Submitted for Your Approval: ds106zone Week 1

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Reverend

Introduction/Overview

Welcome to the ds106zone! Please read the following email in its entirety. Please note that all the assignments/tasks listed below are due no later than Sunday (5/26) night at midnight, though I can’t tell you enough that if you wait until Sunday to do them you will be screwed. Also, the Daily Create assignments need to be completed and published on the day they come out (hence the daily!). This week will be dedicated to the following things:

Getting an overview of what the class is all about
Understanding and starting The Daily Create
Solving any lingering tech issues. Your sites should be setup, we need to make sure the domain is resolving, you have your blog setup, and it is feeding cleanly into the ds106.us site (this all needs to be done immediately).
Getting familiar with how to blog, using WordPress, and personalizing your site by choosing a theme and adding some plugins
Starting visual and design assignments

Please note that this class moves at a lightening fast pace, and if you don’t stop to look around once and a while it will pass you by. You can find the syllabus here.

A note to Open, Online Participants: You can complete as much or as little of what’s listed above as you want. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email at [email protected] or a tweet at @jimgroom.

What’s this ds106 thing all about?

To start familiarizing yourself with the concepts behind ds106 and what the class is trying to accomplish we have a number of resources we expect you to check out.

Scott Lockman: the Lo Way

First and foremost, Scott Lockman, a.k.a Scottlo, has already started a podcast wherein he is framing some of the larger ideas and assignments for the class, as well as preparing us all for the audio section of this course during the end of week two and through week 3. You will be expected to listen to his podcast regularly, which will be published here, as well as catch up on a background episode he has already published wherein he talks about the maverick radio storyteller Arch Obler as well as interviews me (Jim Groom) about what critical interrogation of the web ds106 might mean in terms of ds106:http://scottlo.com/?p=1519Not only are these podcasts required listening, you will be expected to blog about these podcasts.

Episdoe 1: “ds106zone LoDown 001”

tag: scottlocast

Gardner Campbell: Personal CyberInfrastructure

Additionally, you will need to read Gardner Campbell’s short article “A Personal Cyberinfrasstructure” as well as watch the presentation he gives on the topic of controlling your own domain at the Open Education conference in 2009 here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelmXaSibrc[/youtube]

Take notes on the topics he discusses that make you think about what it means to be creating your own spaces online. Write a reflection on this talk- how you do this us up to you; for now writing is okay, but in the future we expect you to use media, links, etc to express your thoughts. The main point of this reflection is to connect the concepts described by Campbell to your own experiences on the web, and project how this might play out as you develop your own online space for this class.

tag: personalcyberinfrastructure

Michael Wesch: Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able

Finally, you need to watch and review Mike Wesch’s talk on internet culture titled from “Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: New Learning Environments for New Media Environment.” Wesch’s keynote delivered at UMW in May 2011 is directly relevant to what we are trying to accomplish in ds106. Take notes on the topics he discusses that make you think about what it means to be creating your own spaces online. Write a reflection on this talk. The main point of this reflection is to connect the concepts described by Wesch to your own experiences on the web, and project how this might play out as you develop your own online space for this class.

Part One of Wesch Presentation: http://vimeo.com/23913046

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23913046[/vimeo]

Part Two of Wesch Presentation: http://vimeo.com/23820500

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/23820500[/vimeo]

tag:knowledge-able

The Daily Create

What is the Daily Create?

The Daily Create (http://tdc.ds106.us/) For credit students need to do at least four times a week for the entire Summer session (that’s twenty Daily Creates!). The Daily Create is a way to help you regularly practice the particular form of digital media we are working on at that moment. For example, we will be focusing on digital photography and design for the first week and a half, so the Daily Creates will mirror that focus. As we move into audio and video the same will be true, and so on.

Today’s Daily Create

Today’s DailyCreate is linked below and it is required! http://tdc.ds106.us/welcome-to-the-ds106zone-take-a-photo-that-introduces-yourself-to-the-class/

Subscribing to the Daily Create

The day’s Daily Create publishes everyday at 10 AM EDT. You can go directly to the site to find the day’s assignment or subscribe for a daily email (subscription form can be found here in the bottom right sidebar), or even follow TDC on twitter (https://twitter.com/ds106dc).

