Over a week ago the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) met with the six faculty in this year’s cohort of the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) here at UMW. The OLI provides a framework for faculty over the course of a year to try and integrate the values of a liberal arts education into an online learning experience. Martha Burtis has this year’s cohort running like a well-oiled machine, and I think this initiative is really finding it’s groove. (And for that matter so is Martha, full time suits her well, the planet’s must be aligning .) But none of that is what I really wanted to blog about, the OLI just happened to be the occasion for me to catch up with Biology professor Steve Gallik—one of UMW’s finest faculty innovators—who turned me on to yet another awesome service of the open web I hadn’t been aware of, namely PediaPress. This is a service that allows you to collect and collate Wikipedia articles into a book … [Read more...]
Cellular Storytelling
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...]