Category: Academics

UMW, and UMW Blogs in particular, is being heralded in Richard Demillo’s new book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities as a space of great educational ferment, to quote from George Leef’s review of the book here. In fact, Leef’s review not only examines more popular open education mainstays like MIT’s Open Courseware, but spends a bit of time discussing the role of networked culture in re-imagining the future of higher education:

Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information.

In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the digital spaces engineered by Jim Groom and his band of Edupunks. At UMW, learning takes place in blogs.”

And when highlighting the importance of a networked culture for the future of learning at institutions UMW is highlighted as a model. UMW Blogs provides more than open resources and lectures on the internet, it also enables the ability to interact and share ideas and resources that helps bridge the gap between institutions of higher learning and the web.

James Bacon, proprietor of the Bacon’s Rebellion blog that focuses on all things Virginia, not only gave UMW kudos in for its work with UMW Blogs in his post on the DeMillo book, but also points out what remains the most important lesson of UMW Blogs. The open publishing platform is not remarkable because it is single-handedly transforming higher education (such an assertion would be absurd), but rather it is how this platform embodies “the process of experimentation” that is still in its infancy when it comes to the future of higher education. To Mary Washington’s great credit, it has been on the bleeding edge of innovation in this regard for more than seven years.

Image credit:  Ethan Hein’s “Hyperbolic orthogonal dodecahedral honeycomb”

Jeff McClurken, chair and associate professor of history and American studies, had the article “Teaching and Learning with Omeka: Discomfort, Play, and Creating Public, Online, Digital Collections” published in the collection “Learning through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.”

The essay was released in electronic form at http://learningthroughdigitalmedia.net. In addition, it was issued in published form by The New School as part of Mobility Shifts, a project supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The article, which discusses the value of discomfort and open-source tools in teaching digital history, features a number of digital history projects by UMW students.

Read the article in its entirety.

Jess Rigelhaupt, assistant professor of history and American studies, and four UMW students served on a panel on “Oral History and Documenting James Farmer’s Legacy at the University of Mary Washington” at the 2010 meeting of the Oral History Association. Christiane Lauer ’11, Sadie Smith ’11, Justin Mattos ’10 and MacKenzie Murphy ’10, with Rigelhaupt, presented papers based on interviews the students conducted in Rigelhaupt’s course “Oral History and James Farmer,” which was taught in fall 2009. The interviews are available at farmeroralhistory.umwblogs.org, a website that documents Farmer’s contributions to UMW and was built as part of the course.  Lauer’s and Smith’s participation in the Oral History Association annual meeting was supported by an undergraduate research grant from the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, published four research articles (the last two as a co-author): “Centralizers in the semigroup of injective transformations on an infinite set” in the Bulletin of the Australian Mathematical Society, “Infinite injective transformations whose centralizers have simple structure” in the Central European Journal of Mathematics, “Automorphisms of endomorphism semigroups of reflexive digraphs” in Mathematische Nachrichten, and “Minimal paths in the commuting graphs of semigroups” in the European Journal of Combinatorics. He was an invited speaker at the “Workshop on Universal Algebra, Complexity and Constraint Satisfaction Problems” in Lisbon, Portugal, and gave an invited seminar talk at the Center of Algebra of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Associate Professors of Biology Andrew Dolby and Deborah O’Dell were awarded a $1,000 grant by the Virginia Society of Ornithology for their joint project Enzyme immunoassay quantification of Heat Shock Protein 60 and its application to avian conservation biology.

At the Virginia Academy of Science’s Fall Undergraduate Research Meeting, held at the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond in October, O’Dell’s student, Anum Shaikh, was awarded funding for undergraduate research. Anum will study the “Effects of Combined Vitamin E and C Treatment on Plaque Formation in Alzheimer’s Disease.”