Yesterday on Twitter Ted Curran asked me if UMW Blogs supports scholarly publishing, as opposed to just “informal” publishing. Hey @jimgroom- does UMW use @umwblogs to support scholarly publication or just “informal” publishing? Could/should it be able to do both? — Ted Curran (@tedcurran) January 10, 2013 It’s a good question, and it helped me realize that I’m increasingly blurring the distinction between scholarly and informal publishing. An occupational hazard, I guess. That said, and in fairness to Ted, there are a number of very clear indicators for scholarly publications: peer-reviewed, usually within a journal, and the author usually has three letters after their name. For all the amazing stuff we have going on in UMW Blogs, we don’t actually publish a formal scholarly journal. That said, we do have more than 40 student-created literary journals, 100s of student created research sites (here are just a few), the student newspaper, the UMW … [Read more...]
A Few Notes on Updating UMW Blogs to WordPress 3.5
The upgrade process for WordPress has been so seamless the last three or four versions that I didn’t realize how spoiled I’ve been until I finally had an issue (and even that was quite simple to resolve). Between automatic updates for plugins, themes, and core files, WordPress has nailed the convenience end of upgrades, and that’s no small thing—just ask anyone who has to upgrade a Mediawiki install UMW Blogs did have one hangup going from 3.4.2 to 3.5 with the SharDB plugin. It was throing the following error: Warning: array_search() expects parameter 2 to be array, null given in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/db.php on line 250 Luke Waltzer had the same issue on Blogs@Baruch, so I knew I was in good company And, as is always the case, Ron Rennick (the original author of the plugin) was on it. (Ron and Andrea deserve every bit of kudos they get from the WordPress community and more.) He fixed the issue in the db.php file for the plugin and noted … [Read more...]
Longwood Blogs Moves Out!
Almost four years ago I experimented with what up and until then was pretty much the coolest thing I had done in edtech (pre-ds106, mind you )—though no one else really noticed save the great Brian Lamb. In less than an hour I had cloned and made available the entire UMW Blogs WordPress framwork (including hosting, plugins, themes, and support material) for Longwood University—a fellow Virginia state university—for the low, low cost of a domain. So, in other words, two years of experimentation and iteration packaged up and mapped to greenwoodlibrary.org at the low, low cost of $8.95 for a namepsace. The trick was mapping a network onto UMW Blogs and using the same core files, themes, and plugins as UMW Blogs (I used a much earlier version of David Dean’s Networks for WordPress plugin). These days the process is pretty common, we’re doing it pretty impressively on umw.edu—but in 2008 it was a bit of radical idea. In fact, I had big dreams for it, this is from my post on the experiment … [Read more...]
UMW Blogs is Full of Rainbows and Unicorns
UMW is gearing up for its accreditation review in 2013. We are part of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools which is one of the six regional accrediting bodies in the US that oversees more than 13,000 public and private educational institutions from preschool to university. It’s an interesting process to watch unfold—even from my myopic perspective of it—and what’s even cooler is that thanks to Tim O’Donnell—the glutton for punishment running the SACS review at UMW—the work done by DTLT over the last 5 or 6 years will be prominently featured as part of the review. I won’t bore folks with the UMW Blogs story because I already wrote the story of the emergence of UMW Blogs a few years ago. Rather, I want to focus a bit on some of the materials I’ve been working on that I think might be useful beyond the SACS review. I’m going to publish some of that here to see if anything resembling a narrative emerges from the disparate pieces. In the event a narrative doesn’t congeal, … [Read more...]
UMW Blogs, a.k.a. Old Faithful
Me and UMW Blogs are going on 5 years this Summer, she’s is the baddest of the bad and meanest and leanest of the mean and lean. She’s a veritable titan of her kind, she’s an educational publishing platform of the very best kind, and she’s turning five. Five years ago from roughly May through August we brought together the early MistyLook themed WPMu and MediaWiki hybrid out into this wasteland of bad BlackBoard installs, and we shone a light. A light of good publishing practices, a site for everyone regardless of his or her class status, and course spaces that actually looked good. We were already dreaming of fancy syndication, course aggregation, and a space attractive and user friendly enough that you would actually want to have a stake in it. It worked, five years later we have more than 6500 sites and 8500 users, and that number has steadily increased over these past five years. We run heavy traffic sites like UMW Bullet and EagleEye, or blogs for alumni 3 and 4 years out. … [Read more...]
Civil Rights Leader James Farmer’s UMW Lectures Online
More than five years ago DTLT started working with UMW’s archivist Carolyn Parsons to try and digitize James Farmer’s video lecture series recorded here at UMW in 1983. The lecture series is an awesome historical resource featuring James Farmer---one of the greatest orators of the 20th century---re-telling his compelling experiences as a civil rights activist in the South during the 1960s. And while the project laid dormant for many years, thankfully Jeff McClurken’s and four of his students in Adventures in Digital History class resurrected it and brought it to life online. Laura Donahue, Michelle Martz and Caitlin Murphy and Kelsey Matthews archived, transcribed, and contextualized 13 of Farmer’s lectures from 1983. What’s more, they’ve created what is arguably the single best resource site yet to see light on UMW Blogs: http://jamesfarmerlectures.umwblogs.org/ The vertical hold on the VHS tapes with the first 4 lectures were in such bad shape that they’ve been shipped out for … [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...]
UMW Cited as Model for Future of Networked Learning
UMW, and UMW Blogs in particular, is being heralded in Richard Demillo's new book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities as a space of great educational ferment, to quote from George Leef's review of the book here. In fact, Leef's review not only examines more popular open education mainstays like MIT's Open Courseware, but spends a bit of time discussing the role of networked culture in re-imagining the future of higher education: Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information. In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the … [Read more...]
UMW Blogs: A 2011 Snapshot
Here are the number for UMW Blogs for all of 2011. 1,530,580 Visits 1,049,706 Unique Visitors 3,417,021 Pageviews 2.23 Pages/Visit 00:01:48 Avg. Time on Site The stats never cease to mesmerize me, even though they are plateauing. But if you stop for a second and think about it, we have more than 1 million people looking at, using, or interacting with academic we're doing at UMW. That is nothing short of amazing by higher ed standards for a school of our size, at the same time the scale is almost laughable for a moderately popular YouTube video. That, for me, is both the amazing and depressing context for these numbers. … [Read more...]
Traffic on UMW Blogs and a few notes
Yesterday was the last day of the Fall semester so I took a quick screenshot of traffic on UMW Blogs in Google Analytics over the last four months, which looks like this: Which made me think, how does this compare to traffic from the Fall semester last year? So I did a quick filtering for traffic from 8/16/10 through 12/16/11 and what was interesting was how consistent the traffic was between the two time periods in terms of frequency throughout the week, over the weekends, etc. What's more, we had almost exactly 100,000 more visits and unique visitors this Fall than last--with almost 200,000 more pageviews. All of which seems to suggest traffic is settling in given that from Fall 2009 to Fall 2010 trafic almost doubled across the board in terms of visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. The change in traffic this Fall in comparison to Fall 2010 was a more modest 20% growth in visits, 25% growth in visitors, and a little less than 15% in pageviews. I'm not sure … [Read more...]