Featured Blog

UMW Blogs Redesigned

UMW Blogs is featuringitself this time, for it has put on a new theme for the new academic year. Wearing the elegant theme PrimePress by Ravi Varma, thanks to the unfailing eye for great looking sites of Andy “Edu”Rush. Moreover, the custom images of Mary Washington were taken and freely shared by our very own Serena Epstein and Jerry Slezak. And if anyone else has images roughtly 920 px wide and 150px high they want to offer up, let us know through the contact form. Well, let us know what you think, and let’s change the world this year, as someone used to say.

While Serena keeps the weekly installments of images capturing the “City of Light” coming, Stephanie —another of UMW’s faithful abroad—offers up her own vision of Paris.

And if you want to read some missives from the center of European culture, you can get regular updates from Italy on Jana’s blog coming live from the masterpiece that is Florence.

If anyone else has a space online (by no means limited to UMW Blogs) tracing their trips, adventures, and/or follies abroad that they would like to share, drop the URL in the comments. Au revoir.

Dr. Gardner Campbell will be hosting the twelfth and final Paradise Lost all-night readathon at UMW this Friday, July 11th. For more details and directions click here. And while we are on the subject of professor Campbell and Milton, take a look at his Summer seminar’s course blog—brilliantly titled Attack of the Summer Miltonauts—that traces the class’s distributed thoughts, commentaries, and struggles with the great works of John Milton. Well worth your time to read these “thoughts inflam’d with highest design.”

Teresa Coffman’s ITEC 521 course is doing some exciting things with the small pieces loosely joined approach to instructional technologies.  The class has been exploring Twitter, playing with wikis at wikispaces, collaborating on a Wikibook, and using Google Pages as eportfolios just to name a few of the ways they have been using the open web to share, collaborate, and present the work they have been doing.

But the larger, more exciting push in this course is really captured by Professor Coffman’s explanation of the logic behind the class wikibook (a draft of which can be found here):

The goal is to provide a resource for teachers to learn about information literacy topics, ideas, and skills. It is important that teachers meet the needs of their students and to enhance their classrooms by incorporating these ideas into their curriculum. Our hope, this book will help with this process.

Now this is life’s work! And such a sentiment captures the reason why all these tools are really about sharing resources and forming online communities that create a pool of resources and support for teachers and students alike to fully engage the changing landscape of literacy in the 21st century.

Below are the three literary journals (ECOllective, The Zephyranthes, and Spindle) that were created this semester for Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals class. Take a look to see some of UMW’s finest creative minds at work, as well as a wealth of talent from various national and international destinations.