Category: What’s New @ UMW

UMW is a sponsor of the Marine Corps Historic Half Marathon on Sunday, May 19. We will have a booth at the Fredericksburg Expo Center on Friday, May 17 from 4–8 p.m. and Saturday, May 18 from 10 a.m.–7 p.m. This is where runners pick up their packets. We will be handing out branded towels as well as information about UMW. We are looking for volunteers for two-hour shifts. It’s a great opportunity to meet and greet folks from all over the country.

We also need volunteers for the UMW water stop bright and early Sunday morning. You can hydrate AND encourage the 7,000 runners as they make their way down Sunken Road.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Kelly Eury at keury@umw.edu.

The innovative ThinkLab Makerspace in the Simpson Library of UMW has been featured in the latest publication from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s 7 Things series on rapid innovation. UMW is cited alongside Stanford, Rutgers, and Case Westerns among other institutions for recognizing early on the importance of makerspaces as a way to inspire self-directed and hands-on learning using emerging technologies like 3D printing, robotics, and e-textiles. DTLT and UMW’s work has been featured in past issues of the 7 Things series on a variety of topics including MOOCs, WordPress, and 3D Printing technology. The full paper can be found on the EDUCAUSE website in PDF and ePub format.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks featured the long history of innovative work coming out of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology in her article “Beyond Disruption” for The Blue Review. Below is a somewhat extensive quote from the article:

Those who have been paying attention only to partnerships among Silicon Valley companies and the Ivies may be surprised that the beating heart of a tremendous amount of academic technology innovation is a small state university in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At theUniversity of Mary Washington, the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology has launched at least four amazing initiatives that should be replicated widely because it’s clear to even casual observers that they advance teaching and learning in myriad ways. For one, evidence of student learning appears on the open web, and I encourage you to check out the current blogs developed for courses. Faculty, too—and I know this from first-hand experience—benefit from knowing what students are thinking (as expressed in blog posts and comments) before they convene for class.

Several years ago, UMW’s DTLT premiered UMW Blogs, termed “the Bluehost experiment” by the DTLT staff because in its first iteration, it was little more than a WordPress Multi-User installation on an inexpensive ($6.95 per month) shared server at Bluehost. Today, any UMW student, faculty, or staff can set up a blog for class or personal use on UMW Blogs—and 500 courses have been brought onto the platform since fall 2008.  Anyone can browse the courses using UMW Blogs or discover all kinds of non-course blogs by exploring the latest posts featured on the home page. The UMW archives, for example, recently put online a series of lectures by the late civil rights leader James Farmer, and Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class has createdRosie the Riveter, an excellent resource that includes “firsthand accounts of what people experienced on the American home front during World War II.”

Next to emerge from this innovation engine was DS 106, an open course on digital storytelling, originally taught by Jim Groom, but since taught by several different instructors, including noted ed tech thought leaders and innovators Martha Burtis and Alan Levine, and recently by instructors at other universities as well. Because of the strong networks of the instructors and students, DS 106 took on a life of its own, with students—both those enrolled at UMW and those following the course from elsewhere—providing daily fun assignments (“the Daily Create”) that stimulate participants’ creativity and stretch their technological savvy. DS 106 spawned ds106 radio, a free-form, streaming broadcast for which anyone could volunteer to provide content.  How popular is DS 106 and its apparently endless stream of creative multimedia content? In spring 2012, Groom launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a better web server for DS 106, and the campaign raised 600% of its goal in just a few days, providing funding for all kinds of course improvements and expansions.  While Kickstarter provided private funds for this project, I’m excited about this kind of crowdsourced funding—although I’d be even more enthusiastic about greater public funding—because it allows project creators greater future freedom than would, say, funding from investors whose motive is more likely to be profit than pedagogical revolution.

Springing next from the mind of the DTLT geniuses was Domain of One’s Own, in which each first-year student at UMW receives a domain name and space on a web server. The project encourages each student  to “reclaim the web” by “taking control of your digital identity,” gathering its artifacts “in a central place that you own and control.” And it’s offered in collaboration with the university’s Office of Information Technology Services,

The pilot gave 400 students and faculty their own domain name and web space to install a portfolio of work or map onto existing systems. In Fall of 2013 every incoming student at UMW will have the opportunity to choose their own domain and receive a web hosting account with the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases, email addresses and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control.

Then, as if granting students this creative freedom and technical autonomy wasn’t enough, this spring UMW launched Thinklab, amakerspace. According to its About page:

ThinkLab is the exciting new makerspace located in the Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington. As a collaboration between the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, the College of Education, and the Library, ThinkLab hosts a variety of emerging technologies and tools for students and faculty across all disciplines. 3D printing, robotics, and electronics work using Arduinos and simple breadboard kits are just some of the many exciting things happening at ThinkLab.

The innovations and—yes, I’ll say it—disruptions, emerging from UMW exemplify some of the best practices in developing communities of learners, fostering collaboration, encouraging writing and reflection and developing curiosity about the world. Channeling George Kuh, Randall Bass emphasizes that such “high-impact practices” lead to “meaningful learning gains” as well as “high retention and persistence rates” because they encourage these specific behaviors:

• Investing time and effort
• Interacting with faculty and peers about substantive matters
• Experiencing diversity
• Responding to more frequent feedback
• Reflecting and integrating learning
• Discovering relevance of learning through real-world application

In an age when universities are pushing faculty ever harder to develop monetizable intellectual property, it’s refreshing to see faculty doubling down on using relatively inexpensive technologies to improve student learning. UMW is a case in point: it’s a modestly funded, small state university that, thanks to all the active minds (and periodic strategic hires) at DTLT and on the faculty, has become a major hub of innovation in higher education.

UMW’s Employee Appreciation Day will be held Monday, May 13 from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The University Awards Ceremony will begin at 10:30 a.m. in George Washington Hall’s Dodd Auditorium. The ceremony will recognize the recipients of the Charles Coleman Memorial Service Award, the Hurley Presidential Commendation and the Staff Advisory Council’s Larry Atkins Awards. During the ceremony, Professor of Psychology Chris Kilmartin will present a lecture, “Look in the Mirror: It Will Cause You to Reflect.”

After the ceremony, all employees are invited to a picnic luncheon on Ball Circle from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. As a reminder, the university will close at 3 p.m. on Monday, May 13.

Service Award Recipients

Congratulations to our service award recipients for the month of May: http://adminfinance.umw.edu/hr/files/2011/08/May-13-Service-Award-Recipients.pdf.

On Thursday, April 25, the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication inducted 17 people into the Eta Chapter of Lambda Iota Tau, the international honor society for students of literature. Inductees are majors in English who had completed at least 12 credit hours in literature and with a GPA of at least 3.5 in those credit hours.

Inductees included: Ana Rebecca Bice, Taylor Rae Chadman, Colleen D. Clark, Theresa Davidson, Danielle Paige DeSimone, Chelsea J. Dicus, Ellen R. Dreher, Michaela P. Godfrey, Catherine S. Kellogg, Gabrielle Kuhn, Catherine R. LeBouton, Danica Leninsky, Joseph Samuel Deitell Pugach, Charlotte Rodina, Bryanne Elise Salazar, Brittany Anne Vitner, and Amanda K. Wikle.

Danny Tweedy, Assistant Professor of English, gave the Taddesse Adera Memorial Address.

The induction ceremony was part of the Ninth Annual William Kemp Symposium for Majors in English, Linguistics, and Communication at which approximately 100 students in upper-division courses in English, linguistics, and communication presented original research and creative works. This year’s symposium featured 18 panel sessions and ran April 25 and 26.