I will be heading up to Boston this weekend thanks to Philipp Schmidt and Claudia Caro Sullivan who are hosting an open learning hackathon at MIT. Below is the proposal I submitted for an idea I would like to pursue conceptually and actually—what do you think? Tim Owens has already been working at some of this with Installatron, and I wonder if there is a better time than now to start figuring out how you create a community out of a variety of distributed, loosely connected domains. How do we start thinking of information architecture that allows students and faculty to control their work (a la UMW’s Domain of One’s Own) and feed it cleanly into a distributed campus publishing environment? I hope to talk and work with people around an idea of revisiting and framing a suite of tools that might be bundled (like Commons-in-a-Box) to make syndication hubs for online courses, communities, and even institutions that much more porous, open, and affordable. A perect example … [Read more...]
All aboard, hippies! Next stop: UMW
It’s official, so I can finally share the good news: this summer I’ll be moving to Fredericksburg, Virginia to work with Lisa Ames, Martha Burtis, Jim Groom, Tim Owens, and Andy Rush as well as an amazing group of faculty, staff, and students at the University of Mary Washington. The DTLT and the people they support are doing really amazing work (UMW Blogs, Domain of One’s Own, DS106, DTLT Today, the ThinkLab makerspace, etc) and I am totally thrilled to join what I consider to be the best damn edtech shop around. I don’t have a whole lot of brainpower at the moment, but I want to take just a second to thank someone who has been an integral part of my getting to this point. To Barbara Sawhill: thank you for all you have done to push, cajole, thwap, and encourage me lo these many years. (Okay, so it’s only been eight years, but I think we’d both agree it feels like longer.) If I have seen further it is by standing on your shoulders, and I am … [Read more...]
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...]
Scholarly Publishing: the Formal, the Informal, and the Ugly
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...]
A Culture of Innovation
A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo. UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2nd at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Online Fall Focus Session on the theme of innovation in higher education. The basic question guiding the presentation, which was centered around the 7 minute video above, was the following: how does a university like UMW consistently foster innovative projects like UMW Blogs, ds106, and, more recently, A Domain of One’s Own? There’s no one adequate stock answer to such a question, so when preparing the presentation DTLT decided to interview students, faculty, and staff around campus to get a broader sense of the culture of innovation happening at UMW. What DTLT got in return for its labors was quite compelling. The video was shot and edited by Andy Rush, and it’s just a teaser for a much larger documentary that DTLT is planning on making this semester to start chronicling and narrating the culture of … [Read more...]
Kaltura and Media Publishing at UMW
When I came to UMW last year there were few options available to students and faculty that wanted to publish media content online. We’ve always encouraged folks to push their stuff to YouTube, Vimeo, or Blip where the hosting was free and the embedding options were simple. We even made it easy to embed in blogs by making use of plugins like Viper’s Video Quicktags which works like a charm (oembed options now are pretty good too, but a bit hit or miss occasionally). That being said the issues surrounding copyright of educational content online has made the waters a bit muddy. Student work gets pulled from YouTube and thus begins the game of cat and mouse finding where and how long a video can be up on a service before getting pulled for daring to include any content that a company might decide to claim ownership of. Meanwhile for departments that were creating fully originally content that they might not want hosted on free and ad-supported networks there was little recourse. I … [Read more...]
Got My Head in the Cloud: Udell on Domain of One’s Own
Jon Udell blogged about the history of an experiment that is finally taking root here at UMW. The pilot is the dry run for giving every Freshman their own domain and web hosting space by Fall 2013 in order to embrace and encourage students to becomes master’s of their own spaces, and get in the habit of maintaining their own personal archive of work. It will be built into the curriculum of a number of courses, and it’s a model of that ask students to take responsibility of their digital presence. To manage their online identities and build it so that they can take it with them when they go. Also, it pushes courses to acknowledge and embrace the open web as an integral part of the of the process of teaching and learning in a classroom or online. What this means is that universities have to start thinking more like the web, but not in the catastrophic terms of MOOCs and the end of institutions, but rather in terms of understanding how networks and networked culture can change our … [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...]