James Harding on Stages and Context of 9/11

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Reverend

In yesterday’s episode of DTLT Today, I had the pleasure of sitting down with University of Mary Washington professor James Harding from the English Linguistics and Speech Department. Professor Harding specializes in avant-garde theater and has published far and wide on the topic. For this episode we focused on a course he teaches at UMW titled “Stages and Contexts of 9/11: Dramatic Literature and Contemporary History.” Given the 10 year anniversary of this historic event, our conversation touched upon attempts to define terrorism over the last decade; ways in which artists have attempted to frame this event; as well as considering the technical and ideological contexts of terrorism in a globalized world.

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ds106 is back and it’s a journey to the center of the internet!!!

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Reverend

Michael Branson Smith has an awesome vision for what ds106 is going to be this semester. What’s more all of DTLT is playing along with his classes up at CUNY’s York College and you can too. If you are interested in taking this creative journey to the center of the internet check out the following video and sign-up on the google form below.

Posted in digital identity, digital storytelling | Tagged | 24 Comments

Killer Shark Class

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Reverend

I am not sure if Sam O’Brien is trying to be funny or ironic (I forgot the difference) with his piece “A Professor’s opening lecture for ‘Intermediate Killer Shark Genre'” in McSweeney’s because in mind that is exactly how courses should be taught at the college level. No question: killer sharks, f-bombs, and threats of bodily harm….it is the one true way at knowledge transfer. Here’s a taste:

So you all think you know a thing or two about killer shark films, hmm? Well, take out your notebooks because here’s your first lesson: you fucking don’t know shit about killer shark films. Write that down three times. Then circle it and draw some jagged teeth protruding from the top and bottom so it looks like a shark is eating your notes. That is the format all of your essays should be in, by the way, with little teeth and dorsal fins all over the place. I don’t care if Word doesn’t have a shark font. Make it happen. [Read the rest here.]

Brilliant, thank you Tom Woodward for passing it on, it fits perfectly on the bava.

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Claudia Emerson on the “poetics of preservation”

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Reverend

We had our first DTLT Today episode (#33!) that actually featured a UMW faculty, and we were fortunate to get none other than Claudia Emerson, who is not only an amazing poet, but also as cool as they come. She sat down on and talked with us today about everything from her recent Guggenheim fellowship award to her forthcoming book Secure the Shadow (LSU Press), as well as a book she is just beginning. Later this academic year Claudia will be traveling to Italy to convene with the well preserved dead in Sicily as you prepares her next book that is focused on the poetics of preservation. Claudia is without question on of the most amazing people I have met since coming to UMW, and listening to her share her unique way of seeing the world is truly a pleasure. And I think all of us at DTLT she this as just the beginning of huge archives of discussions with the professors and students that make UMW an awesome place to be.

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“It was pure in my heart”

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Reverend

This post celebrating Jack Kerouac’s hotness on UMW Blogs thrust me into a rabbit hole that it has taken me several hours to crawl out from. Back when I was an undergraduate at UCLA and worked at the great Audio Visual Services on that campus we delivered the VHS tapes, Laser Discs, and even a few DVDs to classes (along with the equipment to play them). One Laser Disc that came through AVS that I “borrowed” for a while was the 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie (a sweet surprise, the entire documentary is available freely on YouTube here).

The documentary is an interesting attempt to recreate the biography of Kerouac through his novels, and I definitely recommend it if you are a fan of Kerouac or want to learn more about the Beats. It’s narrated by Peter Coyote, and it features William Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg, as well as a wide range of people from Kerouac’s life. One of the scenes that seemed to get burnt into my memory was a 1968 interview he did about the Hippies on William Buckley Jr.’s television show Firing Line. Kerouac was bombed, what’s more he was insufferable: correcting other guests’ pronunciation of words; interrupting them with childish sounds and taunts; while generally dismissing everything they say out-of-hand. In other words, he’s a jackass. Broken down, far too old for his age (he was only 46 at the time) and just a year away from his untimely death. You can see the premature age from pain all over his face, seeing him in this interview is not unlike watching a train wreck. All that said, there is a single moment of beauty in which you can see, at least for a moment, a relic of the idealism that drove him there. When Buckley asks if the hippies had somehow polluted the purity of the Beat movement with their ideology, Kerouac responds “it was pure in my heart.” Amen. Embedded below is the full Firing Line episode which has the special treat of also featuring Ed Sanders). The Open Culture blog linked to excerpts from this interview back in 2009, and it is nice to see the whole thing has been uploaded to YouTUbe back in May.

