Tim Owens - Throw Out The Manual (Page 10)

Tim Owens

Reclaiming this Blog

Reclaiming this Blog

As I wrap up the 2012 year and celebrate 2 full years of blogging I've begun the process of taking a harder look at what I post here and where I put my media. It's no doubt a popular topic of conversation in light of concerns people are having regularly

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

Raising the bar

Raising the bar

Reflecting on the Fall: The ThinkLab

Reflecting on the Fall: The ThinkLab

This past semester has likely been the busiest one yet at DTLT with so many new projects ramping up alongside the regular awesomeness we do day to day. I haven't been great about blogging those efforts along the way but I'll do a few posts to sort of wrap up

VSTE Presentations over the Years

VSTE Presentations over the Years

The Virginia Society for Technology in Education holds a special place in my heart. Back in 2009 when I was just a computer technician working at Longwood University I took a trip with my wife, who was an ITRT (Instructional Technology Resource Teacher) for Prince Edward County Schools at the

The Kitchen Sink

The Kitchen Sink

For whatever reason this semester has been incredibly busy and I haven't taken the time to check back here regularly and update on the many initiatives we've been working on at UMW, or any of the many other things that interest me regularly. In lieu of taking the real time

Are Makerbots still for Makers?

Are Makerbots still for Makers?

Anyone who knows me or follows some of the work I've been doing at UMW knows that I am a huge fan of MakerBot. Not only have they done a tremendous amount of work to bring 3D printing to the masses through their investment in bringing the cost of 3D

The Power of Syndication

This evening I spent quite a bit of time pulling together the feeds of just about every student involved in the Domain of One's Own pilot who has their blog installed into an aggregate site. This site not only aggregates all the work being done in the pilot, but it

Why I joined App.net

Why I joined App.net

As might be obvious by my last post, I've been thinking a lot about Twitter (and subsequently App.net) in the last few days. With a small amount of hesitation I've decided to join App.net, if for no other reason than that competition in this field is necessary. But

Twitter's Fate

There have been plenty of worries about the direction Twitter is heading lately. I'm not just referring to their attempts to monetize the service and the fear of sponsored ads and tweets directly in your stream. Hell, in a few months you might be wishing that was the least of

Failing Coursera

Failing Coursera

Every time one of these new "MOOCish" sites pops up I do my best to play around with the tool before being too hypercritical. Last year when AI Class was all the rage I signed up and managed to make it an entire week I think. The problem there of

The coming 3D printing disruption

The coming 3D printing disruption

This is a patent awarded to Lego for the design of the standard modular brick sets in 1961. It is now expired. This is a printable Lego designed exactly to those same specifications (click to view model on Thingiverse) This is a Lego to Tinkertoy adapter, part of the Free

Where did the O in MOOC go?

Another day, another MOOC fires up its engines and fills my Twitterstream. And Moocmooc is about as meta as it gets: a one week MOOC that will analyze the form itself. And interestingly they're using Instructure Canvas as the delivery platform, which is the LMS that UMW adopted a year

Kaltura and Media Publishing at UMW

Update: I gave up on Kaltura. Despite the warm and fuzzy outlook that follows I later found the information available for supporting it extremely poor. I wrote about that here if you'd like to read it. When I came to UMW last year there were few options available to students

DangerCon Maker Meetup in Fredericksburg

This past Saturday I had the opportunity to attend DangerCon, a collaborative meetup of the Fredhack group and NovaLabs in Reston, VA. I reached out to the Fredhack group earlier this past month to start forming connections and get ideas about UMW's own Makerspace that I'm working on with George

Summer Projects

In the interest of regularly documenting the work I'm doing at the University of Mary Washington here, I wanted to draft out a post on some of the spaces and projects I find myself involved in as I flesh out the details more over the summer. Makerbots and Mashups (and

Why Make?

My work with Makerbots (which I've done the majority of blogging over at 3D Printing @ UMW) this semester has been a catalyst for an approach to the liberal arts that in some ways I think is still being defined. The ideals of a Maker Culture have begun to infiltrate what

Face Trace

Today's Daily Create is a cool one from Darren Kuropatwa who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at this year's Educon. The assignment was to take a photo of yourself and trace over it to create a line drawing of your face. Since I don't have

Under Pressure

The fun of the summer in ds106 has just begun and camp counselor Zazzy has a fun little project for folks that won't take too much of your time. She's putting together a remix of Under Pressure, the classic by Queen, and needs your vocals. More details about the whole

Off to Summer Camp

This summer in addition to my regular duties at the University of Mary Washington I'm also pleased to announce that I will be a camp counselor at Camp Magic Macguffin. For the summer iteration of ds106, Martha Burtis and Alan Levine are rethinking how the course is structured to mix

TDC: The Story of a Photo

After putting together The Daily Create earlier this year I've been lucky to have Alan Levine refining the backend of the site and loading up a bunch of assignments. The semester got so busy I didn't end up participating all that much but decided to jump back in yesterday, and

Faculty Academy 2012

I'm just finally starting to decompress and unpack some of this year's Faculty Academy, which was honestly a total blur of amazing people, presentations, and experiences wrapped into a few short days. For me it was really a special time because this time last year I was actually interviewing for

Back to Photography

Some folks who have only been a part of my network since I began working in instructional technology might not realize my BA is in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Design. Since Longwood didn't have a full Graphic Design program, only a concentration, it meant I was exposed

The First 24 Hours

I feel like I just finished a sprint, the race is still going but we've already won. I had no earthly imaginations that when I drafted yesterday's post about our DS106 Kickstarter project I'd be able to write an update saying we were fully funded just 24 hours later (19

Redefining the Connection between Educational Courses and Community

A few weeks ago over lunch Jim Groom mentioned to me that Zach Davis had moved DS106 to its own server space. On at least three occasions in the past semester it had capped bandwidth usage and it was often having fits of its own being in a shared hosting