The University of Mary Washington (UMW) has been getting attention for their proactive approach to using blogs (often in innovative and unexpected ways) for all sorts of academic ends, including the delivery of course materials, student projects, etc. I contacted Jim Groom, an Instructional Technology Specialist at UMW, to find out more about the efforts that he and others have undertaken in order to make blogs an effective part the UMW technology culture. Through a series of email discussions, we decided that this post should actually come from the source. I provided the questions as a basic starting point, but I’m sure you’ll find Jim’s responses, as well as the many examples and links he provides, both useful and insightful. [Shawn]

Q: Tell us about UMW Blogs. When did it start? What was the decision process?

UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see Ten ways to use UMW Blogs for examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.

The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. Our “sandbox” approach to exploring educational technologies embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).

I think the driving logic behind the experiment was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not removed from what is happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. The move towards ‘openness’ (the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web) with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily.

One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs is it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import it to their own space, or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moreover, this “syndicated framework” we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. [CIT note – for more on Really Simple Syndication see CIT's page on RSS aggregators or watch RSS in Plain English] That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s approach to instructional technologies. One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been UMW Blogs’s ability to pull together all the individual threads from individual blogs into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a ways to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.

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Register now for ScienceOnline!  This free, local, participatory conference will explore science on the web. The  goal is to bring together scientists, bloggers, educators, students, journalists and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for promoting the public understanding of science.

This conference is filled with great people, exciting ideas and inspiration.  In previous years, we learned about science communication, open access publishing, science careers and science blogging.  See (and contribute to) the tentative schedule for this year, see last year’s schedule, read my too-extensive notes from last year’s conference, or see other reports, pictures and video from last year.

See you there: January 16-18, 2009 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park.

I found a nice, simple tool that creates a URL for just the part of a YouTube video that you wish to share.  Say for example a YouTube video is five minutes long, but you are only interested in sharing a particular 30 second segment of it to make a point for a class.  This tool, http://splicd.com , let’s you do exactly that.  Best of all it is extremely easy to use and does not require signing up for an account.

Once you are at the site, the steps are almost self explanatory.  You paste in the URL of the YouTube video, enter in the start and end times for the video segment you want to share, press continue, and Splicd.com creates a URL with that segment. You then send  the Splicd.com generated URL to your class for viewing.

Michigan State  University’s student newspaper states that prospective students now have an option between writing a personal statement or submitting a multimedia supplement to complete the university application. Applicants can upload a personal videos to public Web sites like YouTube and then send the clips to a site that forwards videos to university admissions offices.

What’s next? Dipomas on DVD’s instead of paper?

http://blackboard.duke.edu/help/groups.html

If you want to divide a large class into groups small enough to manage and collaborate on projects and papers, or you just want a private space separate from the rest of the class, you can via Blackboard Groups to set up groups and add your students to groups. Within a group, students have access to a private discussion board, chat tool and document exchange area.

To explore and discover additional Blackboard features, see the Blackboard support website. If you need a tutorial for the Blackboard group tool, request an office visit and we will come to you.

In the current issue, the Chronicle of Higher Education profiles a comprehensive online resource, Teach Philosophy 101.

The site includes materials on planning a course, creating tests and assignments, creating engaging lectures and discussions and even “change of pace exercises” to “break up the routine” of your class.  Recommendations on the site include references to research materials and links for more information.

The author of the site, John Immerwahr, of Villanova University, hopes that the basic framework of the site can be used to create similar online resources in other disciplines.

Graduate Junction has been showing up on other education blogs and looks promising for grad students and postdoc researchers who’d like to network with peers around the world. A description of the Graduate Junction from their about page:

The Graduate Junction has a bold vision to bring together Masters, Doctoral and Postdoctoral researchers from across disciplines and around the world to create an online global research community. The Graduate Junction has two central aims: 1) To provide researchers with an easy way of meeting and discussing their research interests with others in a global and multi-disciplinary environment, and 2) To provide comprehensive searchable listings of information relevant to the graduate research community.

Plastic Logic has demonstrated a new ereader made of lightweight flexible plastics, giving us a glimpse at the next generation of these portable devices. The ereader, which is expected to go on the market in early 2009, is wireless and handles books, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF documents and can be set up for newspaper subscriptions. It’s much lighter and thinner than the current generation Sony Reader and Kindle and features a larger 8.5 in x 11 in display, based on technologies developed by Cambridge University.

You can see pictures of the Plastic Logic ereader and read more details in this blog post from engadget and the official announcement at the company’s website.

Sometimes you just want a way to collect a bunch of files all in one place – quickly and easily. A new tool called ‘drop.io‘ aims to be the “simplest way to share files online”.

For example, I named my drop “drop.io/cittest“. I added a bunch of random files (workshop handouts, video, etc…drop.io provides up to 1 Gig of space free of charge and accepts payments to increase space), and chose to allow others to ‘View and Add’. If I wanted to truly keep this dropbox more ‘private’, I would have also chose a ‘Guest password’, so that people going to my drop.io/cittest URL would have to know the password to access the files.

After completing the initial setup, I can either email my dropbox address to others I want to share it with, or I can go to my drop.io page, and look at some of the other options for sharing that drop.io has up its sleeve.

Things to notice: I can add ‘notes’ to better explain files or provide more details. I can also add links to websites, and move the windows around (up/down). If I click on the video or PDF file, drop.io will show me a preview of each BEFORE I choose to download it.

On the right, I have a set of options under ‘Share’. This is where I can set up drop.io to tip me off when a new file has been added. I can set up my Twitter account, my mobile phone (SMS), or even get an email when a new file is added. Other users can also ’subscribe’ to these alerts, letting everyone I’m working with know when a new file has been added, in various ways.

The last neat trick is one that can come in really handy if you have your own blog or website (or even access to adding some small HTML in Blackboard, for that matter). By clicking the ‘More’ button, I get more options – the best of which is the ‘Upload Widget’.

By copying the ‘Embed code’ and plopping it into the HTML of any webpage, blog or web document, I can add a quick dropbox like the one below. Feel free to give this a try. Just click ‘add files’ and upload a (please, relatively small!) file.

For more about setting up a drop.io account, check out the ‘How To’ movie on the drop.io site.

Celebrating their 75th anniversary, Esquire magazine has released a special “limited edition” cover that features e-ink technology.

While the cover is something of a gimmick, the technology itself holds promise for animated or interactive illustrations or pages in traditional books and magazines or in applications where it can be attached to everyday objects. The e-ink portion of the page was “printed” in a facility in China and had to be shipped refrigerated to preserve battery life for placement on the cover. The battery lasts about ninety days. Esquire has a web page posted about how the cover was made.

Someone has posted a video of the cover at YouTube: