UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik has dreamed up a very cool approach for students in his Histology lab to share and comment on what’s under the microscope. Rather than purchasing expensive camera-ready digital microscopes, he worked with the UMW Teaching Center to purchase a few cheap digital cameras that can upload images quickly to the web so students can post them to a course site.

The resulting course site designed by the inimitable Tim Owens is a highly attractive, intensely visual course space on UMW Blogs that streamlines posting for students thanks to the Gravity Forms plugin (which is premium—what is happening to us!). What I love about this experiment is how beautiful the images of these mammal cells are, and how the students’ brief description coupled with the gorgeous images tell a story about the life and death of cells. Not only that, but it reinforces the idea that new approaches to storytelling with media cuts across all disciplines—it’s not an exclusive a concern of the humanities.

If you’ve never heard of 3D printing, don’t worry – you will.

Here at UMW, Professor George Meadows and Tim Owens of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies have been spearheading an effort to incorporate this nascent technology into the classroom. Follow their adventure here.

Professor Whalen’s ENGL251yy course “Adaptations” is doing big things over on their course website

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This course is about analyzing works that were inspired and adapted from other works.  Currently, the students of ENGL251yy are making an intricate web of connected media.   Each student is expected to complete 10 different “vectors”, by connecting them to other vectors already placed on the web.  Check out their ongoing vector project here on a Google Doc.

UMW, and UMW Blogs in particular, is being heralded in Richard Demillo’s new book Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities as a space of great educational ferment, to quote from George Leef’s review of the book here. In fact, Leef’s review not only examines more popular open education mainstays like MIT’s Open Courseware, but spends a bit of time discussing the role of networked culture in re-imagining the future of higher education:

Open courseware is not the only way online learning is going to change higher education. DeMillo observes that whereas the traditional college class involves the broadcasting of information from the professor to (doubtfully alert) students, blogs involve rich connection networks where students and instructors interact and share their questions and information.

In that regard, DeMillo points to a little-known school where there is great educational ferment: “At the University of Mary Washington, learning takes place in the digital spaces engineered by Jim Groom and his band of Edupunks. At UMW, learning takes place in blogs.”

And when highlighting the importance of a networked culture for the future of learning at institutions UMW is highlighted as a model. UMW Blogs provides more than open resources and lectures on the internet, it also enables the ability to interact and share ideas and resources that helps bridge the gap between institutions of higher learning and the web.

James Bacon, proprietor of the Bacon’s Rebellion blog that focuses on all things Virginia, not only gave UMW kudos in for it’s work with UMW Blogs in his post on the DeMillo book, but also points out what remains the most important lesson of UMW Blogs. The open publishing platform is not remarkable because it is single-handedly transforming higher education (such an assertion would be absurd), but rather it is how this platform embodies “the process of experimentation” that is still in its infancy when it comes to the future of higher education. To Mary Washington’s great credit, it has been on the bleeding edge of innovation in this regard for more than seven years. What’s more, I’m glad people are recognizing it as a vital investment in not only the institution’s future, but in a larger discourse around the future of educational institutions.

Image credit:  Ethan Hein’s “Hyperbolic orthogonal dodecahedral honeycomb”

The PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPAPER WRITING course at the University of Mary Washington was designed to marry old-school in-depth reporting and new-school digital technology. In other words, journalistic tradition in modern form. The instructor, Michael McCarthy, assigned three teams of students a “beat” — or a specific area of news coverage — and asked them to use their own research, creativity and initiative to develop Web-based special reports. With four to five students on each team, they had all semester to report on their topics, conduct interviews, and gather data and design their pages.

To portray with some depth the university’s chase for reaccreditation, what students do with their free time, and what happens to students after graduation, the class worked on three beats and completed these reports.