UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik has dreamed up a very cool approach for students in his Histology lab to share and comment on what’s under the microscope. Rather than purchasing expensive camera-ready digital microscopes, he worked with the UMW Teaching Center to purchase a few cheap digital cameras that can upload images quickly to the web so students can post them to a course site. The resulting course site designed by the inimitable Tim Owens is a highly attractive, intensely visual course space on UMW Blogs that streamlines posting for students thanks to the Gravity Forms plugin (which is premium—what is happening to us!). What I love about this experiment is how beautiful the images of these mammal cells are, and how the students’ brief description coupled with the gorgeous images tell a story about the life and death of cells. Not only that, but it reinforces the idea that new approaches to storytelling with media cuts across all disciplines—it’s not an exclusive a concern … [Read more...]
2011 Online Venice Exhibit
We talk a lot about livestreaming and broadcasting at DTLT. It has quickly become one of the core focuses of our group through projects like DTLT Today and the purchase of our own Kit. We made the proposal to the Teaching Center at UMW to have a kit that would allow us flexibility to go into a classroom and broadcast that action live, bring in folks from around the world to engage and interact with the students. Yesterday we got the first opportunity to do just that. Professor Marjorie Och has led a group of art history students at UMW through the creation of an exhibit on Venice that is completely online. You can probably guess based on that URL that we helped them build it on top of WordPress with UMW Blogs and between the work they did and some tweaking we did to the Autofocus+ theme the site is gorgeous. The opening of the exhibit was yesterday and Andy and I brought the whole setup down to the room to stream it live. I made the announcement on Twitter that we’d be … [Read more...]