Uploading and Tagging your Daily Create

Your photo or design should be uploaded to your Flickr account and tagged appropriately, in Flickr that means one tage that says dailycreate and a second that reflects the day’s assignment, such as tdc498 for today’s TDC or tdc499 for tomorrow’s, etc. If it’s tagged correctly it will show up on the TDC assignment page for that day, if it isn’t it won’t and you will not get not credit for that particular TDC. Pro tip: you need to have at least five photos uploaded to Flickr and made public for them to make your account feed active. Anything less than five photos and your account won’t syndicate to the TDC. We recommend uploading at least five images from your computer immediately if you are new to Flickr.

Tweeting Your Daily Create

You also need to Tweet your Daily Creates with a title, a link to the creation, and two hashtags: #dailycreate and the particular tag for that day’s daily create, for example todays will be #tdc498, tomorrow’s will be #tdc499, etc. You can find the specific tag for each day’s assignment in the assignment page’s URL: http://tdc.ds106.us/tdc498/. Additionally, if your work isn’t re-publishing in the assignment page from FLickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc., you can add your creation directly to that day’s TDC assignment by click on the “Add Your Response” button and filling out the form. Pretty slick, no?

Submitting Your Own Daily Create

Finally, you are strongly encouraged to add your own Daily Create assignment for the class to do, go here to share your brilliance and make us your creative slaves: http://tdc.ds106.us/suggestions/

More about the Daily Create

Read more about TDC here: http://tdc.ds106.us/

Basics of Blogging, Embedding Media & Personalizing Your Site

Blogging Tips

This Blogging Tips guide provides you with an excellent overview of some of the formal elements of blogging. Specifically how to frame your voice, how to provide context, grab your readers attention, link! link! link!, incorporating media, etc. Following those guidelines is crucial to your success in ds106.

Getting Started With WordPress

Alan Levine provides an excellent overview in the following video that helps you start setting up categories for your work, changing your blog title from My Blog to something meaningful, understanding the distinction between pages and posts, using the menus, understanding permalinks, and more. This video is a must for all you UMW students who are just getting up and running.http://youtu.be/XGRIvvDhzyc

Writing a Post in WordPress

Martha Burtis provides a screencast (linked below) that gives you an overview on how to create a post in a WordPress blog if you haven’t done so before. The video is a great overview, but the interface may be a bit different given this video was done almost a year ago: http://youtu.be/V8qD6mQWpQc?t=4m1s

Start it at 4:01

Writing Up Assignments

The Writing Up Assignments guide gives you a step-by-step guide for what is expected of you when you blog your assignments for this course. Tp get full-credit for your assignments, all these elements need to me met.

Embedding Media in WordPresss

Follow the Embedding Media in WordPress explaining how to embed media in your WordPress posts and pages for a wide range of sites that can be reproduced cleanly in your blog posts.

Installing Themes in WordPress

Martha Burtis created an excellent tutorial for installing themes on your WordPress blog. It’s 17 minutes long, and gives you a comprehensive look at the possibilities. What’s more, you can search google for all sorts of tutorials, tips, etc., but to ensure your site’s security we recommend you using themes (and plugins) from the wordpress.org repository. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MuizN4oQZYU

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=MuizN4oQZYU[/youtube]

Installing Plugins in WordPress

Plugins open a wide door to adding functionality to your site. You look for them and install them directly from inside your dashboard. You can find many lists of “best” plugins, but the best route is to experiment with them, and if they fail, delete ‘em .

As part of the blog setup process for ds106 we ask participants to learn more about [wordpress.org/extend/plugins WordPress plugins] by installing several of them on their sites (if they are a self hosted version of WordPress).

