This session combined practical demonstration with web-based provocation. the components for powerful, scalable personal learning environments have come of age. Open source tools and formats allow for near-limitless recombination of content and components, even on a small budget. Special emphasis will be placed on the power of syndication and embed code; we’ll demo WordPress plugins and MediaWiki extensions that foster permeable spaces promoting instantaneous reuse and streamlined content workflows.

Session website with relevant links: http://radicalreuse.bavatuesdays.com

Co-Presenter: Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia

Session videos:

This presentation will examine the innumerable cultural resources available for teaching and learning online. Using the Internet Archives as one example, this presentation will demonstrate the wide array of documents, videos, music, and images that may be of interest to a wide range of disciplines for imagining the space and possibilities for digital media in the classroom. Moreover, these resources are all in the public domain, which underlines some very important questions of working in the world of culture without the ubiquitous limitations of copyright.

• Session website: http://raidingthearchive.umwblogs.org/

Video/audio forthcoming.

A long, long time ago (four years this July, to be exact) UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies took a brave step into our cultural moment’s greatest frontier: teaching and learning on the wide open web. This presentation will examine the history of that bold move along with one of its particularly compelling progeny, UMW Blogs. The launch of UMW Blogs in Fall 2007 saw the creation of over 1000 blogs authored by more than 1200 UMW students, faculty, and staff. We couldn’t be more delighted by the way in which the community has adopted this new space and the activity that’s been generated in it.

Over the course of the year, UMW Blogs was used for such a wide range of purposes that calling it simply a “blogging platform” doesn’t do it justice; we like to think of it more as a web-based publishing platform for re-imagining teaching and learning technologies. This presentation will not only frame the history of this web-based evolution, but examine how the UMW community has used this space to collaborate, interact, and present their work to the worlds beyond its border, much of which will provide a context for a number of the sessions you will be hearing over the course of this conference.

Session website: http://facultyacademy.org/wiki08/page/UMW_Blogs_Begins

Co-presenters:
Gardner Campbell, UMW’s English, Linguistics, and Speech
Andy Rush, New Media Specialist, UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning

Video of session available below:

The Long Poem seminar created an article for Wikipedia over the course of the Spring, 2008 semester as a way to frame some of their research as well as to create a collaborative document that could then be shared with the world. On the first of April this article was officially published on Wikipedia by the class, and is currently an online resource readily available to the world. The project brings up some interesting questions and issues surrounding the academy’s role in creating and shaping the content that people will be accessing on Wikipedia. Should colleges and universities be contributing to this global resource of information? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks? Why Wikipedia?
“Welcome to the People’s Republic of Non-Programistan”

Session website with relevant links: http://facultyacademy.org/wiki08/page/Why_Wikipedia%3F

Co-Presenter: Mara Scanlon (UMW, English, Linguistics, and Communication)

Session audio forthcoming.

The New Media Consortium’s Symposium on Mashups, April 1-3, 2008

This online presentation pushed the boundaries of presentation and performance while exploring the possibilities of using open, portable and user-friendly tools for teaching and learning. Following is the session description:

The time for revolution is here! The tools are now in the hands of the people. We’ll focus on how to use the mashup as a way to both save time and create a more powerful products using free and easy tools like Wordpress, Google Apps and MIT’s Simile project. Now is the time to rise up and end mindless drudgery. Come and be educated! Come and learn the tools that will mean your freedom!

Session website: http://bionicteaching.com/ihatecode

Co-presenter:
Tom Woodward, Academic Technology Consultant, University of Richmond

To view the archived version of this session in Adobe connect follow this link.

ACCS Conference of Virginia, March 14th, 2008

This presentation offered an alternative means of conceptualizing how university networks might approach supporting teaching and learning technologies by designing their online publishing systems around an RSS-rich aggregation system of open syndication, rather than closed repositories and Learning Management Systems (LMS) that seldom, if ever, allow or enable communication outside the walls of the course. Specifically, we described how the University of Mary Washington is using WordPress Multi-User to build an enterprise-level educational publishing platform, and how it has fundamentally transformed the online component of teaching and learning beyond the tools of the standard LMS. You can also take a look at the presentation website we created for this presentation here and/or listen to the audio from this session below.

Co-presenters:
Andy Rush, New Media Specialist, University of Mary Washington
Jerry Slezak, Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning Technologies, University of Mary Washington

Download Don’t Call It a Blog, Call It Educational Publishing

Northern Voice, February 22-24, 2008

Session abstract: “What if we didn’t understand what we do in education with blogs as blogging but as a quick and easy way to publish online within a learning community? Or a place to feature a portfolio of students best work? Or a site where professors and staff track their professional and personal development? What if we understood “campus blogging initiatives” as a community publishing platform to share, learn, and integrate various resources from around the web into a more specific community? What if blogging were no longer the focus as a keyword, and a publishing community was the crux of the process of development? What if faculty, staff, and students are given the ability to shape their online presence and frame their intellectual community alongside one another? What would be the nature of such a syndicated publishing architecture that could support such a change in the ways we think about teaching, learning, sharing, and archiving the academic work done on college campuses? This presentation will offer an alternative means of conceptualizing how university networks might approach supporting teaching and learning technologies by designing their online publishing systems around an RSS-rich aggregation system of open syndication, rather than closed, labyrinth-like repositories and Learning Management Systems that seldom, if ever, see the light of day.”

Co-presenters:
Brian Lamb, Coordinator of Emerging technologies, University of British Columbia
D’Arcy Norman, Educational technology Developer, University of Calgary
Bill Fitzgerald, Project Lead and “proprietor”of OpenAcademic.org

Download “Don’t call it a Blog, Call it an Educational Publishing Platform”

Presentation for the CUNY IT Conference at John Jay College in New York City on November 30th, 2007

This panel examined three uses of open-source tools for teaching and learning, beginning with Mikhail Gershovich’s discussion of Baruch’s cac.cophany, a blog that has allowed the Bernard Schwartz Institute to share its work with local and global audiences. Followed by Matt Gold sharing his experience teaching an online new-media studies course with a number of open-source applications for collaborative writing and research projects. Finally, I presented the blogging initiative at UMW which has brought an entire institution into conversation with itself and the world.

Co-presenters:
Mikhail Gershovich, Director, Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College
Matthew K. Gold, Faculty, New York City of Technology and the CUNY Online Baccalaureate

This session explored how open-source applications can help shape and sustain vital communities of learning. We will discuss collaborative research/learning management systems such as Sakai and Moodle; blogging platforms such as WordPress; social networking applications such as Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter; web-hosting options both on- and offsite; and other innovative practices that center on emerging technologies. We will also consider Creative Commons licenses and implications for intellectual property.

We propose the creation of an Open Content educational resource in history/literature, and documentation/support materials to enable others to easily and effectively create their own using freely available tools and services.

URLs for the session: http://earlyamericas.wordpress.com/ and http://opencontentdiy.wordpress.com/

Audio available:

Download Out of Print

Video available: