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...]
Bearing Witness to Transformation: innovateOSU
Last week at this time I was locked into the 4th annual innovateOSU conference which showcases the work happening in educational technology at THE Ohio State State University. I was honored to have been invited to kick off the conference, and what I realized in my short time on campus was how engaged and focused group of administration and faculty at OSU is having the right conversations about the possibilities of online education—something that’s been bubbling up globally over the last 18 months. In fact, the great Barbara Sawhill came down from Oberlin, and we talked about just that, and then she blogged about it The night before my presentation I was breaking bread with OSU’s Provost Joe Allutto, Social Work Dean Tom Gregoire, Undergraduate Dean Wayne Carlson, math professor James Fowler, Chemistry professor Matthew Stoltzfus, Communications professor Nicole Kraft, and English professor Kay Halasek—and all of them to a person were deeply engaged in the … [Read more...]
A Domain of One’s Own to Community Syndication Hubs
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...]
Ryan Brazell Joining UMW’s DTLT in July
It is my distinct pleasure and honor to announce that UMW has officially hired Ryan Brazell as UMW’s newest Instructional Technology Specialist for the Humanities. He will be starting at the University in July, and we are unbelievably excited about the prospect of brining in such a uniquely qualified candidate to further bolster the awesome that is DTLT. Ryan has had extensive experience in instructional technology over the last eight years at both Oberlin College and the University of California, San Francisco. What’s more, he’s experimented wildly with applications like WordPress—a platform we love at DTLT—for creating portfolios (something that’ll be key for the Domain of One’s Own project we’re unleashing camus-wide in Fall). I am glad Ryan seems excited about the prospect because he’s going to have some of the best faculty in the country to partner with to frame a whole new vision for what ed tech means to the liberal … [Read more...]
If I were to sum up this week of work in an image….
….it would look something like this. Yep, it was that good, and when I am not that exhausted I’ll try to elaborate. … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative
I’ve been crazy this last month, and the proof is in the blog archive pudding: only eighteen god damned blog posts for January. I hope February proves to be a bit easier on the bava, but, with that said, January has been pretty awesome. In fact, this week seems like, to quote the oft blogging Andy Rush, “a watershed moment in DTLT history.” Why? Well, because for the last four days four members of DTLT and Mary Kayler, of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, have been running five cohorts with anywhere form 5-7 faculty talking about the details of both imagining and building their own domain. That’s right, the faculty initiative of Domain of One’s Own is up and running as of this week. What’s been so magical about the whole process is coming into pur offices throughout the week to groups of faculty asking questions about subdomains, digital identity, Installatron, DNS, and more! It’s magic at DTLT right now, and the key is all about thinking at once conceptually and … [Read more...]
UMW Blogs: It Won’t Stop Growing!
File this under arbitrary stats about UMW Blogs. The traffic on UMW Blogs has been really high out of the gate this semester, so I wanted to see what the first two weeks of traffic for the Spring semester looks like compared to the first two weeks of the Fall Semester. The increase is nontrivial. So I submit this for your consideration. During the first two weeks of the Fall 2012 semester UMW Blogs had 82,416 visits (61,745 unique) and 189,618 pageviews. During the first two weeks of the Spring 2013 semester UMW Blogs had 124,823 visits (98,079 unique) and 258,509 pageviews. One day I hope to actually have an understanding of what any of this means, but right now I will interpret it as part of my general awesomeness. … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own: a Peek at the Cyberinfrastructure
Last week Tim Owens and I mapped out the technical infrastructure of Domain of One’s Own as we prepare the purchasing request and generally ramp up for the roll out in Fall 2013. The image below is the result of our brainstorming: Let me try and lay it out for anyone interested in the technical details of how we’re planning on doing this thing, and for how much money. In the center of the image you see the server, at least immediately it will be a hosted, managed server through a serve like Rackspace. For roughly $350 /month we’ll get 8 GB RAM (4 virtual CPUs) and 320 GB storage, and we’ll be charged roughly .18 cents per GB of bandwidth each month. That server setup is roughly twice what we are running currently, and for another $100 a month we can get it managed, which means OS updates, general server maintenance, and someone who will listen to our issues. So, for a managed server with 1 TB of bandwidth each month we are looking at $630 a month just for the … [Read more...]