The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) at UMW is a high-functioning, self-motivated group. We all know our roles, and we perform them with precision regularly. A well-oiled machine, if you will. We haven’t had a staff meeting in a few months, so today (the Monday before classes) we sat down to take stock of our current projects as the semester gets going. And the annotated picture below is a breakdown of the projects we came up with, all of which, mind you, are actually happening now: A Whiteboard of DTLT Projects Fall 2012 After the meeting, which was just a little over an hour, Andy Rush snapped a shot of the whiteboard which I figured I’d annotate and breakdown as an exercise in documenting what we’re working on as of Fall 2012. What’s more, it might be interesting to revisit this post at the end of the semester to see how everything played out, but I guess we’ll see about that. 1) Bluehost Migration I blogged about how we’ve … [Read more...]
From the Archive: ELS Blogs
This time 5 years ago we were closing down ELS Blogs, UMW’s first multi-user WordPress experiment (well actually the second if you count Lyceum), to make way for the campus-wide blogging platform that would be known as UMW Blogs. Five years ago at UMW’s DTLT were heady times, there was still a lot of promise and possibility around the ideas of open publishing through open source applications—much of which has dissipated lately. The ability to deliver an open source publishing platform for an entire campus in-house with no coding experience and even less time is a little heralded marvel of the open web. ELS Blogs had a bunch of amazing blogs on it, with the majority of them being students of Gardner Campbell, whose vision was the reason behind the platform. In fact, part of the push to get ELS Blogs back online came after I recieved an email from one of his students asking about her blog: I graduated from UMW in 2008. I had a blog through this site for a film class back in 2007 … [Read more...]
The Credit She Never Gets
Earlier today I posted a quick video about using the ds106 assignments repository to create engagement in an online learning experience. To be clear there are many things that go into such an experience, but I’ve found the ds106 assignment repository has allowed me to re-think ds106 over the last year and a half. The ability to syndicate filtered assignment posts, rate the difficulty level, relate tutorials, and create new assignments puts the course in the unique position to allow students to shape the experience. The simple act that has proven powerful, fun, and created a sense of community. The current state of the assignment repository came out of an experimental model Martha Burtis has been iterating on since December 2010. It’s pretty amazing because that was the beginning of the idea of ds106 as open architecture, a space that others can build sites onto, like Alan Levine’s Remix site, Tim Owens’ Daily Create, and Linda McKenna and Rachel McGuirk’s … [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...]
Domain of One’s Own as Legacy Archival Project
Image credit dolescum’s Archives’ stacks In the seven years I have been at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies we’ve done a fair bit of experimentation. Most of that has been centered around commodity web hosting, domains, and one-click install open source applications. That method has paid off for us beautifully, so much so that the experimentation we did early on resulted in a successful blogging platform, a cutting-edge university website run on WordPress, and even an extensible framework for a course like ds106. Our experimentation has resulted in grassroots projects that have become official platforms that the campus interfaces with on a daily basis. None of this happened because it was forced on people, but rather because people found the various services we provided useful. This, for me, is the ultimate sign of success for an outfit like ours. The other, uglier side of the early experimentation is that it can be messy. Early on there was the exciting … [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...]
3D Printing: Another ELI 7 Things for UMW’s DTLT
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...]
UMW Blogs, a.k.a. Old Faithful
Me and UMW Blogs are going on 5 years this Summer, she’s is the baddest of the bad and meanest and leanest of the mean and lean. She’s a veritable titan of her kind, she’s an educational publishing platform of the very best kind, and she’s turning five. Five years ago from roughly May through August we brought together the early MistyLook themed WPMu and MediaWiki hybrid out into this wasteland of bad BlackBoard installs, and we shone a light. A light of good publishing practices, a site for everyone regardless of his or her class status, and course spaces that actually looked good. We were already dreaming of fancy syndication, course aggregation, and a space attractive and user friendly enough that you would actually want to have a stake in it. It worked, five years later we have more than 6500 sites and 8500 users, and that number has steadily increased over these past five years. We run heavy traffic sites like UMW Bullet and EagleEye, or blogs for alumni 3 and 4 years out. … [Read more...]
UMW featured in ELI’s 7 Things about New Learning Ecosystems
UMW is featured in this month’s Seven Things You Should Know Series by ELI focusing on Navigating the New Learning Ecosystem. What’s interesting is that this is not the first time UMW has been featured in the 7 Things series, in fact it’s the fourth time since 2009. We were featured in the article on PLEs, WordPress, and MOOCs —and that is certainly cool and I am excited and all that. But what confounds me is whenever UMW staff and faculty submit presentations to ELI’s annual conference we seem to be on the pay-no-mind list. If we’re the innovators ELI seems to regularly have said we are again and again for the last three years—and I think we are all that and more—then start showing us a little love. UMW is kicking major ass in the Instructional Technology field right now—and has been for years, no circling the drain here—and the Domain of One’s Own is going to turn it all up to eleven. If you want to spotlight a … [Read more...]