Tim Owens

September 2012

Replicator-21
September 19, 2012

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 printing down, making the software easy to understand and use, and creating an ecosystem for sharing open source designs (and practicing what they preach by releasing all their products under open source licenses). I also have to credit them for being the catalyst for our own makerspace, the ThinkLab, at the University of Mary Washington. They’ve done a ton for this community and deserve the accolades they receive regularly for it. - Read More -

September 3, 2012

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 also categorizes it with a methodology framed out by Jim Groom working with Cathy Derecki to provide a model of how we can systematically pull in content from distinct courses, professors, content areas, and more. To give you an idea of how powerful this is, imagine getting a feed of all the work being done by students of a particular professor, or maybe seeing the work being done across all freshman seminar courses, or the bigger picture of having a firehose of all work students do for the fall semester. By setting up a series of categories to be applied to each student’s personal feed and using FeedWordpress to pull it all in and categorize it, we can use the power of generated RSS feeds in WordPress to get a feed of any of that data we want to pull it in to different spaces and highlight the work being done by our students. - Read More -