Blogging from Behind

The title says it all, I’ve been blogging from behind lately. Ever since I hit the road for a lion’s share of July to Austin, Los Angeles, and Norman, Oklahoma I’ve been feeling the pressure to catch up. It’s often a good pressure, and I write on this blog for my own professional and personal sanity—it’s been a failure, I know.

Despite my best intentions, sometimes there just isn’t enough time. I’ve been involved in a wide range of projects that I’m really excited about:  Connected Courses, Reclaim Your Domain, OpenVA, and Reclaim Hosting. And my travel this summer was dedicated to three out of the four listed. Catching up on this blog would mean writing the awesome Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon in LA (although a few others far smarter than me already have so I should just relax and link). Starting to share the work we’re doing with Connected Courses to try and model and mentor teachers that want to explore designing an open, connected course this fall. Breaking down the Reclaim Hosting explosion that’s happened this summer with schools like the University of Oklahoma, CSU Channel Islands, Emory University, Southern Polytechnic State University, and Davidson College exploring Domain pilots. Exciting times!

And then there’s my day job where we’re pushing out Domain of One’s Own to the entire campus, souping up UMW Blogs by moving the database to Amazon Web Hosting, and settling into an awesome new building—the Information and Technology Convergence Center— which features some pretty kickass DTLT offices. In fact, much of this semester will be devoted getting used to a whole new cutting edge space to experiment with teaching and learning technologies.

Andrew Forgrave’s #wire106 Poster

And to that end, I’ll be co-teaching two classes with Paul Bond this fall. An online ds106 course at UMW that will be themed around David Simon’s TV series The Wire (read more about #wire106). Something else I’ll be exploring with this edition of ds106 (thanks to Tim Owens, Erin Richey and Ben Werdmuller) is teaching a course without WordPress for the first time in almost a decade!

We’ll also be re-visiting The Internet Course this semester. What’s cool about that course is I think we are ready to open it up, but in this instance students will be producing the course resources and sharing them openly online. So, rather than faculty focused videos on a specific topic, this experience will focus on the collaborative creation of curriculum and sharing what we’ve learned openly as teaching. I’m excited about this because it’s where my collaborations with Paul have been leading these last two years, and I’m pretty excited to see how this evolves.

So, that’s a bit of context for why I am a bit buried here, but the good news is the travel this semester will be extremely light. I’ve all but shut it down, and I’m truly thrilled that I don’t have a plane ride in my future for near on six months.