Domain of One’s Own 2.0: the Manatee Release

Domain of One’s Own, the distributed, web-based sea cow everyone loves! In this wopping one hour and 26 minute video Martha Burtis and Tim Owens take you through two years of development on the UMW Domains project. It’s the most thorough record available of the work they’ve been doing since Summer 2012, and it traces the thinking, development, and deployment of how UMW is giving every student, faculty, and staff a domain and web hosting account of their own. We understand that an hour and 26 minutes is a very long time, so we’re breaking down the conversation according to specific topics so you can watch what might be relevant for you: 00:01:26 – 00:10:30 Domain of One’s Own 0.5: The Alpha Pilot Timeframe: Spring 2012 through Spring 2013 In the first part of the video Tim and Martha discuss the pilot of Domain of One’s Own. We start with some history. During the Fall 2012/Spring 2013 Academic year we used a dedicated server with MediaTemple … [Read more...]

DTLT Today Episode 111: Jon Pineda’s Open Doors

This episode of DTLT Today features UMW Creative Writing professor Jon Pineda. It’s Jon’s first year at UMW, but that didn’t stop him from jumping into the Domain of One’s Own fray with both feet. He’s been experimenting with domains in the classes he teaches, and as well as a space to imagine various creative projects as part of his own work. He’s even bringing the literary journal Font: Poetry he created for high school students in Chesapeake, Virginia into the virtual world as a part of his work with the Domain of One’s Own faculty initiative. So, when Jon and I sat down this afternoon to talk I imagined we would spend most of out time talking about these various projects, but in the end we didn’t. We talked about his work. We talked about his memoir Sleep In Me—which sounds devastatingly brilliant. We talked about skateboarding. We talked about Michelangelo as bad teacher. We talked about demystifying the process of writing. We talked about the wonder of memory. We talked about … [Read more...]

DTLT Today Episode 110: Sue Fernsebner’s Digital History

In this episode of DTLT Today, Ryan Brazell and Jim Groom sit down with History professor Sue Fernsebner to talk about the vast array of awesome projects she’s been working on over the last year. The work discussed includes, but is not limited to: her experimentation with Twitter in the classroom; the immensely popular Tumblr, Gulou, on contemporary China she manages; GIFs as analysis in her Chinese History through Film course; the resource site on the Taiping Civil War designed alongside Ryan as part of her re-imagined History Methods course (read more about the course design here and here). The work Sue Fernsebner is doing in digital history is truly remarkable, and we hope this video starts to give you some sense of her process and approach as she takes us through  how she’s re-imagined her curriculum for the digital age over the last several years. … [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...]

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...]

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...]