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 🙂