For an in-depth tutorial and screencast detailing how to install plugins on your WordPress blog, see this video (which is also below) by Martha Burtis:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA_ycobOlXE[/youtube]

For starters you need to install the following plugins (all of which have tutorials for the installation):

Akismet (spam prevention)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qx47Y0Fiig[/youtube]

Twitter Tools (for integration with Twitter)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtNRAR60w-s[/youtube]

Flickr plugin (for integration with flickr)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQDHz-ZjDoY[/youtube]

Jetpack (for subscribing to comments, sytats, and more)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wckhTukgLvA[/youtube]

Additional WordPress Support

Also, UMW students can use this series of how to wordpress videos provided for UMW community members (UMW login required)

Visual and Design Assignments

FromTheTwilightZoneAndBeyondTITLE2 8colours.gif

This week we will be focusing on Visual and Design assignments. You will need to complete 20 stars worth of visual assignments and 10 stars worth of design assignments (note that stars denote difficulty, not quality). Also, Animated GIF assignments qualify as both visual and design assignments. You cannot do the same assignment twice, and the only required assignment is the Twilight Zone Animated GIF. Also, the specifics for writing up an assignment post can be found here: Writing Up Assignments.Many of these assignments will require a photo editing software, you can see a wide range of free tools here. GIMP is an open source version of PhotoShop that is quite useful, but if you want to experiment with Photoshop the 30-day trial is free. I will be expecting you to ask me for help on Twitter about these assignments as they come up, but there are a ton of tools and resources on the web as well. To get your started, here is a tutorial for creating an Animated GIF using MPEG Streamclip and GIMP (both free tools).

Additionally, here is a tutorial for creating an animated GIF using Photoshop.

Finally, as part of this week’s assignments, and keeping with the ds106zone theme, on Tuesday, May 21st (tomorrow) at 2 PM, I will be introducing the visual and design assignment, providing some tips and recommendations, as well as airing the first ds106zone episode (all of which will be archived and shared soon after). Everyone will be required to base at least ten of the thirty stars worth of visual and design assignments due this week on the Twilight Zone episode “The Invaders” which you can both watch and download here:http://media.umw.edu/podcasts/ds106zone/twilight-zone-the-invaders

Additionally, don’t feel limited to “The Invaders” for your assignments, we invite you to explore the more than 150 episodes of Twilight Zone that were produced from 1959 through 1965. What more, there are a number of folks onTwitter who are using the hashtags #ds106zone and #episodes to share their favorite episodes if you need some ideas.

Happy hunting!

Intro to Visual and Design, ds106zone episode, and Open Office Hours

On Tuesday, May 21st at 2:00 PM I will be introducing some of the concepts and tools behind the visual and design portion of this class. I will demonstrate a few tools, take you through some work previous students have done, and give you some basic visual/design approaches to make it through a number of assignments. This will be streamed live at http://ds106.tv as well as archived and posted to ds106.us soon after the session if you can;t watch it real time.

On Thursday, May 23rd at 2:00 PM EST, join me in a Google Hangout to talk about how things are going. This will be an open office hour that will allow you to meet other ds106ers and get to know each other. I will be available to answer questions, too. The first 15 participants can participate via video. Others can listen in and participate in the chat. Alan and Martha will be Tweeting the URL for the Hangout right before it starts on Thursday afternoon, so keep your eye on Twitter.

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged ds106, ds106zone, umwsum13, Week1 | 1 Comment

$140 Million is Massive

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Reverend

Apart from all sorts of misgivings about Georgia Tech’s MOOCish Master’s program in Computer Science, I want to take a moment to do the math. You charge $7000 a year tuition with the idea you’ll have a 2-year cohort of 10,000 students. If you add that up, you get $140 million. That’s massive, especially when you’re only hiring eight new faculty to educate those 10,000 students. Follow the money, this is no joke, the profits are huge even after you split 40% of the kitty with Udacity.

Update: As Robert MCGuire notes in the comments, my math is off (how about that for doing the math), the number is probably closer 50-60 million given they are charing $7,000 for the whole degree over three years. My bad.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Syndication-Oriented Architecture: a Solution to Problem of Coherence

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Reverend

I’ve been preparing a talk that I will be delivering this afternoon for Campus Technology’s Virtual Leadership Summit. Given the session will be moderated by Gardner Campbell, I figured I’d take the opportunity to try and frame out the broader vision behind Domain of One’s Own that goes well beyond the education sphere. In fact, it’s remarkable how much of the vision is encapsulated in Jon Udell‘s 2007 talk “The Disruptive Nature of Technology.” For this presentation I have take seven clips from this talk—each roughly two minutes long. I’ll be using them as a touchstone for various concepts I want to try and demonstrate why it is essential at this moment to be encouraging people (and for the purposes of this talk faculty and students) to take control of the work they do online.