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“EdTech transmissions: We Control the Vertical and the Horizontal” at Maricopa College

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Reverend

Image credit: Cogdog made me stop at all the 106 rooms

Back in May I was lucky enough to be invited by the good folks of the Maricopa College System (the largest community college district in the US)  to talk about edtech as a change agent in higher education at their 2011 Teaching and Learning with Technology conference. I focused my talk on a few things: UMW Blogs, Jon Beasley-Murray’s Wikipedia Experiment, and the MOOC (in particular #ds106) as potential examples of change that is currently happening on the higher education landscape. I have talked about UMW Blogs a lot over the last few years, and what was new in this talk for me was trying to explain ds106 (which I think I did a better job of at the Elon talk). What was cool about my freeform discussion of ds106 is that it marks one of the few times where the kernel of an idea emerged within a talk for me that went on to become something that I actually impelemented and thought was awesome. I had been thinking a lot about how I would do ds106 differently for the fully online, 5-week intensive Summer version of the course, and it is in this talk (as well as a series of conversations with Alan Levine over the few days following this talk) that I got the courage to go ahead with the Summer of Oblivion. The last 30 minutes of this talk (at about the 40:00 minute mark) I start framing my thoughts about MOOCs, ds106, and the possibilities for rethinking online learning with such a model—I even nail the vision I has been searching for in regards to Videodrome, Dr. O’Blivion and what it might all mean.

Finally, I sound like a salty dog sailor in this video because I had blown out my voice in Vancouver only a day or two before at the epic Norther Voice jam session at the Sanctuary. I still hold that up as one of the greatest experiences of my life, and between Vancouver with all the maniacs and Arizona with cogdog, that 10 day trip back in May was OISOME!

Additionally, there is also a video available from the 45 minute Q & A after the talk which was a blast. From what I can remember, Alan and I spent a lot of time wondering why anyone would use an LMS —and saying something to the effect that “we don’t hate BlackBoard, but just feel better when it is not around.” 🙂

Special thanks to all the folks at Maricopa who made me feel right at home despite the fact I was highly self-conscious given how shot my voice was. And I would particularly like to thank Christy Alcaron and Eric Leshinskie for making everything so easy. What’s more, I have a separate post I need to write about the unbelievable edtech folks on the ground at Maricopa. They have come up with an extra-institutional professional development approach called the “cybersalon” which I had the distinct pleasure to partake in after the presentation—and I must say it’s brilliant, but more on that shortly.

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Shenandoah debuts online

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Reverend

It’s official, Shenandoah literary magazine has made the move from print to online-only. What’s more, it just so happens that I was integral in the process of moving this journal to WordPress—where else could it go? Martha Burtis and I came up with a pretty slick architecture for making this happen elegantly and easily. I will be blogging that out over the next month in a multi-part series. But in the interim I highly recommend you check out the first online issue of Shenandoah and leave a comment. I’m personally a big fan of Steve Scafidi, so if you do know his work check out a number of poems from his forthcoming book Lincoln Poems—there is even audio of him reading the poems. And what I love about the new format of Shenandoah is that it is free available to anyone with an internet connection—therein is the true revolution.

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Independent Domains – Thresholds to Teaching and Learning on the Open Web

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Reverend

A couple of weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure of delivering the closing plenary session at the Elon University’s 8th Annual Teaching and Learning Conference. Katie King, Ben McFadyen, and Claudia Sparks were awesome, and special thanks to Peter Felton for bringing me there and actually encouraging me to talk about ds106. The day was set up brilliantly, Ray Land gave the opening keynote in which he talked about “Threshhold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge” (which you can see in its entirety here). His idea of “a pedagogy of uncertainty” went really well with the second half of my talk which was about the ds106 Summer of Oblivion, so I decided to steal it and use it in my closing plenary. The first part of my talk is an overview of what UMW has done with UMW Blogs and the seemingly endless potential for an open source, open access publishing platform to frame an online community of thought at a university. As you might have guessed, I have talked about this a lot over the last 4 or 5 years.

