PediaPress

Over a week ago the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) met with the six faculty in this year’s cohort of the Online Learning Initiative (OLI) here at UMW. The OLI provides a framework for faculty over the course of a year to try and integrate the values of a liberal arts education into an online learning experience. Martha Burtis has this year’s cohort running like a well-oiled machine, and I think this initiative is really finding it’s groove. (And for that matter so is Martha, full time suits her well, the planet’s must be aligning .) But none of that is what I really wanted to blog about, the OLI just happened to be the occasion for me to catch up with Biology professor Steve Gallik—one of UMW’s finest faculty innovators—who turned me on to yet another awesome service of the open web I hadn’t been aware of, namely PediaPress. This is a service that allows you to collect and collate Wikipedia articles into a book … [Read more...]

Welcome to Cloud City…

Your domain is waiting for you Go to www.umwdomains.com to move in today. ______________________________________ The above poster is all Martha Burtis, and I love it! The visual is inspired by Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back, and I love the idea of marrying the idea of Domain of One’s Own to a futuristic advertising campaign for real estate in the cloud! Success with a  project like this is going to depend on getting the word out around campus, and there’s no better way than with some catchy advertising. And that’s where you come in. This is just the first of many posters we hope to be printing over the next fifteen weeks, and we want to invite anyone out there to share ideas they might have for awesome Domain of One’s Own posters. Email them to me (jimgroom_at_gmail.com), add them to the comments below, or use the #uwmdomains hashtag on Twitter. If we use your idea we will send you a framed version of the final poster autographed by the entire DTLT … [Read more...]

Paris is Burning through Syndication

Have I ever mentioned how awesome #UMW‘s Study Abroad blog aggregator is? More than 200 posts since June. #4Life — Jim Groom (@jimgroom) July 20, 2013 When I tweeted out how awesome UMW’s Study Abroad aggregator blog is a few folks asked me how we’re doing the syndication. Aggregation is something I’ve written about so often on the bava blog that I’m afraid I take for granted. That said, I really don’t want to because I truly believe it is the best way to foster distributed communities, enable ownership of one’s own work, and keep a centralized archive all at once. Aggregation by way of RSS-enabled syndication is still the simplest way at this stuff, and I’m gonna try and prove that once again So with the aforementioned Study Abroad blog aggregator we have almost 90 feeds that have been added (self-service style) over the last two and half years that have syndicated more than 2300 posts. We do this using the plugin called … [Read more...]

DTLT Today: Episode 104, UMW’s Domain of One’s Own

Note: At two points in the above video (roughly at 12 minutes and 22 minutes) there’s cacophonous feedback when we go to the shot of the laptop. Andy picks it up and fixes it soon after the 22 minute mark. I’ll be editing this out sometime soon, apologies in the meantime. Those clips with heavy feedback loop have been edited out. After a year and a half hiatus DTLT Today is finally back in action with episode 104. Even better, we had the whole old gold crew together (i.e. Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Tim Owens, and myself) to talk about the Domain of One’s Own project we’re kicking off this Fall for 1000 freshman. I pushed for this episode because I was blown away by how streamlined Tim Owens and Martha Burtis had engineered the sign-up using the client management software WHMCS. It’s extremely slick; a two step process that gives students and faculty alike their own domain and web hosting immediately. What’s more, the domain propagates in less than 10 … [Read more...]

DTLT Today: Episode 104, UMW’s Domain of One’s Own

Note: At two points in the above video (roughly at 12 minutes and 22 minutes) there’s cacophonous feedback when we go to the shot of the laptop. Andy picks it up and fixes it soon after the 22 minute mark. I’ll be editing this out sometime soon, apologies in the meantime. After a year and a half hiatus DTLT Today is finally back in action with episode 104. Even better, we had the whole old gold crew together (i.e. Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Tim Owens, and myself) to talk about the Domain of One’s Own project we’re kicking off this Fall for 1000 freshman. I pushed for this episode because I was blown away by how streamlined Tim Owens and Martha Burtis had engineered the sign-up using the client management software WHMCS. It’s extremely slick; a two step process that gives students and faculty alike their own domain and web hosting immediately. What’s more, the domain propagates in less than 10 minutes. It’s amazing to see how cleanly and … [Read more...]

Gulou or, Public Scholarship in the Digital Age

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...]

Jim Groom Delivers Three Invited Presentations

Over the course of two weeks, Jim Groom was invited to give presentations about the innovative work the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies has been doing recently. On May 16th, Jim Groom delivered a talk titled “Syndication-Oriented Architecture: a Solution to Problem of Coherence” for Campus Technology’s Virtual Leadership Summit. You can read more about the conceptual thinking about the ideas presented here. On May 22, he was invited to speak about the open, online class ds106 to the College of Wooster, you can watch the presentation in its entirety below, and read more details here. Finally, on May 30 he presented once gain about ds106 to the University System of New Hampshire, a presentation you can read more about and listen to the audio here. The slides can be found below. … [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...]

Jim Groom Interviewed for Ohio State University’s Writers Talk series

On May 6th an interview with Jim Groom was aired on the Ohio State University’s radio program Writers Talk. The discussion focuses on the work he has done as part of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology: ranging from the formation of UMW Blogs, the popular appeal of the Digital Storytelling class affectionately known as ds106 and its relationship to those confounded MOOCs, as well as DTLT’s current groundbreaking project Domain of One’s Own. The interview runs 30 minutes and you can listen to it below. OSU Writers Talk … [Read more...]