This semester I’ve been helping Susan Fernsebner, UMW professor extraordinare, with her section of HIST 297: History Colloquium. This course serves as “an introduction to the methods historians use to analyze the past,” and all three sections, each taught by a different member of the department, are focusing on digital skills not as an add-on, but as a critical, integrated part of the course. Susan wrote a great post this past summer that outlines the structure and purpose of HIST 297, as well as the intentionality with which the department decided to spread what used to be a one-semester methods course into a two-semester sequence. You should go read her entire post on the subject (it’s not long! go read it now!), and I’m hopeful that she will have the time and opportunity to write more about this as the semester starts winding down. Seal of the Taiping Revolution, via Wikimedia Commons. The basic goal of HIST 297 is to introduce students to the methods … [Read more...]
All Aboard!!!
More than a week ago the President of UMW, Rick Hurley, published a piece in The Huffington Post explainging how and why UMW was “Getting Aboard the Hightech Train.” What’s crazier than anything, is why it’s taken me over a week to blog about this article! What’s wrong with me, this is an article in which UMW’s president openly acknowledges that the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology is essential to the future of UMW. More than that, he publicly says things I think are totally awesome, such as the following: …about eight years ago, the University of Mary Washington created a Division of Teaching and Learning Technology and staffed it with the brightest, most creative people we could find. At the time, a lot of schools were investing in software, in learning management systems, programs and platforms. But we invested in people. We wanted them to be our braintrust, to work with our faculty to find interesting and innovative ways to use … [Read more...]
Tracking Over Four Years of Traffic on UMW Blogs
I’m working on presentation about assessment on another front, and as an excuse for a break I decided to post some recent UMW Blogs traffic statistics from the last four years. I know analytics and data is all the rage currently, and these numbers should somehow enable me to better articulate UMW Blogs’ usefulness. Nonetheless, they always seem at once massive and paltry. Massive in that various work produced on UMW Blogs by thousands of students have been viewed 13+ million times over the last four years by milliosn of people. Paltry in that 13 million views is a middling viral YouTube video at best. Probably like most people in the era of “big data,” I often feel lost in a malaise of statisitcal aggregates—data that ultimately means less than nothing without a context. The only hope I garner from this is that people are finding our work, but not at the aggregate. Seems to me it’s at the ground level—thousands of sites with tens and hundreds … [Read more...]
Moving into month #2
Some assorted thoughts as I enter month #2 of my employment here at UMW: I have been here … for a month? I have been here FOR A MONTH. My perspective on this is short and narrow so far, but it seems strange that a liberal arts college would focus so aggressively on attracting more men by de-emphasizing its past as a women’s college. I’m coming from a community that errs on the side of overselling its commitment to progressive education, so that’s a big change. Also, seeing an entire organization try to butch itself up is amusing to no end. Tim, Andy, Martha, and Jim are even more ridiculously creative and talented than they appear from afar. Adventures in anxiety, part 1: whenever a super cool project comes up, my first reaction is “I would love to do that, but I have all this other stuff to finish before I can tackle that.” And then I take a deep breath and realize: nope, those cool projects ARE my job. Sure, there is administrative and support … [Read more...]
PediaPress
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...]
Paris is Burning through Syndication
Have I ever mentioned how awesome #UMW‘s Study Abroad blog aggregator is? More than 200 posts since June. #4Life — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) July 20, 2013 When I tweeted out how awesome UMW’s Study Abroad aggregator blog is a few folks asked me how we’re doing the syndication. Aggregation is something I’ve written about so often on the bava blog that I’m afraid I take for granted. That said, I really don’t want to because I truly believe it is the best way to foster distributed communities, enable ownership of one’s own work, and keep a centralized archive all at once. Aggregation by way of RSS-enabled syndication is still the simplest way at this stuff, and I’m gonna try and prove that once again So with the aforementioned Study Abroad blog aggregator we have almost 90 feeds that have been added (self-service style) over the last two and half years that have syndicated more than 2300 posts. We do this using the plugin called … [Read more...]
Gulou or, Public Scholarship in the Digital Age
This post is long overdue, and if I hadn’t checked out for a couple of months in April and May it would have been blogged on the bava a lot earlier. In fact, it’s criminal it hasn’t been broadcast more widely around the UMW community because the fact that Sue Fernsebner, a Chinese history scholar and faculty member in the History department at UMW, has a blog that has become a spotlight page for news on Tumblr is a kind of a big deal. Sue lays out the whole phenomenon far better than I ever could in this post. I love the way she ponders the implications of her blog being featured alongside major mass media new outlets: It’s now introduced there alongside established media (Reuters, LA Times, CNN, USA Today, etc.) and also accompanies other, less traditional but equally popular sites for news consumption (e.g. The Daily Show) on the same page. I’m just beginning to ponder the implications. What does it mean that an individual’s site—one person’s own, simple Tumblr—is … [Read more...]
An Ode to UMW Faculty
An Architecture of Amazing Possibility Andréa Livi Smith, who’s a Historic Preservation professor at UMW, found time on her blog to write a little ode honoring UMW’s DTLT. She contextualized it with an explanation as to why she is so enamored with this cutting edge, highly attractive group of instructional technologists They set up the blog aggregator for my Paris class. I love this thing: it keeps all my students’ blogs in one place, making for easy commenting and grading [the aggregator was the handy work of Alan Levine, I believe]. They also set up the system for my scavenger hunt which will be held in Paris later in the summer. (And no, you can’t see it yet. It’ll be the star of another post) All I had to do was explain what I wanted, what had not worked last year (seriously, it deserved an #epicfail) and voila! Now I have a system that will make it easier on the students and on me, and will be ready for the next trip, too. I can just imagine how this would have … [Read more...]
UMW’s Innovation isn’t Technical, it’s Narrative
When someone as sharp as Leslie Madsen-Brooks writes an article about the state of innovation in higher education and points to UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (a.k.a DTLT) as the example, I can’t help but feel pretty good about my life (as I imagine other DTLTers might). I mean quotes like the following reinforce the constant boasting I do in the office to anyone who will listen Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At theUniversity of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives [UMW Blogs, ds106, Domain of One's Own, and the ThinkLab] that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad … [Read more...]
UMW’s ThinkLab Makerspace featured in EDUCAUSE
The innovative ThinkLab Makerspace in the Simpson Library of UMW has been featured in the latest publication from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's 7 Things series on rapid innovation. UMW is cited alongside Stanford, Rutgers, and Case Westerns among other institutions for recognizing early on the importance of makerspaces as a way to inspire self-directed and hands-on learning using emerging technologies like 3D printing, robotics, and e-textiles. DTLT and UMW's work has been featured in past issues of the 7 Things series on a variety of topics including MOOCs, Wordpress, and 3D Printing technology. The full paper can be found on the EDUCAUSE website in PDF and ePub format. … [Read more...]