diy Embarking on the P2PU School of Webcraft I was inspired by Alan Liddell's latest post where he has started working on the P2PU course "School of Webcraft" and thought "Why the hell not?!" You see my experience with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc all stems from a DIY attitude of learning
conference VSTE 2011 is coming! Tomorrow morning I head out to the 2011 VSTE Annual Conference. VSTE stands for the Virginia Society for Technology in Education and is probably the largest gathering of educational technologists in this state. It's hard to believe that this will be my 5th year at the conference. In
media Expanding the Media Network at DTLT Back in July shortly after starting my job at UMW I began talking to Jim about the possibility of doing a video podcast. It would have to be something that wasn't relatively long, but a daily thing where we'd reflect on all manner of subjects. I
development I <3 Gravity Forms The more I use Gravity Forms for Wordpress here at UMW, the more I am constantly impressed by such a full-featured and flexible plugin. This is not some shill paid post. I've used Wordpress for 5 years now developing sites and themes and my discovery of Gravity Forms
soda SodaStream comes to DTLT Today 2 weeks ago I just happened to be thinking about items you could buy that would end up "paying for themselves" in some way. You always here about items like programmable thermostats that end up saving enough money in the short term to be worth the investment. I
3d MakerBots in Education [caption id="attachment_306" align="aligncenter" width="580" caption="Image Credit: Bre Pettis"][/caption] Have you ever heard of a MakerBot? It's a 3D printer that basically "prints" melted plastic onto layers, building almost any digital model into
ds106 You Are Cordially Invited ### Dear DS106, You are cordially invited to attend a midnight showing of a 1987 Christmas Classic, "A Muppet Family Christmas" in honor of the holidays. IMDB gives the storyline as follows: > When Fozzie and the Muppet Show gang drop in unexpectedly on Fozzie's mother, she
Test Post This is just one of those pesky test posts to see if some additional, yet to be revealed, functionality is actually working. Please disregard.
change11 Where is the "Change"? "MOOCs are all about messing with boundaries, barriers, and silos." In May of this year George Siemens announced the "Mother of all MOOCs", appropriately titled Change. The philosophy is sound: Why have a single person or even small set of people delivering course content when we
alumni Custom Post Types in Wordpress with Gravity Forms We recently discovered the great premium plugin Gravity Forms at DTLT from the web group at UMW who purchased it to use with the redesigned UMW.edu site (running completely on Wordpress!). One amazing feature of gravity forms is that it allows you to create a form that, when a
The 7:30 Project [S]o Andy Rush came up with a great idea, document all the off-the-wall things I come up with in the early hours of the morning when I get to work. You see, for the time being my wife and I are commuting to Fredericksburg from Richmond. Since she likes
audio This American Life Sex Tape This is possibly the best parody I've heard, and I think it's a perfect example of how students can use just audio to create a compelling new narrative.
apple Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. Today, just one day after announcing a slew of new gadgets and showing off yet more amazing software that seems futuristic, Apple replaced their homepage with an image none of us wanted to see. At the age of 58, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer and passed away. I&
DesignAssignments Born This Way The great @scottlo is back on the radio and doing some great things, one of them being timed #ds106 assignment. ~24 minutes where he plays a few songs and challenges you to finish an assignment. Don't think, just make. I saw it this morning and rose to the
DesignAssignments Going Home I grew up in a small town called Fairborn that was situated close to Dayton, Ohio. We moved when I was 11 and haven't been back in a very long time. From what I understand the town is suffering with job loss and many folks having moved out
DesignAssignments Where did that guy come from?! Spending some time this evening in Photoshop with another fun ds106 assignment. Pretty basic, photoshop a guy into odd scenes. I'm focusing on film scenes. Enter our volunteer stage left: Photo courtesy of Rob Let the games begin.... I've got quite a few more planned, but
DesignAssignments Sorting Hat The Messing with MacGuffin asks you to choose a pivotal point in a movie and alter the plot with a single line. It turns out to be a hell of a lot of fun!
brainstorming Collective Collaboration These are notes we took at the DTLT office yesterday while brainstorming ideas for 2 courses we have the opportunity to create for the Spring Semester under the American Studies discipline of the History Department at UMW. But yesterday we did things differently. Rather than simply erasing the whiteboard and
images Writing through Media I was browsing Reddit and came across this image which I post here not because I think it's so hilarious it's worth a blog post, but rather it has my mind spinning on the realization of why an image like this exists. In the Age of
Media U A few weeks ago when I started playing around with Wowza for streaming I started thinking about the value iTunes U offers for the University. We have an iTunes U server on campus that never really got much action, in part because it was nothing more than a Linux box
Kinect, 3D Printing, and Advanced Technology for Higher Education Today after giving a standard talk to students about some great resources freely available on the web for their projects, Jim and I stuck around and chatted with George Meadows who is teaching the freshman seminar course. We got to talking about interesting technology that's out there right
design Design Matters So often I have lengthy discussions on Twitter and keep telling myself "I need to be blogging this! 140 characters isn't enough for my rage!" but to grab the bits and pieces of what was said on Twitter and codify it here on my blog can
umwbl.gs and DIY url shorteners Shortening URLs has become a really popular service in conjunction with Twitter and text messaging growing in popularity. I've wanted to play around with URL shorteners for awhile now. To be honest I don't trust that bit.ly or t.co or is.gd will be
amazon Streaming Live Video without Ads for Pennies I've been in search of a decent low cost video streaming solution for a long time now. It doesn't take long playing with Ustream and Livestream to realize that while the software running those systems is extremely user friendly and convenient, the ads they run are
