You may want to visit this site whenever you’re looking for some inspiration or if you have a particular challenge that you’re trying to address. If you’re a del.icio.us user, you can add to the list by simply tagging items with “cooltechnmc.”

If you ever see something pop up on the list that intrigues you, contact any member of DTLT. We’d love to explore the possibilities with you!

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.

Information about our keynote speaker and guest presenters will be available in late January. You can follow the conference by visiting blog10.facultyacademy.org.

We look forward to seeing you at the 15th Annual Faculty Academy.

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.