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...]
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...]
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...]
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...]
Gulou or, Public Scholarship in the Digital Age
This post is long overdue, and if I hadn’t checked out for a couple of months in April and May it would have been blogged on the bava a lot earlier. In fact, it’s criminal it hasn’t been broadcast more widely around the UMW community because the fact that Sue Fernsebner, a Chinese history scholar and faculty member in the History department at UMW, has a blog that has become a spotlight page for news on Tumblr is a kind of a big deal. Sue lays out the whole phenomenon far better than I ever could in this post. I love the way she ponders the implications of her blog being featured alongside major mass media new outlets: It’s now introduced there alongside established media (Reuters, LA Times, CNN, USA Today, etc.) and also accompanies other, less traditional but equally popular sites for news consumption (e.g. The Daily Show) on the same page. I’m just beginning to ponder the implications. What does it mean that an individual’s site—one person’s own, simple Tumblr—is … [Read more...]
An Ode to UMW Faculty
An Architecture of Amazing Possibility Andréa Livi Smith, who’s a Historic Preservation professor at UMW, found time on her blog to write a little ode honoring UMW’s DTLT. She contextualized it with an explanation as to why she is so enamored with this cutting edge, highly attractive group of instructional technologists They set up the blog aggregator for my Paris class. I love this thing: it keeps all my students’ blogs in one place, making for easy commenting and grading [the aggregator was the handy work of Alan Levine, I believe]. They also set up the system for my scavenger hunt which will be held in Paris later in the summer. (And no, you can’t see it yet. It’ll be the star of another post) All I had to do was explain what I wanted, what had not worked last year (seriously, it deserved an #epicfail) and voila! Now I have a system that will make it easier on the students and on me, and will be ready for the next trip, too. I can just imagine how this would have … [Read more...]
Faculty Recognized for Digital Pedagogy
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. … [Read more...]
Bearing Witness to Transformation: innovateOSU
Last week at this time I was locked into the 4th annual innovateOSU conference which showcases the work happening in educational technology at THE Ohio State State University. I was honored to have been invited to kick off the conference, and what I realized in my short time on campus was how engaged and focused group of administration and faculty at OSU is having the right conversations about the possibilities of online education—something that’s been bubbling up globally over the last 18 months. In fact, the great Barbara Sawhill came down from Oberlin, and we talked about just that, and then she blogged about it 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 … [Read more...]
A Domain of One’s Own to Community Syndication Hubs
I will be heading up to Boston this weekend thanks to Philipp Schmidt and Claudia Caro Sullivan who are hosting an open learning hackathon at MIT. Below is the proposal I submitted for an idea I would like to pursue conceptually and actually—what do you think? Tim Owens has already been working at some of this with Installatron, and I wonder if there is a better time than now to start figuring out how you create a community out of a variety of distributed, loosely connected domains. How do we start thinking of information architecture that allows students and faculty to control their work (a la UMW’s Domain of One’s Own) and feed it cleanly into a distributed campus publishing environment? I hope to talk and work with people around an idea of revisiting and framing a suite of tools that might be bundled (like Commons-in-a-Box) to make syndication hubs for online courses, communities, and even institutions that much more porous, open, and affordable. A perect example … [Read more...]