December 26, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

ds106 Wins Innovation Award from Reclaim Learning

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This week, ds106, the open online digital storytelling community that grew out of CPSC106 at UMW, was awarded the Innovation Contest from Reclaim Open Learning. The award is meant to honor projects that embody principles of open education and participatory learning. ds106 is one of five projects to receive the award this year.

Reclaim Open learning is a collaboration between the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine and the MIT Media Lab. It’s goal it to bring together like-minded researchers and educators who are interested in issues of open education. The Innovation Contest is one program of the project.

ds106 is an open, online digital storytelling community that was originally architected by Jim Groom, director of teaching and learning technologies at UMW. After teaching UMW’s digital storytelling class, CPSC106, for two semesters, in spring 2011 Groom became interested in opening the course up more broadly. Working with Martha Burtis, special projects coordinator in DTLT and another CPSC106 instructor, and colleagues at other institutions, Groom launched ds106.us and  invited anyone to join the course and participate in the activities.

During the first semester, over 200 participants signed up for ds106 from around the world and explored the art and meaning of digital storytelling. Since then, the community has spawned a crowd-sourced assignment repository, a Web radio station, The Daily Create (a site that provides daily prompts for those interested in exercising their creative muscles), and In[spire] (a student-created site that showcases the finest work in the community). In addition, faculty at other schools have used the ds106 community to model similar courses at their own institutions.

As part of the award, Burtis will attend and present at the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium in Newport Beach, California on September 26 & 27.

Domain of One’s Own Project and DTLT Featured in Center for Digital Education

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The Domain of One’s Own project, an initiative being run at the University of Mary Washington by the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was featured in the Center for Digital Education in an article by Tanya Roscorla. The article notes the unique nature of the program amongst peer institutions across the nation, as well as the profound need for such a program to exist. The Domain of One’s Own project successfully ran a pilot with over 400 students and faculty, and will open fully to the incoming freshman class this fall.

Jim Groom Delivers Three Invited Presentations

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Over the course of two weeks, Jim Groom was invited to give presentations about the innovative work the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies has been doing recently. On May 16th, Jim Groom delivered a talk titled “Syndication-Oriented Architecture: a Solution to Problem of Coherence” for Campus Technology’s Virtual Leadership Summit. You can read more about the conceptual thinking about the ideas presented here.

On May 22, he was invited to speak about the open, online class ds106 to the College of Wooster, you can watch the presentation in its entirety below, and read more details here.

Finally, on May 30 he presented once gain about ds106 to the University System of New Hampshire, a presentation you can read more about and listen to the audio here. The slides can be found below.

Jim Groom Interviewed for Ohio State University’s Writers Talk series

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On May 6th an interview with Jim Groom was aired on the Ohio State University’s radio program Writers Talk. The discussion focuses on the work he has done as part of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technology: ranging from the formation of UMW Blogs, the popular appeal of the Digital Storytelling class affectionately known as ds106 and its relationship to those confounded MOOCs, as well as DTLT’s current groundbreaking project Domain of One’s Own. The interview runs 30 minutes and you can listen to it below.

OSU Writers Talk

Jim Groom Keynotes OSU’s Ed Tech Conference

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Image credit: innovateOSU “Jim Groom Keynote”

Jim Groom delivered the keynote presentation at Ohio State University’s  fourth annual educational technology conference, innovateOSU, titled “Domain of One’s Own: Open Educational Experiences.” The presentation shared the work that has been happening at UMW over the past eight years, chronicling the fruits of  DTLT‘s experimentations with commodity web hosting which led to innovative projects  such as UMW Blogs, Digital Storytelling (ds106), and most recently Domain of One’s Own. You can see the slides for this presentation here. To see an archived video of the live presentation click here.

Jim Groom Keynotes Regional Technology Conference

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accs-2013_vegasJim Groom delivered the keynote presentation titled “A Domain of One’s Own: A Novel Approach to Open” at the Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia conference. This presentation contextualized the history of innovative work in UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies since 2004 to frame the current Domain of One’s Own pilot that will provide a domain and web hosting account to all Freshman and Transfer students come Fall 2013.

Tim Owens, Jim Groom Presented at Emory University

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Jim Groom

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Tim Owens

On Tuesday, January 29th, Tim Owens and Jim Groom, in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, were invited to speak about Domain of One’s Own at Emory University’s inaugural “Symposium on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing.” The presentation covered the current pilot of UMW’s Domain of One’s Own while sharing the remarkable faculty development initiative happening around the pilot as well as the full blown implementation of this project come Fall 2013 wherein UMW gives all of its incoming freshman sponsored access to their own domain and web hosting.