DTLT Unveils New Website

July 31, 2009 By 1 Comment
DTLT's New Web Site

DTLT's New Web Site

Over the summer, DTLT has been hard at work at our “next generation” Web site. This fall, we’re unveiling it at home.umwdtlt.org. Among other things, the site will feature regularly updates information about faculty projects, upcoming events and opportunities, and DTLT news and announcements.

In addition, we’re planning to use the site to feature ideas, tips, and information about using technology to teach across the disciplines at the University. We hope to build it into a “one-stop shop” for all things instructional technology-related at UMW.

Behind the scenes, the new site is actually running on top of the UMW Blogs platform. We’ve mapped our own “custom domain,” umwdtlt.org on top of a blog on that site, allowing us to take advantage of the always growing portfolio of features on UMW Blogs. In addition, we’ll be exploring how to integrate UMW Blogs new social networking platform, BuddyPress, into the community we hope to build around this new site.

We invite you to check out our new online home!

Filed Under: News

Biology Labs, Re-Invented

July 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

gallik_lablogs_smallUMW Professor of Biology Steve Gallik is re-imagining the college science lab. For several years, he has been taking the lab experience online, building an online laboratory manual for cell biology that demonstrates experiments, provides background information, and allows students to easily input and analyze data.

Two years ago, he added the “Lablogs” component to the project; students in his cell biology classes use the UMW Blogs platform to publish and share their lab results. Through built-in aggregation tools on UMW Blogs, it is possible for Professor Gallik to monitor and evaluate student progress and provide feedback based on students’ questions and results. Students, meanwhile, are building a digital lab manual that they can annotate, manage, and take with them.

You can learn more about Dr. Gallik’s project by viewing this video he made introducing the online lab manual and describing the publication of lab results to student lablogs.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

In addition, last year he and DTLT instructional technology specialist Jim Groom sat down with Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE to discuss the lablogs project.

Filed Under: Featured, Project, Sciences & Math Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Literary Journals 2.0

July 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Claudia Emerson's Literary Journals Web Site

Claudia Emerson's Literary Journals Web Site

For the last two years, UMW’s Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry, Claudia Emerson, has been leading a class of upper-level English majors interested in the intricacies of literary publishing.

Working in small groups, the students take on the task of imagining, developing, and publishing online literary journals. Each group of students must tackle questions about the scope and mission of their journal, how to solicit and evaluate submissions, and, finally, how to present their journal online in a custom-built Web site.

At literaryjournals.umwblogs.org you can peruse the students’ final products, from ecoCollective, a journal that examines the intersection between artists’ and their environments to Spindle, which seeks to “evoke a dream-like state of creation” in its presentation of prose, poetry, visual arts, music, film, performance art and craftwork.

Whether the discipline is literary arts, computer science, or history, at UMW we are regularly seeing faculty challenge students to use the Web as a platform for individual discovery and personal publication.

Filed Under: Arts & Humanities, Featured, Project Tagged With: , , , ,