So, in order to both prepare for the talk and “narrate my public agenda”simultaneously, I’m going to link to the seven clips and contextualize each of them as part of a larger narrative centered on how new methods of instruction can be augmented by an architecture that defines learners and faculty as personalized, connected nodes within the networked world of the web. We’ll see how this goes.

1. The Problem of Coherence

Udell recognizes early on in this talk that despite all the great and magical qualities of the web to connect people and ideas, there remains an enduring issue and one which remains just as problematic six years on: a sense of coherence to the work we do online. In the following clip, Udell frames the issue of coherence in terms of what universities are used to in terms of monolithic IT systems that provide a sense of organization and structure that is anathema to the loosely coupled properties of the web, but endure because they make the interactions and exchanges fairly coherent, but using crude, outdated tools that accrue back to the university system rather than the individuals who actually created within them.

For example, you can do work within your school’s content management system (CMS) or learning management system (LMS) but there is often no effortless way (or even possibility) to allow people to port that work into their own personal archive. So while you might have some semblance of coherence in these systems, they lack any of the any the affordances that make the web the web (these are the limitations xMOOCS still seem to operate within monolithic systems with none of the affordances of the web). On the other hand, the loosely distributed spaces for creation like blogs, wikis, twitter, tumblr, Facebook, etc. allow for greater interaction, collaboration, and promotion of what is happening at your university, but often at the cost of coherence. There has been no quick and easy way to aggregate that work within the university’s existing CMS. So, in some ways the two are at “loggerheads.” Let’s listen to Udell first:

The Problem of Coherence

2. Hosted Lifebits

But in good form, Udell doesn’t offer a problem without a solution. He suggests the problem of coherence might be addressed if we start looking at the ways in which we publish and republish our work online somewhat differently. Rather than continuing to use monolithic systems that people are asked to create on, we need to focus our attention on actually designing an architecture that can syndicate (or simply republish seamlessly) the work people are already creating on the web in their own various online spaces. What institutions and communities can then do is use a syndication-orientated architecture to place that work within the proper contexts. In other words, build a republishing system that takes the work happening in these various individual spaces and make it part of a larger, coherent community web presence. The shift is from monolithic, institutional systems to more atomized, individualized publishing that is reconstituted as a whole through its myriad, distributed parts—not unlike Britian’s technological revolutions during the Spanish Armada: build smaller, faster, more agile ships to overcome the monolithic, sluggish Spanish navy.

Read more from Udell about this one here.

Hosted Life Bits

3. A Personal Lifetime Digital Archive

This next audio clip is why I decided to include these clips in the first place. I ‘d been presenting for the last four or five months using Udell’s ideas as a framework for my talks, but every time I listen to this talk again I was frustrated at just how much I butchered his examples. But, alas, I refuse to give up, and I figured this format gives me a bit more help 🙂 The idea behind the Personal Lifetime Digital Archive is very compelling to me on many levels. The idea that we all have a ton of digital work both locally and online across various platforms means that we are going to have to continually grapple with the issue of archiving our stuff. I love the example of Suzy in this clip, and following her through what a personal digital archive might look like, and how understanding our digital lifebits as something we can both control and share feeds into a syndication-oriented architecture. What’s more, it changes the axis of how a student might work across various instituions they come into contact with during their lifetime. We should be thinking of their time at school as one in which we are helping them understand the changing nature of publishing and online identity, and helping them understand this in a more nuanced, complex way, but more on that shortly.

Personal Lifetime Digital Archives

4. Not a Federation of Schools

Continuing on with Suzie’s personal digital archive, I think one of the things Udell understands intuitively about the web that most universities fail to understand is that it’s not just about them (another space wherein the xMOOCs are misguided). I guess as a university it’s hard not to be self-centered, but the bottom line is that the idea of a personal digital archive goes well beyond schools, in fact it has to in order for it to be relevant. But, when you think about how most university IT infrastructure is setup right now, it is the absolute opposite. Once you leave, your access (and by extension your archive) is gone. What does this mean for helping the people we educate maintain a coherent, enduring personal archive of the work they’ve done while attending our university? Isn’t making this easier part of what we should be doing?

