Professor John Morello’s Communication 370 course (or “Communication and the 2008 Presidential Campaign”) provides a really powerful model for using a course as a video publishing platform, a space for critical media studies, as well as a forum for discussion about the election as it unfolds. Each of the students in this course created their own short speech in support of their candidate of choice (you can see examples here), which were then posted on a third-party service of their choice and embedded on the course blog (see the technical guidelines for this process here).
Yet, the videos were only one part of this course, there was also the on-going campaign commentaries, dissection of campaign ads, as well as timely discussions about the political implications of the economic crisis. All of which made for a dynamic and open forum leading up to election night. And when I say open, I mean open. Numerous comments and discussions on the site came from people that were not part of the class (or even the UMW Community), but were still intensely interested in discussing the election. The fact that both Barack Obama and Sarah Pallin campaigned in Fredericksburg during the final stretch made this course all the more discoverable and relevant to the local community.
But what’s really engaging about the way professor Morello used this space resides in how a web-based course site quickly transformed into an open forum that not only allowed the students to bring in relevant resources from all over the web effortlessly, but also encouraged the class to both create web-based media and engage their classmates and the community out in the open.
This afternoon was the opening of the online exhibit created by the members of Professor Marjorie Och’s upper-level Art History Seminar on Venice. The semester was dedicated to researching the rich art history of the “City of Water”, and they tracked their research and discussion over the last fifteen weeks in a course space here (and there has been some great discussion there as of late—check out the Billboard posts). Over the last two weeks they have created a site which acts as both an exhibit and a kind of course publication wherein you can read first hand the work they have been doing on topics ranging from Titian;s Altarpieces to Early Modern Women’s Clothing to Conserving Venice to the Venice Biennale. But the homepage of the online exhibit sums it up best:
This site offers visitors the opportunity to see our students’ research on this remarkable city in a format we have referred to as our online exhibit. An actual exhibit on the city of Venice is clearly impossible — one could never transport the Grand Canal or Palazzo Ducale into a museum space. But technology allows us to bring together different aspects of the city, its visual culture, and history in a format where we can discuss the great palazzi along the Grand Canal or the magnificent space in front of San Marco.
And while we still have to put up the timeline and add some links between sections of the students “wall panels” (I take full responsibility for this oversight), it’s an impressive display of a seminar course coming together to share their research and frame a broader examination of a cultural treasure like the city of Venice as a series of individual efforts cultivated and fostered by a group examination of a topic. Bravo tutti!
Also, I have to give a special shout out to Katherine Ahrens research blog, she was constantly tracking and sharing her work, and seemed to have a lot of fun in the process which made reading her work that much more enjoyable. Plus, as an added bonus, she included some really cool pictures of her recent trip to Venice.
Professor Angela Gosetti’s course blog for her “Katabasis in Myth and Film” Freshman seminar has been one of the most fun, active and engaged spaces on UMW Blogs I have yet to see. If you don’t know what katabasis means (kinda like me before following this course), it’s from the Greek and generally means a “descent”, but more specifically denotes a journey downwards into Hades. And with more than 200 posts and 250+ comments—many of which are far longer than the original post—it has been an absolutely fascinating journey through which to witness the life of the mind unfold. Professor Gosetti’s success with this space for generating a group-based discussion for a seminar course is remarkable, and the course blog also provided a platform for all kinds of sharing of web resources throughout the semester. Impressively conceived and executed, you should ask Angela about the thinking behind this one!
Professor Michael Killian’s “The Bio Blog” is a pretty impressive endeavor that collects and categorizes the posts of over 70 students in his Introduction to Biological Concepts (Biol 121) course. Every student maintained his or her own blog and their posts were tagged according to the section they were part of, which allowed for both an aggregation and categorization of posts in the main blog by section number, student, and most recent posts. But, more importantly, the experiment provided a space where students could actually work through the concepts they were learning about using the innumerable resources all over the web.
In Judith Parker’s Psycholinguistics course students have been asked to create scientific posters, but they were encouraged to explore new ways of presenting their work online. Justin Toney created his science poster for the class with Glogster, an online poster tool that enables linking, embedding, media, as well as re-posting it on other sites, such as a UMW Blog. I think he used Glogster to some great effect—don’t you? I really dig the design and aesthetics of his work. Imagine that, a web-based science poster that isn’t a progeny of PowerPoint and actually has some character and sass! You can see the full screen version of Justin’s work here.
To explore more tools like Glogster take a look at Alan Levin’s incredible resource “50 Ways to Tell a Digital Story.”
Professor Krystyn Moon’s seminar on the history of consumerism in the 20th century is taking a fascinating approach to their topic. They’re not only blogging their reflections on the various texts they are reading throughout the semester, they have also created a group blog for the course wherein everyone features a product on their own personal wish list. I find this a fascinating experiment wherein a class openly inhabits the very space that they are critically examining. Who says personal happiness can’t be equated with the critical examination of purchasing material possessions? Check out their course blog, and do some virtual window shopping.
One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.
So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.
Have you seen Uncle Lumpy’s Down-Home Art Blog and Pancake Emporium? It seems to be a wild class experiment that has emerged on UMW Blogs, wherein all the authors are blogging under what seems to be personae (check out the very entertaining contributors page for a few examples). It’s a healthy mix of local art news, pancake recipes, and a Q & A column with Uncle Lumpy himself—which is hysterical. The blog is a lot of fun and is featuring a number of artists which is a great resource for cool information. What becomes immediately apparent is that the unknown souls behind this project are consciously creating an online art news and entertainment space that moves well beyond the classroom and out to the UMW community more generally, and even one step beyond….I’m digging Uncle Lumpy!
The beautiful images in the header of UMW Blogs are courtesy of UMW's own Serena Epstein and Jerry Slezak. If you have a photo of UMW that you would like to share, send it along to us at jgroom_at_umw.edu.
Spanish Civil War Memorial Exile Museum (Museu Memorial de l'Exili), La Jonquera, Girona, Spain. On the panel are several hundred names of some of the people who were forced into exile and flee from General Franco´s fascist troops at the end of the Spanish Civil War. (More info: www.museuexili.cat)
Professor John Morello’s Communication 370 course (or “Communication and the 2008 Presidential Campaign”) provides a really powerful model for using a course as a video publishing platform, a space for critical media studies, as well as a forum for discussion about the election as it unfolds. Each of the students in this course created their own short speech in support of their candidate of choice (you can see examples here), which were then posted on a third-party service of their choice and embedded on the course blog (see the technical guidelines for this process here).
