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...]

DTLT’s Innovative Work featured in The Blue Review

Leslie Madsen-Brooks featured the long history of innovative work coming out of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology in her article “Beyond Disruption” for The Blue Review. Below is a somewhat extensive quote from the article: Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At theUniversity of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways. For one, evidence of student learning appears on the open web, and I encourage you to check out the current blogs developed for courses. Faculty, too—and I know this from first-hand experience—benefit from knowing what … [Read more...]

Domain of One’s Own: a Peek at the Cyberinfrastructure

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...]