Projects
University of Mary Washington Blogs
This project uses WordPress Multi-User (an open source semantic publishing platform) to allow students and faculty author online with minimal overhead. This is the second iteration of a multi-user blogging platform (see the ELS Blogs description below for the first) and it is available campus-wide to any UMW faculty, staff or student who wants to use it. It has grown to thirteen hundred student and faculty blogs during the Fall 2007/Spring 2008 semesters. This web-based publishing space offers the UMW academic community a quick and easy authoring solution that is flexible, elegant, and open. Providing a relatively simple process for creating class sites, e-portfolios, and a whole host of other web-based resources.
Link to UMW Blogs.
English, Linguistics, & Speech Blogs
ELS blogs was the first WordPress Multi-User environment tested widely at the University of Mary Washington. With close to 80 blogs over the course of six months for just one academic department. The simplicity for students and faculty to create their own publishing space on the web coupled with the ease-of-use of WordPress made this online publishing platform both attractive and quite successful in its debut. UMW is now introducing a broader WordPress Multi-User solution for the entire campus with the second iteration of this project: UMW Blogs (see description above). ELS Blogs, however, is still up and running and will continue to provide a space for both faculty and students to create a dynamic web authoring space for their academic needs for the foreseeable future. Link to ELS Blogs.
Online Literary Journals
Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals class pushed the boundaries of thinking through the relationship between theory and practice in the classroom by having students conceptualize, build, and design their own web-based literary journal. This experience-based course in the humanities broke the fifteen week semester up into two parts respectively: 1) an intense discussion-based examination of the most prominent contemporary literary journals; 2) the class broke up into four groups, each of which was charged with building their own online literary journal. The pertinence of a “technology lab” in such a humanities class offered the students a unique, goal-driven experience of analysis, conception, and creation -and all within the course of one semester. An excellent example of the possibilities of such a class are made apparent by Nonce, a student-based journal that received over fifty submissions from all over the globe in less than ten weeks time (be sure to take a look at the journal and read their mission statement). Link to student journal.
The Venice Seminar Exhibit
Marjorie Och, professor in the Art and Art History Department at Mary Washington, developed a seminar on the city of Venice that incorporates several dynamic open source technologies. The course’s goal was to build an online exhibit that features the research on Venice the seminar participants produced over the course of the semester. The seminar experimented with the possibilities of using wikis and blogs to offer web-based writing and researching opportunities that would allow students to reflect on course content, develop a sense of belonging to a community of scholars, and produce a product they could include on their resumes as a professional experience. Moreover, professor Och experimented with how to connect these on-line experiences to what was happening in the classroom. The combination of a hybrid application of the blog and wiki to both frame the research and the represent the final projects as an online exhibit/journal proved to be a critical element for suggesting how invaluable intellectual resources can be captured, represented, and archived for the participants as well as the outside world with relative ease.
NEH Slave Housing Site
Through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Historic preservation department at UMW is investigating extant slave quarters in both rural and urban areas to re-examine some of the assumptions about living spaces for slaves during the antebellum period. The research consists of gathering a tremendous mount of architectural information and images that need to be shared amongst a distributed group of investigators. All of which will ultimately serve as the beginnings of an academic research database. I worked closely with professor Doug Sanford, the principal investigator for this grant, to design a web-based space for collecting an sharing the data gathered (one of the ultimate requirements for distributing this information under the auspices of a federal grant). We used the open source content management system Drupal to allow the twelve investigators involved in this projects to add content, upload files, and share their images of respective slave housing sites (which are all centrally housed on the photo sharing service Flickr). Link to the NEH Slave Housing project.
