Since the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) became Digital Learning Support (DLS) in the summer of 2019 (along with bringing aboard a whole new cast of characters) we’ve been dealing with various legacy accounts and websites from previous iterations of the unit.
This week I met with Angie Kemp, UMW’s Digital Resources Librarian, to discuss what we could do about posts that were on the old umw.edu DTLT site as well as on umwdtlt.com. The posts found in both these places recount the work done by the unit, capturing various initiatives, events, and most importantly faculty and student work over the years. I didn’t want to just obliterate this content but there is the reality that the websites the writings were housed on no longer served their purpose.
One of the first things Angie brought up is the web archive that the library runs on umw.edu that has been crawling our sites since 2014. This crawler is already capturing flat files of pages throughout umw.edu so many of the oldest posts that were on umw.edu were captured there. As always the library, like so much University infrastructure, is there doing the work without us noticing. The one drawback is that because of limited funding and space the library has to be judicious in what they archive from the web so they don’t usually capture any videos that might appear on the page. I’ll have to remind myself going forward that if we are embedding media we should consider providing a direct and meaningful link to the externally hosted video to increase the odds of someone being able to track down what might have been there.
The next phase of the conversation was the umwdtlt.com site, that was used by the most recent iteration of DTLT, to chronicle the work they were doing. This site currently lives on our Domain of One’s Own instance which makes it easy to access, but was not being archived by the library as it lives outside of the umw.edu ecosystem. As of this writing I am waiting to hear back from the library about capturing several of these pages and the posts so that it too can be part of the documented history of the unit and the Domain of One’s Own project.
After the conversation I had with Angie and reading through many of the posts written over the years I realized that DLS has not be publicly documenting the work we’ve been doing. I suppose I’ll blame COVID-19 for that because as soon as we had our feet underneath us a new unit we were suddenly thrust in to the “Great Pivot” of 2020. There was barely enough time and energy to do our jobs let alone write about it. The silver lining is that the panic and the ensuing work brought both DLS and the Center for Teaching (CfT) much closer together. This eventually inspired the initial creation of learn.umw.edu to support this past summer’s faculty development initiative, ReFocus Online. At the inception of learn.umw.edu we also had goals that this site would be a central hub for the resources and tools that might fall under the broad mission of supporting the work of learning at UMW (that scope isn’t that large, is it?). With the creation of this blog we add the documenting of the learning going on at UMW.
In this space we will write about ideas and initiatives, but more importantly we aim to showcase the work of individuals across campus who are doing the work of teaching and learning. We also imagine that we (DLS and CfT) won’t be the only ones writing in this space and we hope with time we can provide a platform for people to talk about their endeavors in their own words.
Oh, and don’t worry, the site will be archived.