bavatuesdays

All,

The 5 week intensive course has been fast, furious, and a lot of fun. I can’t thank the open, online students enough who carried the commenting, feedback and general network love for many of the for-credit students at UMW. That said, some unbelievable gems from the UMW community made themselves known over the last 5 weeks, and some unbelievable work was produced as a result. You all know who you are and I applaud your effort and look forward to more. For those UMW students who didn’t avail themselves on the affordances of the ds106 community at large and simply tried to get by, I’m afraid you missed the whole point of ds106—which has nothing to do with a grade.

I also want to recognize the thankless work of Martha Burtis, Andy Rush and Tim Owens at the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies who not only counseled this broken TA throughout the process but more importantly played along with crazy, experimental notions of what this class could and should be more brilliantly than any other crew could—you all rock! They made it far better than I could have ever dreamed. This was a class that really reflected the ethos of DTLT more than anything: experiment wildly, do it openly, hold people accountable for their own genius, and have fun all the while. And while this class had too many problems to list here (but my final video will examine some of them), it was approached in good faith, and I think there is much to be learned from that.

Anyway, enough gushing, this class is all but over. The open, online credit students rocked the house, and ds106 loves you. As for the UMW for-credit students, you have just a little bit further to go before you sleep:

• All video assignments are due no later than midnight tonight unless you contacted me otherwise—nothing else will be accepted after that point.
• Starting tomorrow you must work on archiving your blog, I already posted the details, timeline and tutorials for this.
• As a final exam, each of for credit student (and any of the open, online students who are interested) need to create a considered and thoughtful reflection on the ds106 Summer of Oblivion. It should be at least 5 minutes long and should be a circumspect and thoughtful review/reflection of this online course. What worked for you? What didn’t? Was the Oblivion narrative a sideshow or an attraction? Would this class work better in person than online? If so, why? If not, why not? Etc. These are all starter questions, I want you to pursue you particular reflections on this course. Please avoid attacks, rants, and the blame game. Come clean, where did you fail the class and where did the class fail you? What’s more, I want you to do it as a video that you submit on your existing blog (and your archived blog) by no later than midnight Thursday, July 21st.
  

Finally, today there are three new videos from the Oblivion narrative that begin to sew the campy threads of this craziness together, no matter how loosely. You can find them all here: http://ds106.tv

What’s more, there will be one more short video tomorrow morning at 11:30 AM (EDT).

And that’s that, best regards, and remember ds106 is 4life!

Jim Groom
Dr. Brian Oblivion
Tim Doom
Tim Groom
Kim Droom
And the voice of Sherrif John Bottom