Opening up UMW

Picking up on the theme of ‘openness’ in Dr. Boyles’ talk, we’ll look at some of the projects I’ve been working on to open up information about UMW. One example is the experiments I have been doing to create new ways to discover and visualize the activity within UMWBlogs. (See the project blog at http://semantic.umwblogs.org/about). We will also look at the future directions I imagine, which involves combining information about your courses with information about the blogs, something that I have been calling a “Giant EduGraph.” (There is a short article about the idea in the current issue of Panlibus, page 15, here http://www.talis.com/panlibus)

For the hands‑on part, I’ll ask you to both help me test the application and give me feedback. If you bring along information about a course or courses you taught this year, especially the ISBN numbers of texts you used, we’ll use that information to create course profiles, and see what connections we can discover. You do not need to have used UMWBlogs to take part in this activity.