Author Archives: Meg

Composing a Life

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When I first came to JMU, I entered a new phase of life: new job as a dual professor-administrator, mother to a new baby (my second), and a new decade (I turned forty soon after I arrived). A few months in, a colleague gave me a copy of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life. I think she knew how much I would appreciate Bateson’s topic:

“This book is about life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic.” 

In the decade since, I have changed administrative roles twice, completed a variety of big-multi-year projects, and turned fifty. I picked Bateson’s book up again this spring. It Continue reading →

Liberty and Learning at JMU

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Here is a guest post I wrote for the American Democracy Project at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, July 2017

The James Madison statue on East Campus (“Big Jimmy”) is a popular spot for photographs, especially on Constitution Day. Photo courtesy JMU Marketing and Communications.

We take civic engagement very seriously at James Madison University. Originally founded as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women in 1908, this institution has been renamed and rebranded multiple times. President Samuel Page Duke proposed the name Madison College in 1938 in part to commemorate the legacy of the nation’s so-called “Forgotten Founder,” and President Ronald Carrier led the Continue reading →

Fixing #TradCiz (Traditional Citizenship) with #DigCiz and #Civictech

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234329 2017 MLK Celebration Week- March and Speak Out-1047

JMU students hold a commemorative march and speak out every MLK Day. Signs this year featured hashtags, some for actual online conversations, some for imagined ones. Both suggest an emergent mindset regarding social media and political or democratic engagement.

This summer, I have been participating in a #DigCiz conversation that is helping me think more carefully about the relationship between activities in the digital world, especially social media, and activities in the analog world, especially in the American political system. In a recent Tweet, I referred to the nexus between #DigCiz and #TradCiz (Traditional Citizenship) (I think I made #TradCiz up. If not, please let me know). Part of this nexus includes what is called “civictech,” a term used in civic-engagement-in-higher-ed conversations to reference a host of Continue reading →

Confederate Heritage at JMU

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This building commemorates noted 19th century scientist and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who resigned his commission in the US Navy in 1861 to serve as a commodore in the Confederate navy. After the Civil War, he briefly lived in Mexico, where he tried to create a slaveholding colony for exiled Confederates. He eventually returned to his home state, Virginia, and accepted a position as professor of meteorology at Virginia Military Institute. A strong advocate for public higher education, he helped create the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech). Photo by author.

I’m republishing this May 2017 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because links to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.

Talk of Confederate heritage seems to be everywhere these days. As a public historian who studies, teaches, and writes about this subject, I find the sudden resurgence fascinating and repellent at the same time. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, put it well when he said, Confederate statues “are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” I make a similar point in my forthcoming book, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in WiImington, NC, which includes an analysis of monuments and memorials in that city. But my interest is more than academic. Every day, I go to work in a building that long served as a Confederate monument. To be clear, my views on renaming/removing/contextualizing such Continue reading →

Mapping My Place in the Open Landscape

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Maybe it’s all the cultural geography I’ve read, but I find the idea of mapping my place in the landscape of open learning very intriguing. Am I digital visitor or a resident? In my forthcoming book, I explore (among other things) the way cognitive mapping works to help people navigate their place in the cultural landscape of a community; I’m especially interested in the way that our attachments to physical places serve as mnemonics for experiences or events (both positive and negative) crucial to identity formation, especially civic and racial identities. Among other things, I consider the way parades function—a group of people processing deliberately by iconic buildings and monuments serves to inscribe shared values on the landscape but also works to unite the marchers Continue reading →

It’s a Real Thing: Open Pedagogy

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About three years ago, I recreated my own domain. I had had a fairly extensive website back in the late 1990s, when Web 1.0 ruled the universe, but when I came to JMU in 2005, I found that faculty overwhelmingly used Blackboard and hid their syllabi and assorted pedagogical aids away from public sight. It has been interesting to watch the shift toward open ed occurring here in the last decade. As more and more faculty, generally the younger ones, experimented more and more with WordPress and Omeka and similar tools, I did, too. And as I added blogging assignments, digital exhibits, and Continue reading →

Open Learning, Digital Citizenship, & Political Citizenship

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NOTE: For week three of the #OpenLearning17 cMOOC, I was supposed to read Doug Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (excerpts online). But I got sidetracked, as I often do, by other readings. Imagine my surprise, however, to find Englebart everywhere I looked.

I’ve been recently thinking about the relationship between open learning, digital citizenship, and political citizenship. At JMU, I’ve been leading efforts to advance the civic engagement of our undergraduates and I’ve been involved in digital humanities work in the College of Arts and Letters. These interests grow out of my training in American Studies and public history, both of which are interdisciplinary endeavors that seek to involve ordinary Americans in shaping a more accurate, more sophisticated Continue reading →

Associative trails in the post-notecard age

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From Life Magazine, Nov. 11, 1945

Like other scientists involved in producing weapons of mass destruction for WWII, Vannevar Bush eventually issued a clarion call to his colleagues to create “pacific instruments,” namely machines capable of collecting “the inherited knowledge of the ages.” This week I read his famous July 1945 essay, “As We May Think” and immediately recognized his memex as a proto-computer with the ability to create associative trails of information. Unlike the atomic bomb, which Bush oversaw, the memex’s purpose was constructive: by enabling scientists to select, annotate, and Continue reading →

Parlez-vous open learning?

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Way back when I was in my twenties, I traveled to Quebec with some friends. I felt so sophisticated, so grown-up as I tried to use my high-school-plus-one-semester-of-college French language skills. I could order (safely) from a menu; navigate hotel check-in; count money out for a purchase; and interact cordialement with people I met. Of course, it was an illusion–that heady feeling of fluency. I was not then nor have I ever been fluent in French. I wasn’t even proficient. But I tried and it felt good to push myself that way.

parlezvous

So it is with open learning. Over the years I have acquired some of the vocabulary, grammar, and idioms needed to converse in this language, yet I know I am far from proficient.

My goal in joining #OpenLearning17 is simply to become more conversant. At the moment, I have a Twitter account that I use frequently to connect with #twitterstorians, #publichistorians, #genedadministrators (ok, there’s not really a hashtag for that yet, no one wants to admit to being one I guess), and #civicengagement folks as well as a few others. I routinely incorporate digital humanities projects into my classes, and I have a blog that I started one day when I was wondering about my personal brand, whatever that is. Like many academics, I often walk around composing blog posts in my head, but by the time I get in front of my computer, *poof*. Hopefully, this cMOOC will help me find the right words.

How about you? Parlez-vous open learning?

Quads as Symbols of Liberal Learning

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We recently ended Springboard, a series of thirteen days in June and July that are designed to welcome freshmen to campus and provide a key part of their orientation programming. Organized by our Orientation Office in conjunction with Admissions, the advising centers, the academic colleges, and my unit, University Programs, it affords my colleagues and me an opportunity to talk directly to students and their parents about academic expectations here and the value of a liberal education. I only get ten minutes, so I try to make it count by focusing on a few “mental images” as takeaways.

Here’s what I said: Continue reading →