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...]
Civil Rights Leader James Farmer’s UMW Lectures Online
More than five years ago DTLT started working with UMW’s archivist Carolyn Parsons to try and digitize James Farmer’s video lecture series recorded here at UMW in 1983. The lecture series is an awesome historical resource featuring James Farmer---one of the greatest orators of the 20th century---re-telling his compelling experiences as a civil rights activist in the South during the 1960s. And while the project laid dormant for many years, thankfully Jeff McClurken’s and four of his students in Adventures in Digital History class resurrected it and brought it to life online. Laura Donahue, Michelle Martz and Caitlin Murphy and Kelsey Matthews archived, transcribed, and contextualized 13 of Farmer’s lectures from 1983. What’s more, they’ve created what is arguably the single best resource site yet to see light on UMW Blogs: http://jamesfarmerlectures.umwblogs.org/ The vertical hold on the VHS tapes with the first 4 lectures were in such bad shape that they’ve been shipped out for … [Read more...]
Jim Groom Featured in Chronicle of Higher Education
Jim Groom, director of teaching and learning technologies, is featured in the Thursday, March 29 blog post on The Chronicle of Higher Education website. The post, “Professor Hopes to Support Free Course With Kickstarter, the ‘Crowd Funding’ Site,” discusses Groom’s efforts to raise $4,200 for a new server for ds106, the digital storytelling course. … [Read more...]
Masters of Our Domain Names: UMW to Pilot Domain of One’s Own
What’s gotten lost in all the attention around the ds106 Kickstarter is the fact that on Friday DTLT sat down with UMW’s Chief Information Office, the inimitable Justin Webb, to work out the details for an initial pilot launch of a Domain of One’s Own at UMW for 200 to 400 students starting this Summer and continuing throughout the 2012/2013 academic year. What does this mean? It means we’ll be providing personal domain names and web hosting for anywhere from 200-4000 students that will be used in a series of courses over the the coming year. This is born out of the idea that we want to help students consider taking responsibility for their online identity, as well as explorE the implications of what it might mean for them to take control of their work and manage their own portfolios (howe ver we understand that term). The idea that we can do this in partnership with the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) just reinforces how important giving students control over their … [Read more...]
Alan Levine and Jim Groom Present at SXSWedu
Newest DTLT team member Alan Levine joined Jim Groom as invited speakers at the March 6-8, 2012 SXSWedu conference in Austin, Texas. Sharing their experiences in teaching the ds106 Digital Storytelling Conference, Levine and Groom joined Philipp Schmidt (P2PU) and Karen Fasinpaur (K12 Open Ed) in a lively panel discussion on Developing a Culture of Openness. Levine also led a hands on session, Create Something from the StoryBox where participants explored a storytelling digital time capsule project he conducted during a year of travel in 2011. … [Read more...]
You know what, DTLT is pretty sick right now
Image credit: Kate Geraets "We Rock" (click image for link) The semester has been flying by, here we are in week 10, two-thirds through and I have to say we here at UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies are moving at a pretty amazing clip. It’s as if everything has clicked, and we all “can still jack in and know what do to.” It’s like a team that just starts to hit their stride, and when they do it all just feels so natural. A beautiful sense of peaking where everything around you slows down and you can just see what’s coming next, and nail it. Working at UMW’s DTLT right now is a rare professional privilege, and I find myself racing to work everyday to ride that high. But all of this might just sound like sugar coated cheerleading, so let me layout what exactly has got me so excited about working at DTLT right now. UMW’s Online Learning Initiative Steve Greenlaw is leading up an initiative at UMW that I think is … [Read more...]
Cellular Storytelling
UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik has dreamed up a very cool approach for students in his Histology lab to share and comment on what’s under the microscope. Rather than purchasing expensive camera-ready digital microscopes, he worked with the UMW Teaching Center to purchase a few cheap digital cameras that can upload images quickly to the web so students can post them to a course site. The resulting course site designed by the inimitable Tim Owens is a highly attractive, intensely visual course space on UMW Blogs that streamlines posting for students thanks to the Gravity Forms plugin (which is premium—what is happening to us!). What I love about this experiment is how beautiful the images of these mammal cells are, and how the students’ brief description coupled with the gorgeous images tell a story about the life and death of cells. Not only that, but it reinforces the idea that new approaches to storytelling with media cuts across all disciplines—it’s not an exclusive a concern … [Read more...]