Not a federation of schools

5. Narrating Your Public Agenda

And while the personal digital archive and the concomitant syndication-orientated architecture cannot be limited to a federation of schools for it to be relevant, at the same time personal publishing and personal archiving remain central to the academic enterprise. The idea of consistently and regularly narrating the work you do is the premise of an intellectual community. In that regard the web provides us to publish in a space of immediacy that enable a community to help each other refine their thinking—kinda sounds like college, right?

Narrating your public agenda

6. Digital Identity

At UMW we have spent a lot of time considering how the work a student might do as part of their college career may be one way to get them thinking responsibly about their digital identity. Just how much the web is becoming integral to how the world beyond understands who you are is a central question for us. We want them to realize that from the start of their career at UMW, and hep them use their time at UMW to shape an online identity that reflects their best selves. And that is exactly what Udell is arguing for in this next clip, rather than parents and teachers abdicating the responsibility of helping students understand the web, it is our responsibility to show them how to use it responsibly. And that is not a simple matter of rules and protocol, rather it is best done through practical experience and conceptual possibility.

Online Identity

7. Networked Minds

“How effective are you going to be able to be?” This is where Udell brings back the vision behind the syndicated architecture, personal digital archives, and more into the fact that all these ideas are always in service to the core message: the web enables us to dramatically augment the possibilities for sharing and collaborating around ideas. The digitally networked world affords our student a whole new level of potentiality that we, as colleges and universities, must recognize and design for accordingly—that is our responsibility. Fact is, we can’t teach them what it means to be networked learners if we don’t have faculty that understand this and the vision and architecture in place to realize it. What’s more, it’s a community’s responsibility to offer a sense of coherence (in this regard the appropriately designed virtual space) for this to happen in the most powerful ways. Instructional design has never been more important, I just wish it would stop aping the monolithic systems and start adopting and cohering the loosely coupled nature of the web.

Networked Minds

Posted in presentations | Tagged jon udell, presentation, presentations, syndication | 7 Comments

Proud to be Maladjusted

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Reverend

Last month I had the pleasure of attending the last Great Lives lecture of the season, a talk delivered by Dr. Ghaemi entitled “Madness and Greatness” —you can see the video archive here. His talk, which is abstracted from his book of the same title, looks at evidence of depression or bipolar illness in series of great historical leaders, such as Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and a few others. He attempts to demonstrate that such mood diseases actually helped them in leading during times of crisis. Diagnosing the dead is tricky business in my mind, but his larger discussion of transvaluing psychological conditions like manic depression was quite powerful. I particularly liked the video clip of Martin Luther King, Jr. that Dr. Ghaemi ended with about the precarious state of a well adjusted person in a maladjusted society (and vice versa). What’s more Dr. Ghaemi reminded the audience that by 1968, the year of his assassination, MLK was one of the most hated figures in politics because of his global views of systematic oppression that he repeatedly linked back to the imperialist war in Vietnam in the service of capital. Talk about the normative culture of U.S. history selectively claiming just one dimension of a truly great man.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Dr Ghaemi, maladjusted, Martin Luther King, MLK | Leave a comment

ds106zone: You are About to Enter Another Dimension

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Reverend

It’s been a long time coming and I hope you can forgive the delay, but as Luther would say in 48 Hours “I’ve been busy!” That’s right ladies and gentlemen, this is the long awaited—at least by Scottlo—post about ds106zone, the 5 week Summer session of ds106 being taught through UMW that will be starting on Monday, May 20th. I have to thank my old new radio friend Scott Lockman for giving me the required push to finally get this post out, we spent more than an hour Thursday morning talking about the class, and the conversation reinvigorated me to get my act together.

For anyone following ds106 for any length of time the name Scottlo will be synonymous with audio greatness, and for those of you who are new to the game it will soon become such. If you want a good idea of what you might be in for this Summer, take the time to listen to the most recent Scottlocast wherein the master introduces you to old time radio giant Arch Oboler as well as spends some time pulling teeth from yours truly to try and get a read on just what the hell will be happening this Summer. Let’s just say it was an interrogation of sorts 🙂

And, to that end, let me try and map out—albeit loosely—what might be in store for ds106zone this Summer. First things first, what the hell is ds106zone? ds106zone is an idea Dr. Garcia had about framing the Summer session around a Twilight Zone inspired thematic. In other words, approach the class as a kind of play-acted narrative, like we did with Summer of Oblivion, loosely based on the conventions of The Twilight Zone, something like:

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the ds106zone.

