Recording the Crisis

August 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Steve Greenlaw's Financial Crisis Website

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.

Filed Under: Featured, Project, Social Sciences Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

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.

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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: , , , ,