In this month’s edition of ELI’s 7 Things Series they feature 3D Printing, and thanks to the awesome work of Tim Owens and George Meadows UMW is featured prominently. Tim and George have been experimenting wildly with 3D printing over the last academic year, and 2 Thing-0-Matics, 1 printer bot, and a recently acquired Replicator later they’re all but ready to teach their Freshman Seminar on Makerbots and Mashups this Fall. Tim has been chronicling their work on UMW Blogs here, and what’s truly amazing about 3D Printing is how immediately it both amazes and inspires anyone who comes within range its imaginative tractor beam. They’re nothing short of hypnotizing to watch in real time, add to that the conceptual and real possibilities of how science and technology is changing the world of industry as we understand it and you have a realm of edtech that we have only just begun to explore. What’s more, it’s finally cheap enough for any institution to experiment with. Mike Wesch was … [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...]
You know what, DTLT is pretty sick right now
Image credit: Kate Geraets "We Rock" (click image for link) The semester has been flying by, here we are in week 10, two-thirds through and I have to say we here at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies are moving at a pretty amazing clip. It’s as if everything has clicked, and we all “can still jack in and know what do to.” It’s like a team that just starts to hit their stride, and when they do it all just feels so natural. A beautiful sense of peaking where everything around you slows down and you can just see what’s coming next, and nail it. Working at UMW’s DTLT right now is a rare professional privilege, and I find myself racing to work everyday to ride that high. But all of this might just sound like sugar coated cheerleading, so let me layout what exactly has got me so excited about working at DTLT right now. UMW’s Online Learning Initiative Steve Greenlaw is leading up an initiative at UMW that I think is … [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...]