When I had world enough and time I was planning on doing no less then 10 full blown episodes on various topics updating Twilight Zone episodes for our cultural moment before the class even started. But life and nervous breakdowns got in the way sometimes, so I’m forced to recalibrate. I plan on introducing each week’s topics through a Twilight Zone inspired episode, and I’ll be tapping various people over the coming weeks as I frame each of these out. So, as of now, there will be one episode a week (five all told) that frame the topics and expectations and that course participants will be invited to riff on—and make there own if they are so inspired. What’s more, each week there will be a live broadcast on Tuesday (which will be archived) wherein that week’s topics for discussion will be delineated in more detail and our weekly guest will be featured. Another session that will provide a space to ask questions, provide feedback, and publicly berating anyone who is not doing the work will be live broadcast and archived each Thursday. As of right now I have Scottlo locked in for audio weeks 2 and 3 (we’ll be building the radio shows from day one), and I’m working on getting Michael Branson Smith for video for weeks four and five (hence the pingback 🙂 ).

And while I’m a bit tight on time for photography and design during weeks one and two, I think I know a few few folks who’ll be good for talking animated GIFs, photography and design over the next week or two. Either way, I am starting to actually pull this together, and I figured I might as well get this bad boy running and see what comes of it. I sent a slightly tweaked version of Alan Levine’s “scare” email out to the enrolled UMW students just now, and it might give anyone interested a sense of what they’re in for over the next five weeks. Though to be fair, open online participation is play as you want, there is no overhead: it’s fun and it’s free! I’m still fine tuning the syllabus, but as for now this class is on like Donkey King! If you want to participate as an open online student, you can sign-up here: http://ds106.us/handbook/success-the-ds106-way/quick-start/

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged ds106, ds106zone, umwsum13 | 13 Comments

UMW’s Innovation isn’t Technical, it’s Narrative

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Reverend

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 ways.

Or….

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world.

And…

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education.

I’m verklempt! 🙂 It’s awesome to see the innovative work happening at UMW for almost a decade now get recognized more broadly. Leslie’s framing her brilliant article around our work is the highest of compliments, and it really means a lot coming from someone who has been doing this work from both a support staff and faculty position for a long time now. People often ask “What’s in the water at UMW?” or “What are you all smoking?!” And while I don’t have a stock answer to that, I can say this: the simple process of openly narrating the work we do on our blogs has almost everything to do with our success. In other words, our willingness to regularly document the work we do, shared it openly, and even featured the work of others happening around the community has been what ultimately has made UMW’s DTLT that much better (and we are that much better). When you think about it, we’re not that different from a ton of other ed tech shops around the world: we support faculty, we run an LMS, we experiment with web-based tools, we pretend to understand what new media means, etc. For me, the one real difference is we have taken the time to narrate that process openly, which usually results in promoting the work happening around campus and injecting a little fun into the process (Andy Rush and I talk about this very thing all the time).

What’s most interesting to me about this formula is that it isn’t technical, it’s all cultural. Rather than squawking about MOOCs and the inescapable educational apocalypse, we went ahead and built our own networked online course (the ever irreverent ds106) that was very much inspired by the OG MOOCs, but was designed for our particular campus culture. Why aren’t more people doing this? Why are so many people wasting endless time writing about “MOOCs and the Latest Form of Autodidactic Rock Climbing Walls” rather then actually promoting the real work happening on the ground at their campuses. And I am not trying to be critical here because I have been to enough campuses the last four or five years to know there is a ton of awesome stuff happening at so many of them, it just so happens very few people are actually narrating it. The MOOC narrative has taken over, and we are all the poorer for it. Homegrown innovation on a university or college campus is not really all that complicated, it starts with the commitment to regularly tell the story about where you are and what you are doing rather than hanging to a bill of goods you are being sold about where you should be. Anyway, thanks Leslie, your article ruled, and it really made a bad month a little better. Big fan!

