bavatuesdays

“Well, Lloyd, I’ve been away but now I’m back. So, you line ’em up and I’ll knock ’em back, one by one.”

That’s right the best damn ITS from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine (or Portland, Oregon for that matter) is back in the blogosphere. It has been one of those months, as they say, where I have been all work and no play, making Jackie here a dull boy. So much to say with so little time to frame it means that I have been battling a bit of my own writer’s block – but this silly post is just a way to warm up … so stay tuned I am getting ready to tackle a number of topics such as:

• Faculty Academy
• Teaching with Lyceum
• And using wikis as developmental syllabi

So stay tuned …

I have been thinking a lot about the space of multimedia authoring in higher education lately, and it just seems to me that most universities I have been at are grossly under-prepared for the challenges that freshmen over the next ten years are going to represent in terms of “non-traditional” authoring. In fact, Gardner’s Donne Seminar podcasts are one example of incorporating a “non-traditional” (whatever the hell that means) media authoring tool into a 16th and 17th century Brit Lit college classroom. As it has been recently claimed, if technology is understood as a heuristic then we must consider how such techniques for learning and discovering shape the context in which we learn and, hence, the content that we learn.

I have been particularly interested in these questions because over a year and a half ago I turned my then 14 year old nephew on to Sorenson Squeeze, he has since discovered how to edit films quite impressively – moreover, he has just started publishing them on his very own blog! Wow, here’s a kid who is developing a filmic vocabulary that is allowing him to communicate ideas, emotions, and his own life experience quite effectively through numerous mediums to a potential audience of millions.

There is no question that universities privilege the written word over all other media, yet there is a question as to how long this can and will remain the case. We are, indeed, embarking on a brave new world characterized, at least for the moment, by a popular digital-authoring movement (just go check out youtube.com if you don’t believe me)- but are we at all prepared here in higher-ed? Not by a long-shot!

That is how I would describe the student readings of Donne being published on Gardner Campbell’s blog. Where was this guy when I was an undergraduate in English literature?

Wow! The sound quality is impeccable, but, more importantly, the interpretive and analytical nuances of such a student generated project are truly amazing. This is Web 2.0 in the academy at its finest … Bravo to all involved!

As a proud member of DTLT I think it is safe to say that we had a relatively successful run of our “Bluehost: A Fantastico Expedition” presentation at the ACCS conference today. It was really a pleasure to talk about all the fantastic”o” things we are doing here at UMW, and framing it through our experiment with bluehost web hosting gave me a fresh and important perspective on all the great things we do on a daily basis. Additionally, it makes me really excited about the next steps we take. I know Gardner always talks about the ‘Dream Team’ – and today I think I saw what he was talking about when I watched my colleagues share their knowledge so articulately with the audience … bully for DTLT!!! Below is a picture of the group (I actually took the picture so, unfortunately, I am absent from the photo) right after the rock concert:

Oh, yeah, did I mention Jon Udell is coming to Mary Washington? More info here …

I have been taking a little slack here at DTLT (which, by the way, will be hosting none other than Jon Udell at this year’s Faculty Academy on May 17th – wow!!) for pointing out the delicate subtleties of a slide show extension for flash called Slide Show Pro. So much so, that my new initials have been designated S.S.P. Often times, folks try and focus on what Slide Show Pro -that beautiful image presentation panacea- cannot do. Like, for a random example, interface and work with a photo gallery such as coppermine (which, happens to be where the theater and historic preservation classes we are working with here in DTLT are storing their digital images). Well, my jaded PowerPoint lovers, Web XS 24(like me) has recognized (in all our infinite wisdom) the shifting paradigms of web image communication as we know them, and coded accordingly.

In sum, comments on blogs can be a space for conversation, dialogue, and a general community of sharing and learning. But they can also be a place to pay homage to your Slide Show Pro master! So, I will be expecting at least two, if not three, comments on this blog very soon – if dignity is still a value in this forsaken land of scrap bookers!!

Basecamp has done it again recently with their free IM messaging service. Here is how they describe it:

Campfire lets you set up password-protected web-based chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Set up a room on your intranet for internal communications.

You can find out more here … Campfire.

Thanks for the tip Zach!

I have been been looking for resources on the relationship between Americas’ first war (the Tripolitan War from 1801-1805) in North Africa and the Haitian revolution. While I am still searching for the historical connection, I found a very interesting ‘academic’ project using a wiki and blog to open up the historical narrative of the Haitian revolution to a larger online community. The Louverture Project understands its marriage of the narrative of this important revolution for liberation with technology as follows:

One proposed feature of The Louverture Project is the development of a historical narrative to provide context for the encyclopedic collection of facts on the site. The Revolution Will Be Forgotten is a work in progress, a popular history of the events of 1791-1804 and their effects on the world at large. Readers of the online narrative will have the freedom to read the text on its own, or to explore the ideas, concepts, and facts referenced in the text in varying levels of detail. Of course, TLP will also function as a fully-searchable online resource for a wide range of Haiti-related historical material.

Though we’re starting out with a focus on the Revolutionary Period of Haitian history, it’s not easy to tell exactly when, or if, the effects of that revolution ended. Therefore, the scope of the site is bound to expand as more contributors come online. Be bold in adding to and editing the site. Let it be l’ouverture “the opening” to knowledge and understanding of a fascinating, important, and too-long ignored piece of world history.

The intersection of popular histories and social networking technologies seems to be a truly important academic and cultural development that takes the wikipedia model and focuses it upon an in-depth examination of specific moments of, in this case, history (but why not music, literature, art, biology, chemistry, etc.?). The use of the wiki, and other social networking applications, as a repository for the inscription of a public memory that is neither unilateral or complete suggests an ongoing dialogue that depends upon community involvement and a willingness to explore and engage the intellectual and cultural moments that shape our worldview. Such a project, while it is certainly exposing itself to potential “errors”, opens up the composition of cultural memories to the diverse authorship of communities. The Louverture Project envisions the possibilities of technology to expand the horizons of understanding of cultural moments, practices, etc. both within and outside of institutional models.