Through the end January, we’re inviting any member of the UMW community to visit the TtM site at texts.umwblogs.org. After enough volunteers have signed up to start collecting and contributing recordings, we’ll be in touch with volunteers with instructions about how to participate.

In addition to the recordings, we’re asking each participant to write a brief reflection on the text they chose–sharing their own insights into why this text was important to them intellectually.

We hope this project will become the nexus of a conversation about who we are as a teaching and learning community, and a place where we can share our common inspirations and explore new sources of inspiration together.

TtM was inspired, in part, by the amazing work of Marie McAllister and her students at Eighteenth Century Audio. Recognizing that students studying 300-year-old poetry often needed to hear the text in order to really understand it, Marie has worked diligently to collect audio recordings from around the Web as a resource for her students and any eighteenth century scholars. Over the years, Marie’s students have also contributed their own recordings to the collection.

More information about the Texts that Matter project can be found at texts.umwblogs.org.

Every semester, Professor McAllister’s students have added additional poems to the archive, both in the form of orginal recordings and by linking to the wealth of audio resources available through sites like PennSound and LibriVox.The archive currently has over 250 poems listed, and it continues to grow.

We leave you with a poem listed in the archive, Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to her Book” read by Alan Davis-Drake and available at LibriVox.

Download Title

This fall, students in Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart’s Digital Whitman class are collaborating with students at three other universities to explore the life and work of Walt Whitman. Students at each school will be investigating a different aspect of Whitman’s life, with the UMW class focusing on Whitman’s time in the South during the Civil War. Students at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and NYU will focus their investigation on Whitman’s relationship with the city of New York. Meanwhile, at Rutgers University, students will be explore the poet’s late career, when he spent his final decades in Camden, New Jersey.

The entire cohort will build a digital presence for their work, sharing their discoveries and collaborating on projects. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project will result in a persistent online repository of primary source materials from particular locations that Whitman inhabited.

UMW Class Website: http://marywash.lookingforwhitman.org/

Looking for Whitman Site: http://lookingforwhitman.org

Photo by bobster855 on Flickr

Steve Greenlaw's Financial Crisis Website

During the spring 2009 semester, Steve Greenlaw’s international finance students did more than just study the current financial crisis — they created a persistent online resource about the global recession.

Students carefully studied and analyzed the international crisis and decided they wanted to build a Web site that shed light on the reasons behind the meltdown and the ongoing events surrounding it.

Working on a site in UMW Blogs, Dr. Greenlaw and the students developed a structure for their analysis and presentation and then spent the spring and summer publishing and updating their findings. In addition to sections on the site that examine the intricacies of everything from the subprime mortgage market to the government bailout, students created a timeline of events and developed a robust bibliography of references.

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.

Click here to view the embedded 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.

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.