Posted in dtlt | Tagged dtlt, featured, umw | 7 Comments

OSU’s Writers Talk: Platforms that Unlock Passion

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Reverend

“I never knew writing could be so much fun”- EduPunk at OSU with @digitalfirstosu Innovate speaker @jimgroom on WT itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wri…

— Writers Talk (@WritersTalk) May 8, 2013

Back in March I gave a keynote presentation at THE Ohio University’s InnovateOSU conference (which I documented here) framing the various experimentations at UMW that led up to our current Domain of One’s Own project. The day before that presentation I was fortunate enough to sit down with the remarkable Jonathan Diehl, an OSU student that does his university proud. [N.B. – Jonathan doesn’t have a domain of his own I can link to so I will settle for his twitter 🙂 ] I had a compelling and wide-ranging discussion with Jonathan, and what I really loved about talking with him was the fact he had done is research quite thoroughly. He knew about and read this blog; he was familiar with EDUPUNK; he researched ds106; and, he even had a working knowledge of Domain of One’s Own. Unlike many “professionals” I have talked with over the years, John did his homework before this interview and there is no question what a huge difference that made in the tenor and depth of a conversation.

The half-hour conversation had a very specific arc that I think worked quite well. Here are the topics we covered (I think in this order):

how I rediscovered writing through blogging?
what the hell is EDUPUNK?!
how did EDUPUNK morph into ds106?
is ds106 a MOOC?;
what might the technical architecture of learning look like in the future?
what exactly is a MOOC and what might it mean for the future of higher ed?
and, finally, how might platforms (and communities) unlock passion?

The above topic list was created by me post-facto, so it may not be entirely accurate—consider yourself warned. Also, listening to the conversation again I was struck by how much work I have to do on clarifying my thoughts about the technical architecture of the future of learning, I found my description and examples far too broad and vague. What’s more, the ideas around the open architecture of the future of personalized learning is something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about recently. So listening to this conversation has been very useful in forcing me to clarify my thoughts in preparation for a presentation I’ll be giving May 16th at the Campus Technology Virtual Leadership Summit (moderated by none other than Gardner Campbell). My talk for the Campus Technology event is inspired by Jon Udell‘s 2007 “The Disruptive Nature of Technology” talk (as well as his IT Conversation with Rohit Khare and his 2010 Kynetx Keynote) as a means to think about how a technical architecture for education is better driven by coherence and context rather than scale and broadcasting, but more on that shortly. In the mean time, I’d like to give another thank you to Jonathan Diehl for being an amazing interlocutor, and tolerating the fact I talk too damn much!

OSU Writers Talk

Posted in interview | Tagged audio, innovateOSU, interview, Jonathan Diehl, mp3, OSU, Writers Talk | 4 Comments

bavatuesdays Episode 4: Blood and Black Lace

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Reverend

Above is the fourth episode of bavatuesdays, in this discussion Paul Bond and I take a look at Mario Bava’s 1964 giallo Blood and Black Lace. It’s quite a masterpiece of murderous technicolor, and it’s considered by many the beginning of the body count/slasher film genre. The premise is that a fashion house becomes the epicenter of a series of gruesome murders of six female models, and hence the Italian title Sei donne per l’assassino (Six Women for the Murder). The assorted murders are stylized to seem as if they had been taken from the pages of a death-themed fashion magazine. There is a lot to love about this film, and while Paul and I try to cover as much as we can, we couldn’t help but spend much of the time lauding Tim Lucas’s (of Video Watchdog fame) amazing commentary on the DVD. The man has nothing short of an encyclopedic knoweldge surrounding just about every detail of Mario Bava’s career. It is absolutely compellign to hear him talk, and it makes me want his book Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark all the more.

As for the recording of our conversation, I’m still working on getting the delay between Paul in the Google Hangout and the Wirecast broadcast to mesh more cleanly. As of now we are still a couple of seconds out of sync which is annoying. And while this doesn’t break the deal for me because we are doing it for fun and to learn about Bava’s films, I have to say it makes it harder to watch and having it synched would make the world a little bit of a better place to be ;). Anyway, I’ll try and figure this out this week so the next six episodes are clean. Hope you enjoy the show despite all it’s imperfections!

