We’re excited to kick off the 2017-18 academic year by reflecting on what DTLT has been up to this Summer! This is a new feature for the DTLT blog that will run every month, so you can keep up with us! We’ve been busy the last few months, and we want to share just a bit of the great work happening.
First, we have two new student aides who started over the summer, Bethany Thomas and Stefanie Chae. Both are UMW seniors, with Bethany majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing, while Stefanie is a Communication and Digital Studies major. They will largely be doing multimedia work for us, including a lot of video editing. They both were invaluable in helping us pull off another successful Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute!
Speaking of DPL (which got a shout-out in PC Magazine), we welcomed 115 participants from around the world in early August, including 19 faculty/staff fellows from UMW. We also hosted a number of talks that are all archived on our YouTube channel. Jesse Stommel and Martha Burtis, Executive Director of the DKC, led a track on Domain of One’s Own, while Kris Shaffer led one on Data. Jess Reingold and Nigel Haarstad coordinated an “Ingenious Bar” for participants to get help with DoOO. Jesse also led a track at DPL Vancouver, while Kris was there to assist. Jesse gave a particularly moving keynote in Vancouver, which is embedded below.
Another group effort was our participation at the Domains 17 conference in Oklahoma City. Lee Skallerup Bessette presented about the DoOO curriculum, Jess talked about her experience moving from student to “teacher” with DoOO, and Jesse co-presented, If bell hooks made an LMS, with Sean Michael Morris. Martha was the keynote speaker at the conference and her talk is well worth the read.
The team also collaborated with the DKC to offer Domain of One’s Own training to Orientation Leaders and Peer Mentors. Under the guidance of Jess Reingold, we helped over 60 students get started on DoOO, in the service of helping connect with new freshmen and helping them transition successfully to UMW.
We’ve also done some remodeling, both of our physical and virtual spaces. We spent a lot of the early part of the summer reimagining our DTLT office and the Incubator Classroom to be more useable and communal. We changed the configuration of our work area (aka the bullpen) in order to make it more welcoming for faculty to come and work alongside us. The Incubator Classroom is still a work in progress, but we’re steadily turning it into a space that is more flexible and creative!
Virtually, Jess redesigned our internal DTLT page. We also developed and added two new class visits to our roster: Leveling up with DoOO and Using Multimedia in Digital Assignments. We hope that these two new offerings will help faculty and inspire students in their digital work.
But this isn’t even all we’ve been up to!
We have been working away on our own research and publications. Kris’s work on Twitter bots and disinformation was featured in the New York Times, Slate, Bloomberg News, and elsewhere, and he published Indie, Open, Free: The Fraught Ideologies of Ed-Tech. Jess continued her work on her MS in User Centered Design, taking courses in Information Architecture, as well as Innovation and User Centered Design. Nigel expanded his photography portfolio and saw his book chapter, “Learning interfaces: Collaboration and learning space in the digital age” published in New Media and Digital Pedagogy. Lee presented at the annual, international Digital Humanities conference in Montreal on Sustaining the Digital Liberal Arts, while continuing her writing at ProfHacker. Finally, Jesse was featured in Inside Higher Ed with his views on the plagiarism software Turnitin. His chapter on MOOCs and Critical Digital Pedagogy was also published in MOOCs and their Afterlives.
What have you been up to this summer?
Photo by David Lezcano on Unsplash
