This spring, DTLT is kicking off a project called “Texts that Matter.” TtM will invite faculty, students, and staff to record texts in the public domain that they have found intellectually inspiring. [Read more...]
Poetic Voices
October 5, 2009 By Leave a Comment
For the last year and a half, students of Marie McAllister have been creating a listening archive of 18th century poetry. The project, which began as an effort to help students struggling to understand older poetry, operates under the premise that hearing someone read a poem aloud can help clarify its meaning. In addition, the creators of the site also believe that listening to poetry is fun and that many of these texts were written with the intention that they would be read aloud and serve as a source of entertainment.
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.
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Digital Whitman
September 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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
Digital History comes to UMW
August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
In the spring of 2008, students in Jeff McClurken’s digital history class built and published persistent online resources about several historical topics. Working in small groups, students chose their topics and then spent the first few weeks of the semester learning about a “digital toolkit” of tools and technologies that they could use to build their sites.
With the new toolkit in hand, each group developed a project contract with Dr. McClurken, outlining their goals and how they planned to use various technologies to achieve them. Over the course of the semester, groups regularly reported back to their peers and their professor about their progress, providing Dr. McClurken with an opportunity to intervene if he sensed anything was going astray.
In April, the sites went live and each group presented their work at both the history department showcase and at Student Research and Creativity Day.
Venice on Exhibit
August 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Marjorie Och spent last fall traveling to Venice with her art history seminar students. And she did it all without getting on a plane! For two years, students in her Venice seminar have designed and developed online exhibits about the Italian city, and published their own research papers in the space.
Each student chose a topic about Venice and then spent the semester researching and writing. At the end of the term, the class unveiled an “online exhibit” that featured each of the essays, accompanying photos, an interactive timeline, and an annotated map.
The final product was professional and inviting. As one commenter said,
The exhibit had beautiful pictures and great information that I didn’t know about Venice and the arts and the artists, it also has interested me to make sure I travel to Venice….ASAP!!!
Recording the Crisis
August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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.
Biology Labs, Re-Invented
July 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment
UMW 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.
Literary Journals 2.0
July 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment
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.
