Image credit: innovateOSU “Jim Groom Keynote” Jim Groom delivered the keynote presentation at Ohio State University’s fourth annual educational technology conference, innovateOSU, titled “Domain of One’s Own: Open Educational Experiences.” The presentation shared the work that has been happening at UMW over the past eight years, chronicling the fruits of DTLT‘s experimentations with commodity web hosting which led to innovative projects such as UMW Blogs, Digital Storytelling (ds106), and most recently Domain of One’s Own. You can see the slides for this presentation here. To see an archived video of the live presentation click here. … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative
February 1, 2013 by 1 Comment
I’ve been crazy this last month, and the proof is in the blog archive pudding: only eighteen god damned blog posts for January. I hope February proves to be a bit easier on the bava, but, with that said, January has been pretty awesome. In fact, this week seems like, to quote the oft blogging Andy Rush, “a watershed moment in DTLT history.” Why? Well, because for the last four days four members of DTLT and Mary Kayler, of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, have been running five cohorts with anywhere form 5-7 faculty talking about the details of both imagining and building their own domain. That’s right, the faculty initiative of Domain of One’s Own is up and running as of this week. What’s been so magical about the whole process is coming into pur offices throughout the week to groups of faculty asking questions about subdomains, digital identity, Installatron, DNS, and more! It’s magic at DTLT right now, and the key is all about thinking at once conceptually and … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own: a Peek at the Cyberinfrastructure
January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Last week Tim Owens and I mapped out the technical infrastructure of Domain of One’s Own as we prepare the purchasing request and generally ramp up for the roll out in Fall 2013. The image below is the result of our brainstorming: Let me try and lay it out for anyone interested in the technical details of how we’re planning on doing this thing, and for how much money. In the center of the image you see the server, at least immediately it will be a hosted, managed server through a serve like Rackspace. For roughly $350 /month we’ll get 8 GB RAM (4 virtual CPUs) and 320 GB storage, and we’ll be charged roughly .18 cents per GB of bandwidth each month. That server setup is roughly twice what we are running currently, and for another $100 a month we can get it managed, which means OS updates, general server maintenance, and someone who will listen to our issues. So, for a managed server with 1 TB of bandwidth each month we are looking at $630 a month just for the … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own discussion on Chronicle’s Tech Therapy
December 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment
One of the many awesome Gary Larsen’s The Far Side comics Earlier this week Jeff Young and Warren Arbogast (a UMW alumni!), of The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast, invited me on their program to work through some of the ideas at the heart of University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own project. You can listen to the half hour long episode here. What I’m enjoying about conversations like this about Domain of One’s Own is that the concept is starting to make a bit more sense in my mind as people push me to frame it as succinctly as possible. It’s not easy because, as Jeff and Warren note, at its core Domain of One’s Own is “heady stuff” —it’s a conceptual shift in how we think about controlling data, syndicating content, aggregating ideas, and, more importantly for UMW’s purposes, empowering faculty and students alike. There’s no one easy way to frame this project as an elevator pitch because … [Read more...]
Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own
November 13, 2012 by 5 Comments
Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own will be held on November 15th, 4:00-5:30 in the Red Room. Also, given the recent addition of a faculty forum at that time we will be also hosting this session again on Thursday, November 29th from 4:00-5:30 in the Red Room. Attend Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own to learn about a groundbreaking UMW digital initiative sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation (CTE & I) and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT). President Hurley recently provided support so that a number of new domains and hosting can be established along with funding to provide technical support for this new initiative. There are now over 200 UMW students who have established their own domain names and bound their personal learning spaces to them. What’s more, there are ten professors who have piloted the initiative this semester by integrating it into their curriculum to varying degrees. Martha Burtis and Alan Levine have their … [Read more...]
Open Call – Domain’s of One’s Own University Initiative
November 8, 2012 by
Open Dialogue – Domain’s of One’s Own has been rescheduled to November 15th, 4:00-5:30 in the Red Room. Attend the Open Dialogue – Domain of One’s Own to learn about a groundbreaking UMW digital initiative sponsored by the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation (CTE & I) and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT). A number of new domains and hosting will be established along with funding to incentivize this new initiative. There are now over 200 UMW students who have established their own domain names and bound their personal learning spaces to them. What’s more, there are ten professors who have piloted the initiative this semester by integrating it into their curriculum to varying degrees. Martha Burtis and Alan Levine have their students creating multimedia notebooks/portfolios of their work that they can they can continue to use or archive. Zach Whalen has his students creating their own web spaces that helps them take control and re-conceptualize … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own has been funded!
November 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Man, when I think about how much blogging I haven’t yet done tonight that I need to, I begin to realize just how awesome a moment it is at UMW right now. Not only are we part of the visioning committee for a statewide conference for thinking how Virginia’s educational resources might be shared more effectively, we are also working on developing an online learning initiative designed from values (which also has been been funded for next year); we’re rocking the makerspace; we’re making kickass videos about how awesome we are; we’ve had a hand in this little thing called ds106; and more generally we are swaggering like Mick Jagger…. But in addition to all that we got news earlier this week that the Domain of One’s Own will be fully funded moving forward! This is huge for our group on a few counts: 1) it includes a half-time position that can help us get fully staffed again, 2) it illustrates the administration at UMW is fully committed to … [Read more...]
A Culture of Innovation
October 2, 2012 by 1 Comment
A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo. UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2nd at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Online Fall Focus Session on the theme of innovation in higher education. The basic question guiding the presentation, which was centered around the 7 minute video above, was the following: how does a university like UMW consistently foster innovative projects like UMW Blogs, ds106, and, more recently, A Domain of One’s Own? There’s no one adequate stock answer to such a question, so when preparing the presentation DTLT decided to interview students, faculty, and staff around campus to get a broader sense of the culture of innovation happening at UMW. What DTLT got in return for its labors was quite compelling. The video was shot and edited by Andy Rush, and it’s just a teaser for a much larger documentary that DTLT is planning on making this semester to start chronicling and narrating the culture of … [Read more...]
Documenting a Domain of One’s Own
August 28, 2012 by 2 Comments
Over the last month or so we’ve been piecing together the Domain of One’s Own pilot, and it really is a thing of beauty. I already talked about how we’re using it to archive a ton of work we’ve done over the past seven years, as well as how it represents an architecture of empowerment for faculty and students alike. In this post I want to talk a bit about how we’re running and supporting this pilot to give folks a sense of the practical day-to-day of getting something like this off the ground. First off, We’re running both the commodity web hosting and domains through Media Temple. More than seven years ago in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) we started a similar pilot that gave all the instructional technology staff their own domain and web hosting through Bluehost in order to experiment with what’s possible. Seven years later we’re doing that same experiment with at least 400 faculty and staff, but this … [Read more...]
From the Archive: ELS Blogs
August 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment
This time 5 years ago we were closing down ELS Blogs, UMW’s first multi-user WordPress experiment (well actually the second if you count Lyceum), to make way for the campus-wide blogging platform that would be known as UMW Blogs. Five years ago at UMW’s DTLT were heady times, there was still a lot of promise and possibility around the ideas of open publishing through open source applications—much of which has dissipated lately. The ability to deliver an open source publishing platform for an entire campus in-house with no coding experience and even less time is a little heralded marvel of the open web. ELS Blogs had a bunch of amazing blogs on it, with the majority of them being students of Gardner Campbell, whose vision was the reason behind the platform. In fact, part of the push to get ELS Blogs back online came after I recieved an email from one of his students asking about her blog: I graduated from UMW in 2008. I had a blog through this site for a film class back in 2007 … [Read more...]