“Ride the Yak.” Ewwww.
It has been a tumultuous 24 hours at UMW, since the Virginia State Police rolled in last night and arrested some protesters who had been occupying the administration building for the past three weeks in an attempt to get the university to divest its portfolio from fossil fuels. It has been interesting, to say the least, to watch the controversy play out in different media.
Dormers Away!
This post is the sequel to last December’s “Columns-n-a-crate,” which are both part of the great series entitled Virginia Architectural Pastiches. The new Campus Center is getting its dormers lowered on with a crane. Must have been acquired at Antebellum Greek Revival Features-R-Us.
Screen shot of the wiki in progress; click to enlarge.
This semester I am experimenting with using MediaWiki as a platform for the students in my History of Manhood in the US course to build a collaborative set of reading notes. After being less than completely satisfied with my Twitter experiment last semester, I was looking for a new way to integrate an online component into my courses. One of the problems I had with student tweeting is that it generated a lot of noise; there was a lot of talking and very little listening. I had a hard time keeping up with all the tweets, and it seemed unreasonable (as well as unproductive) to expect the students to do so. In previous years, I had found that response-blogging suffered from a similar problem; there was an awful lot of expression and not a lot of contemplation. So I found myself searching for a different kind of online community, one in which the students wrote less but more thoughtfully, and actively engaged with what the others were contributing. Read more
Is it a siren song that I sing?
This week’s assignment for the Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative is to explore online scholarly communities. I spent some time racking my brain trying to think up Early Americanist communities online, until I realized that I have been an active user of just such a community for years, H-Net. I belong to several of their groups, and I get much of my information about fellowships, conferences, and new work from interacting with their email listservs and their newly renovated web portal. The size and breadth of its user community makes it an invaluable resource for me. Read more
Woodville’s Charge of the Light Brigade (courtesy of Wikipedia), another famous exercise in futility.
This week I have been thinking about digital identity as a process, an insight that emerged from a serendipitous overlap between an email conversation with a friend and the the week’s readings for the UMW Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative. Read more
I had a great bunch of thesis students this year. I learned halfway through the semester that a bunch of them had been carpooling to the Library of Congress and had dubbed themselves “the Mack Pack.” (Also, apparently they dubbed my feedback a “Mack Attack,” which wasn’t meant to be complimentary.) They all presented their work at the History and American Studies Symposium last Friday, and they all did a great job. Read more
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