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.

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.

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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.

If passed, sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, YouTube, and Flickr, will almost certainly go away (at least in their current forms). Furthermore, if these bills are passed, UMW Blogs will be in danger of being blacklisted unless we begin to police and monitor every piece of content uploaded to the space.

We believe that there needs to be an intelligent and balanced discussion about the nature of intellectual property in our increasingly-digital world. We are sure that neither of these bills contributes to such a conversation.

Please join us in protesting SOPA and PIPA.

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”

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.

After listening to a presentation on Women’s Fashion and Cross-Dressing in the Modernist Era, I have to say I’m glad that this is a course requirement.  Not only does this help students in the course figure out how to use new technology for educational purposes, it also allows those who are thinking about taking the course get a sneak peek at the topics studied throughout the semester.

I highly enjoyed these presentations and I hope this becomes a new trend for professors to follow.

Penspin.info isn’t just a blog about your everyday basic pen spinning techniques, however.  This student is truly a master of the art of pen spinning, and his videos are very helpful on the subject.  You too could easily become a spinning guru thanks to this blog!

Penspin.info gave UMWblogs.org the most traffic it’s received to date, boasting 10,000+ visitors in a single day.  This is partially thanks to Professor Whalen’s Writing Through Media course, which encourages students to post on reddit to gain karma, which in turn, boosts their grade.  Here’s the reddit post featuring Penspin.info with 200+ “upvotes” (sort of an equivalent to the “like” button on Facebook).

So forgo those old pencils and go on and get your pen spin on.