How is it April already? March was a blur of activity for us at DTLT, including a snow day that precluded Dorothy Kim’s scheduled talk. Fear not! We managed to get a podcast together, White Supremacy and the Academy, and had the pleasure of welcoming another guest, Kelly J. Baker. You should give it a listen; it was a fantastic conversation. We also arranged a last minute speaking gig for Dorothy Kim on a panel at the Religious Freedom in a Fractured America conference with the help of UMW’s amazing Department of Classics, Philosophy and Religion.
Lee started the month off on the road, attending the HumetricsHSS workshop on Valuing the Syllabus. She has also been hard at work on her Digital Fluency course for this year’s Digital Pedagogy Lab. If you haven’t heard enough of Lee from the podcast above, then you can watch her talking about adjunct issues for Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum. Finally, she reviewed The Case Against Education for Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
We also received two visits to DTLT to see what we were up to. We were pleased to welcome esteemed colleagues from Grinnell College and SUNY Geneseo. Both institutions sent a small group of faculty and staff for a tour of the HCC and discussions about UMW’s innovative approaches to digital pedagogy. For the visit with SUNY Geneseo, Jess designed a great activity so we could all brainstorm the future of our institutions. She also completed her graduate course on Adaptive and Game-Based Learning. She is officially half-way through her Master’s!
We got sweatshirts!! Modeling is @stefaniechaes, our student aide that designed them! #DoOO #UMWMade #UMW @customink pic.twitter.com/XGr6wTYrpS
— UMW DTLT (@umwdtlt) March 13, 2018
We got DTLT swag this month, too, sweatshirts designed by Bethany and Stef. They have also been working on designing DPL t-shirts and more. Stef has also started to do some videography for local businesses, in preparation for her impending graduation (sniff!).
Sean has been hard at work organizing DPL (still time to register!) and working with the online learning cohort. If you haven’t yet checked out the lineup for DPL, please do so – it’s going to be really exciting this year!
Jesse also started the month off on the road, delivering a keynote at the 2018 Open SUNY Summit in New York City entitled Open Pedagogy: Building Compassionate Spaces for Online Learning. He also published How to Ungrade, a blog post, which was also featured on the front page of Inside Higher Ed. Jesse also continues to lead the Digital Knowledge Faculty Initiative.
Nigel is continuing to work on the Learning Mastery Gradebook in Canvas, and testing the new Canvas Quiz engine (to be released next year, so keep your eyes out for the announcement!). He also recently enlisted in the Virginia State Defence Force as a Communication/Public Affairs Specialist, which is directly related to his dissertation research in disaster communications.
Finally, we’re sad to announce that Kris is leaving DTLT for greener mountains. He’s finishing up a number of projects, including the DoOO Dashboard and updating our internal documentation. He’s finalizing a plan for archiving some of our UMW Blog sites in collaboration with the library as well.
We’re going to miss Kris tremendously. We wish him and his family the best in their new endeavors!
Photo by Quentin REY on Unsplash
