500 Open Courses on UMW Blogs

At the beginning of every semester I get a hankering to post something about UMW Blogs. I don’t know why, it has arrived to the point that it’s more like air than technology around campus at this point. We regularly have more than 50 faculty using this platform any given semester as a space to share their teaching out in the open, and after five and a half years of UMW Blogs we now have more than 500 courses on the system (and this doesn’t include courses from the 2007/2008 academic year—we didn’t start tracking them until Fall 08). What’s more, since we started tracking traffic on UMW Blogs in Fall 2009 we have had more than five million unique visitors and almost twelve million page views—two million of those page views came last semester alone. Five hundred open educational experiences laid bare to the world at large, each one a love letter to the ideal of thinking, sharing, and creating on the open web as part of a public institution. To be … [Read more...]

Eduglu Revisited: The Syndication Bus 2012

It’s been more than a year since I’ve really thought, no less written about, the syndication bus as it relates to ds106. For any of you who might be new to the idea of the syndication bus, it’s an approach to syndicating posts from various blogs or other social media sites into a space that can be filtered by tags or categories in order to help manage the flow of data so that it can be discovered, explored, and aggregated into a space that helps build community. On and off over the past 5 years I—as well as many others for much longer—have been obsessed with the idea of designing such a space. In many ways it’s the philosophy that undergirds the design logic that made UMW Blogs a syndication rich platform for aggregating course sites, study abroad blogs, clubs and organization sites, etc. So, it’s interesting that George Kroner should tweet earlier today that a post back in 2007 contained a lot of interesting conversation about the idea of the … [Read more...]