You can see Paul Bond’s post on the film here and his flickr set of relevant images here.

Posted in bavatuesdays | Tagged bavatuesdays, Blood and Black Lace, Tim Lucas | Leave a comment

Oh, my offence is rank

Posted on April 20, 2013 by Reverend

I attended a Great Lives lecture on Abraham Lincoln delivered by Michael Burlingame at UMW the other night . Like so many others, I am intrigued that Lincoln continues to capture the popular imagination in some pretty powerful and playful ways long after his death. During the lecture I was taken by the fact that Lincoln preferred King Claudius’s soliloquy to Hamlet’s oft-quoted “to be or not to be….” I didn’t really remember Claudius’s soliloquy so I looked it up after the lecture, and it comes in Act III, Scene III at line 37. I’ve reproduced it below.

Oh, my offence is rank. It smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not.
Though inclination be as sharp as will,
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood?
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this twofold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall
Or pardoned being down? Then I’ll look up.
My fault is past. But oh, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn, “Forgive me my foul murder”?
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder:
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardoned and retain th’ offense?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law. But ’tis not so above.
There is no shuffling. There the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limèd soul that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels. Make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees, and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe.
All may be well. (kneels)

There was some dark shit going on with Lincoln.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

bavatuesdays episode 3: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Reverend

This was a particularly fun discussion for me, and it came at a time that I desperately needed a distraction. Paul Bond continues to be nothing short of gold when it comes to these discussions about Mario Bava’s films, and it’s pretty amazing how we’ve been able to work together in a pretty loose, distributed way to make this show happen fairly organically. He’s very mellow and doesn’t seem the least bit phased by my lack of organization and planning, what’s more he does his research and has a ton of interesting things to frame about each film as well as Bava’s career more generally. You can see Paul’s post about The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) here, and his screen shots for the discussion here.

The discussion starts out talking with a focus on the trailer for the American International release of this film in the U.S. titled The Evil Eye, which appears to be dramatically different from the Italian version—which was a complete flop in the theaters, being pulled after only a week. Neither of us have seen the film, but would love to know if there are any existing versions of the U.S. version out there, because we really want to see it.

It’s fun to talk about the trailer because it includes so many scenes that just aren’t in the Italian version of the film. That said, I must recognize that I misspoke about the proximity of Rome to the sea. Rather than being two or three hours away from the Mediterranean (as I stated during the show), it just so happens the center of Rome is just 30 miles away from Ostia (which Paul mentioned), a beach community that is frequented by Romans during the Summer. In other words, my knowledge of Italian geography is greatly exaggerated, and I suck. Research, Jim, RESEARCH!!!

From there we spend some time talking about Leticia Romàn‘s career, the unbelievable use of lighting in this film to create suspense and horror, a few prolonged scenes demonstrating Bava’s mastery of the medium, as well as the fact that many consider The Girl Who Knew Too Much the first film Giallo. We cover even more than this (the conversation lasts over an hour), and I feel the more Paul and I watch Bava’s film in succession the more attentive and comfortable we become with our discussions. There is something be said about working your way through a director’s ouevre to get a more precise sense of their art.

Finally, we also talked about the theme song for this film in the Italian version: Adriano Celantano’s song “Furore.” Celantano is a titan of Italian pop music and film culture, and “Furore” was an earlier hit from 1960. He was inspired by Elvis Presley, and has gone on to have a 50 year career selling millions and millions of records. What we have in this film is an early appearances of Italy’s “King of Pop.” Also, another correction is due here. I’m not sure if “Furore” was Celantano’s first major hit in Italy, that is something I said in the discussion but I can’t confirm it. But, to be frank, I don’t think it was given how many singles he had made before that song—but I recognize that is not proof. What’s more, I am not sure if Furore was Celantano’s first appearance on a movie soundtrack–another point I make that needs to be fact checked. Anyway, I guess it was good no one watches less they be dreadfully misinformed by me, Paul on the other hand is the genuine article 🙂

Posted in bavatuesdays | Tagged Adriano Celantano, bavatuesdays, mario bava, The Girl Who Knew Too Much | 1 Comment