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...]

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...]

Digital Native

Caitlin Murphy ’12 knew she was prepared for a job that combined her history and digital studies degrees and thought a position at PBS would be the perfect fit. Not long after she submitted her application, Murphy got a call from the internationally renowned public broadcasting network. They had reviewed her resume and delved into her online [...] … [Read more...]

Digital Native

While at UMW, Caitlin Murphy '12 combined her passion for history with her love for technology. … [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...]

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...]