As part of an attempt to start imagining what open systems for publishing and sharing a community’s work—as UMW has done exceptionally well with UMW Blogs, ds106, and Domain of One’s Own—Jim Groom (the Director of the Division of teaching and Learning Technologies) has been invited to the Open Learning Hackathon at MIT this weekend to work with a range of thinkers to start framing an architecture that might harness and expose the power of loosely coupled syndication systems modelled on the qweb rather than monolithic information systems.. … [Read more...]
Bearing Witness to Transformation: innovateOSU
April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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
April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Jim Groom Keynotes OSU’s Ed Tech Conference
March 27, 2013 by
Image credit: innovateOSU “Jim Groom Keynote” Jim Groom delivered the keynote presentation at Ohio State University’s fourth annual educational technology conference, innovateOSU, titled “Domain of One’s Own: Open Educational Experiences.” The presentation shared the work that has been happening at UMW over the past eight years, chronicling the fruits of DTLT‘s experimentations with commodity web hosting which led to innovative projects such as UMW Blogs, Digital Storytelling (ds106), and most recently Domain of One’s Own. You can see the slides for this presentation here. To see an archived video of the live presentation click here. … [Read more...]
Ryan Brazell Joining UMW’s DTLT in July
March 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]
Jim Groom Keynotes ACCS Conference
March 16, 2013 by
On March 15th, 2013 Jim Groom delivered the keynote presentation titled “A Domain of One’s Own: A Novel Approach to Open” at the Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia conference. This presentation contextualized the history of innovative work in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies since 2004 to frame the current Domain of One’s Own pilot that will provide a domain and web hosting account to all Freshman and Transfer students come Fall 2013. … [Read more...]
Jim Groom Presents at SUNY’s Online Summit Conference
March 13, 2013 by
Jim Groom presented a talk titled “Open by Design: Open Educational Experiences” at SUNY’s 14th annual Learning Network Summit for Online Learning conference on February 28th, 2013. Below are the slides for the talk and you can see a video archive of the session here. … [Read more...]
If I were to sum up this week of work in an image….
February 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment
….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
February 1, 2013 by 1 Comment
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!
January 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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...]