The second half of this talk was really the first time I had an extended period of time to think about and share just how trippy, frightening, and amazing the ds106 Summer of Oblivion class was for me. From about the 20 minute mark in this presentation until the 50 minute mark I try and work through some initial thoughts about what ds106 might be about, and how the Summer of Oblivion reinforced for me just how much the world of online learning is completely unexplored in terms of experimentation and a variety of approaches. This opportunity wouldn’t have been possible without the fine folks at Elon who were so cool in inviting me and letting me go hog wild, so thanks to them as well as everyone who helped make the Summer of Oblivion possible—I gave many of you kudos in the talk, but as always there are many, many more I missed.

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Back to school at UMW (Blogs)

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Reverend

We just finished our first week at UMW—-it was an uncharacteristically late start for us. We are usually in week two or three by now, but I am not complaining because the extra spell before game time was nice. That said, the semester has arrived and UMW Blogs held up beautifully the first week (even though it got clobbered traffic wise). Martha Burtis did a site re-design which looks snazzy. What’s more, Martha re-themed the UMW Wiki to match UMW Blogs, which is something we plan on experimenting with and using a lot more this year. After the upgrade in early August, it seems like UMW Blogs has been rock solid. No downtime, and very little in the way of errors, crashing plugins, rogue themes, etc. The system is tight, and I am not afraid to say it these days. With more than 22,000 unique visitors during week one and over 82,000 page views—all I have to say is bring it on. UMW may be small, we may be relatively poor, but we are scrappy as all hell. What’s more we are open education at it’s best and least pedantic.

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A DTLT Today Weekly Round Up (9-2-11)

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Reverend

There were a ton of solid DTLT Today episodes last week. Tim Owens and I interviewed Antonio Vantaggiato on his work in progress (The Zen of Teaching) that interviews a variety of folks about the myths surrounding teaching, learning, and technology in our current moment. Add to that Tim and Andy Rush’s interview with UMW’s own Curtiss Grymala (resident WordPress Programmer) who under the visionary leadership of Cathy Derecki in University Relations has been re-imagining, re-coding, and re-designing UMW’s main website for WordPress.

What’s more, I sat down with Martha Burtis for an episode of DTLT Today in which we talked about the Online Learning Initiative being spearheaded here at UMW by the great Steve Greenlaw. Both Martha and I are on the committee, and in addition to both Martha’s incisively blogged thoughts about the state of online learning under the tyranny of instructional designers heretofore, as well as Steve Greenlaw’s last two or three posts in which he is framing his own course redesign, the tyranny of the contact hour, while thinking out loud about what a re-imagined high impact course (whether face-to-face or online) might look like (en fuego, anyone?). So, given UMW’s current state-driven initiative to experiment with online learning, Martha and I sat down to try and explore what it might mean to rethink online learning for the liberal arts experience.

Finally, my special friend Andy Rush and I sat down to talk about the DTLT media empire collective that has emerged over the last number of years. Starting with UMW Blogs, but focusing more on the “PGP” (or post-Grant Potter ds106radio era). The impact Grant Potter’s ds106radio experiment has had on the thinking and future of DTLT cannot be underestimated, not can how important a piece to the puzzle the addition of the great Tim Owens has been to get us there.

We have been playing hard with DTLT Today, there is no doubt about that. And while I was working with faculty all week I have been planting the seeds. I think I have two interviews with UMW faculty lined up for next week—if there is space in the crowded DTLT Today schedule. I am planning on interviewing Professor James Harding on the idea of Terrorism and how it has been defined post-9/11 given his work on the subject in his Post-9/11 seminar. What’s more, I am hoping pulitzer prize winning poet Claudia Emerson will sit down with us to talk about what she is working on currently. There is nothing cooler than listening to both these thinkers talk and imagine, and for me that is a big part of what DTLT Today is and will increasingly become. Also, we need to start getting the students and their work on there.

Finally, doing a 15 minute DTLT Today episode on a regular basis is kind of like a group video blog—and there can be no question just how formative this series has been in bringing the DTLT group together around ideas and having fun—both of which we do very well 🙂

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