins for Domain of One’s Own and UMW Blogs. The other technical stuff we’ve been experimenting with is sharing our documentation for Domain of One’s Own. Tim … [Read more...]
Student Coded Projects for DTLT
This semester students in Karen Anewalt’s Software Engineering course (CPSC 430) will be working with DTLT to create a series of WordPress plugins/themes for UMW Blogs and Domain of One’s Own. This is pretty awesome because we could always use some development, and it gives these students experience working with clients who need particular functionality for an open source application. Traditionally students in this course put a call out to the community for projects and built applications for any takers from scratch. This model had some success, but the issue with this approach was that there was no one to take care of the application after the students graduated. Under this new approach, DTLT will be maintaing whatever they program. Major kudos to Martha Burtis for coming up with this model as well as taking the lead on organizing it. Below is a list of the projects we are asking the Computer Science students to develop. The descriptions are in italics and were written … [Read more...]
The Academic GIF
GIF from In the Mood for Love I wrote several months ago about the experience of working alongside UMW’s Chinese History scholar Sue Fernsebner to start imagining how she might integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centered around film analysis. I tongue-and-cheek referred to it as GIFiculum, or GIF as curriculum. Sue has been doing some serious work on this front, and she recently emailed me about how she will be re-structuring her Chinese History through Film course to make the GIF work central to the film analysis in the final paper. Framing it, to use Sue’s words, as “an exercise in visual and thematic analysis.” How cool is this? A few of us from DTLT will be heading to her class around mid-semester to run a workshop for the students on creating GIFs. This is something Andy Rush and I did last semester and it was a blast. There will also be a GIF Awards ceremony the final week of the course to collectively analyze and discuss what makes an effective “visual and … [Read more...]
UMW Domains a Win for Open
Audrey Watters has been on an all-out tear over at Hack Education as she wraps up the year in edtech. Few, if any, in the field are sharper, more concise, and resolutely independent of the institutional and corporate entanglements that pervade this space. I’ll echo so many others who have recognized how unbelievably important her voice is as a result. That said, working independently, speaking freely, and calling out so many on their nonsense doesn’t always pay the rent, so to help ameliorate this UMW’s DTLT would like to provide a standing offer of a job for Audrey when she finally decides to settle down Until then, I totally support her writing things like what follows when ennumerating the many “wins for open” in her recent post “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: The Battle for ‘Open’:” University of Mary Washington’s “Domain of One’s Own” initiative (one of the very best things in ed-tech right now) has been picked up by other universities, including Emory and Davidson. Also, in … [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...]
Open, Public Educational Publishing Platforms #4life
On Monday I checked in on the traffic stats for UMW Blogs, something I do from time-to-time when the semester starts to slow (the fact this didn’t happen until week 14 is telling). I was pleasantly surprised to see that UMW Blogs hit a new high for visits in a single day with 14,099 on Thursday, November 14. This is about 5,000 more visits than our daily average of 9,000. So, alongside Tim Owens and Martha Burtis, I started to dig into the details of the traffic for November 14th to see if there was any one post that was driving up the traffic. And, lo and behold, this post about The Matrix and the allegory of the cave by a student named Rebecca in Zach Whalen‘s Spring 2012 Adaptation course got 715 up votes on Reddit, and the rest is UMW Blogs traffic history. In just one day that post got 4,356 hits, and 8,193 hits over the course of the month. Crazy. This list of traffic by landing pages not only illustrates the reddit effect for the Matrix post, but also pointed us to … [Read more...]
DTLT Today Episode 107: Marie McAllister’s Domain of Her Own
For the 107th episode of DTLT Today, I sat down with English professor Marie McAllister to talk about her ongoing experimentation with technologies in her teaching over the last decade more generally. In particular, the amazing work she has done with the ever growing poetry anthology site Eighteenth Century Audio---a perennial UMW Blogs site that is one-of-a-kind on the web. Marie was part of the Domain of one's Own faculty initiative this past Spring, and what I love about her approach is that she is not afraid to experiment. Over the course of this discussion we talk about her work with an honor's Medical Writing course on DocuWiki, the English Coffee House Bulletin Board built within phpBB, her various forays intoWordPress, and her long history with MediaWiki. This is truly a domain of her own, and she epitomizes the vision of faculty becoming sysadmins of their profesional spaces online. What's more, I obviously agree with her when she says every university should be … [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...]
A Place of One’s Own
UMW’s President Rick Hurley The University of Mary Washington’s President Hurley published another article in the education section of The Huffington Post the week before last titled “A Place of One’s Own — Online.” This article builds on an earlier post published at the beginning of the month (which I already discussed here on the bava) that is part of a larger series about the “intersection of technology and pedagogy at colleges of the liberal arts and sciences.” This installment frames how UMW is not approaching instructional technologies as an afterthought, but rather is working to integrate it into the very fabric of the teaching and learning experience. This has been the case with UMW Blogs for more than six years, and the rollout of Domain of One’s Own is building upon that. The article frames Domain of One’s Own in the following ways: The Domain of One’s Own initiative urges and coaches our students to set up … [Read more...]