You can blame Brian Lamb for this post, he encouraged me to go for the trifecta. My last two posts were about 1) the possibilities public university publishing platforms offer institutions of higher ed to align their mission with the web, and 2) (if you can look beyond the nudie bombs and GIFs long enough ) how communities like Tumblr can be amazing open educational resources. So, for the third and final installment of this unplanned and rather haphazard series, I want to talk about an emerging trend at UMW that has me pretty excited: course domains. Although, to be honest, this post has in many ways already been written by Ryan Brazell. In “Mapping the Taiping Civil War” he lays out the amazing work he is doing alongside History professor Sue Fernsebner (speaking of educational Tumblrs!) and her students for the re-imagined research methods course she’s teaching this semester focusing on the Taiping Rebellion. In short, they have gotten a domain for the course … [Read more...]
Open, Public Educational Publishing Platforms #4life
On Monday I checked in on the traffic stats for UMW Blogs, something I do from time-to-time when the semester starts to slow (the fact this didn’t happen until week 14 is telling). I was pleasantly surprised to see that UMW Blogs hit a new high for visits in a single day with 14,099 on Thursday, November 14. This is about 5,000 more visits than our daily average of 9,000. So, alongside Tim Owens and Martha Burtis, I started to dig into the details of the traffic for November 14th to see if there was any one post that was driving up the traffic. And, lo and behold, this post about The Matrix and the allegory of the cave by a student named Rebecca in Zach Whalen‘s Spring 2012 Adaptation course got 715 up votes on Reddit, and the rest is UMW Blogs traffic history. In just one day that post got 4,356 hits, and 8,193 hits over the course of the month. Crazy. This list of traffic by landing pages not only illustrates the reddit effect for the Matrix post, but also pointed us to … [Read more...]
Distinguished Adjunct Professor Broadcasts Guerrilla Art Installation
On Nov. 7, distinguished adjunct professor of media, Dr. Brian Oblivion, installed a guerrilla art piece at the Open Education conference in Park City, Utah. The installation is a groundbreaking meditation on identity and data in the 21st century. Dr. Oblivion posits in this piece that “data is the new flesh.” With the help of [...] … [Read more...]
Tim Owens and Jim Groom Present at Open Education Conference
On Nov. 6, Tim Owens and Jim Groom of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies were part of a multi-institution presentation on “ Reclaiming the Open Learning Environment.” This talk introduced the vision behind the distributed architecture of Domain of One’s Own as an example of an innovative open learning environment that empowers faculty, staff, and [...] … [Read more...]
Jim Groom Delivers TEDx Presentation in Puerto Rico
On Oct. 18, 2013 Jim Groom delivered a TEDx presentation at the University of Sagrado Corazón in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The invited talk focused on the philosophy behind the Domain of One’s Own initiative happening currently at UMW. The video of the 14 minute presentation can be seen below. … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own presentation at TEDxU SagradoCorazon
I already blogged a bit about both this presentation for TEDxUSagradoCorazon as well as a related talk I gave at Sagrado Corazon about how blogging informed my vision of media more generally, and edtech quite specifically, from the beginning of my career as an isntructional technologist. I literally stumbled into the field as a wayward literature Ph.D. candidate, and the ideas I discovered during the first days of personal blogging, namely creating, openly sharing, remixing, and archiving, continue to drive the work I am part of a decade later. For all that has changed, the ethos has stayed the same. The Domain of One’s Own presentation at TEDxUSagradoCorazon is actually four minutes shorter than the 18 minutes allotted, and I think I do a decent job of relating the Jon Udell’s idea of trailing edge technologies to the power of the web as a space that is predicated on open formats, free-for-all sharing, and distributed empowerment that scales globally yet is grounded in the … [Read more...]
Digital Native
While at UMW, Caitlin Murphy '12 combined her passion for history with her love for technology. … [Read more...]
A Place of One’s Own
UMW’s President Rick Hurley The University of Mary Washington’s President Hurley published another article in the education section of The Huffington Post the week before last titled “A Place of One’s Own — Online.” This article builds on an earlier post published at the beginning of the month (which I already discussed here on the bava) that is part of a larger series about the “intersection of technology and pedagogy at colleges of the liberal arts and sciences.” This installment frames how UMW is not approaching instructional technologies as an afterthought, but rather is working to integrate it into the very fabric of the teaching and learning experience. This has been the case with UMW Blogs for more than six years, and the rollout of Domain of One’s Own is building upon that. The article frames Domain of One’s Own in the following ways: The Domain of One’s Own initiative urges and coaches our students to set up … [Read more...]
Opt-in to the Conversation Redesign
Have you noticed the changes to Conversations? Canvas has been tweaking a beta version for the last few months to improve its functionality. If you haven’t tried it yet, click the question icon and select the Try New Conversations option (the new Conversations is an opt-in feature). You'll see it mimics the look of Discussions. You can switch back to the old Conversations at any time by clicking the question icon again and selecting Switch Back to Old Conversations. So what's new? Courses drop-down menu: In the courses menu, you'll now be able to filter messages by course. Yay! We wanted that! You’ll also be able to organize your inbox by more courses and concluded courses. Tags will appear at the top of the inbox to show what course is being filtered. Compose new messages: The compose message icon creates a new window in the middle of your screen. You can filter recipients by course, create subject lines, and add attachments to messages. And you can continue the … [Read more...]