So, it’s been over a year since UMW has had it’s main .edu website running on WordPress. DTLT has been experimenting with the possibilities of aggregating posts from UMW Blogs into umw.edu (in fact, this post will aggregate into DTLT’s site on umw.edu). But the cooler part is to start experimenting with bringing the work students and faculty are doing in the classroom to the university’s website, and to that end Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class last semester has done some really cool things. Every semester I come and talk to this particular class about the possibilities for creating an open, online space to share the documentary histories they create over the course of the semester. We look at a ton of sites, and imagine what’s possible for them. The final project/product for the entire class is to build a site and populate it with all the documentary media on the assigned topic they create, collect, and curate for the world to … [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...]
Fall 2012 Report Card for DTLT
pjern’s “Report Card 1946″ At the beginning of last semester I posted a list of projects DTLT was planning on working through during the Fall 2012 semester. I forgot about it until I was asked to map out how our group plans on assessing the work we do (with that line I am officially the director now) which prompted my return to that post to see what we got done. Turns out we are as awesome as I have been saying all along. I was pretty impressed with how much we accomplished, and started thinking this would be an excellent mechanism for assessment—frame the specific projects you are working on and narrate them openly according to an ongoing examination and reflection of how they further the mission of our group, the university, and public liberal arts more generally. That seems like a meaningful mechanism of reflection and open assessment that others can chime in on, and the process can prove far less bureaucratic and much more authentic—even if it … [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...]
When Plugins Go Rogue
I logged into UMW Blogs yesterday only to find this garrish header advertisement in my dashboard panel: What the hell is this? Advertisement? On UMW Blogs! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE! And so forth. I posted on Twitter to get see if anyone knew anything and it turns out, thanks to Scott Reilly and Kailey Lampert I quickly learned it was the Facebook Like Button. @jimgroom @andrea_r @sabreuse It’s the “Facebook Like Button” plugin. That isn’t permitted in Plugin Directory; author is getting notified — Scott Reilly (@coffee2code) January 9, 2013 @sabreuse @andrea_r @jimgroom Ewww. BTW, Facebook Like Button is the culprit (plugins.svn.wordpress.org/facebook-like-…) — Kailey (@trepmal) January 9, 2013 So, it is now deleted from UMW Blogs, and shame on us for ever giving into the Facebook-inspired “Like” web. A useless plugin with a terrible ad to remind us of our sins, it seems to me a metaphor for the larger web right now … [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...]
Domain of One’s Own discussion on Chronicle’s Tech Therapy
One of the many awesome Gary Larsen’s The Far Side comics Earlier this week Jeff Young and Warren Arbogast (a UMW alumni!), of The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast, invited me on their program to work through some of the ideas at the heart of University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own project. You can listen to the half hour long episode here. What I’m enjoying about conversations like this about Domain of One’s Own is that the concept is starting to make a bit more sense in my mind as people push me to frame it as succinctly as possible. It’s not easy because, as Jeff and Warren note, at its core Domain of One’s Own is “heady stuff” —it’s a conceptual shift in how we think about controlling data, syndicating content, aggregating ideas, and, more importantly for UMW’s purposes, empowering faculty and students alike. There’s no one easy way to frame this project as an elevator pitch because … [Read more...]
Domain of One’s Own has been funded!
Man, when I think about how much blogging I haven’t yet done tonight that I need to, I begin to realize just how awesome a moment it is at UMW right now. Not only are we part of the visioning committee for a statewide conference for thinking how Virginia’s educational resources might be shared more effectively, we are also working on developing an online learning initiative designed from values (which also has been been funded for next year); we’re rocking the makerspace; we’re making kickass videos about how awesome we are; we’ve had a hand in this little thing called ds106; and more generally we are swaggering like Mick Jagger…. But in addition to all that we got news earlier this week that the Domain of One’s Own will be fully funded moving forward! This is huge for our group on a few counts: 1) it includes a half-time position that can help us get fully staffed again, 2) it illustrates the administration at UMW is fully committed to … [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...]
Documenting a Domain of One’s Own
Over the last month or so we’ve been piecing together the Domain of One’s Own pilot, and it really is a thing of beauty. I already talked about how we’re using it to archive a ton of work we’ve done over the past seven years, as well as how it represents an architecture of empowerment for faculty and students alike. In this post I want to talk a bit about how we’re running and supporting this pilot to give folks a sense of the practical day-to-day of getting something like this off the ground. First off, We’re running both the commodity web hosting and domains through Media Temple. More than seven years ago in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) we started a similar pilot that gave all the instructional technology staff their own domain and web hosting through Bluehost in order to experiment with what’s possible. Seven years later we’re doing that same experiment with at least 400 faculty and staff, but this … [Read more...]