Recently, Lora Taub, Dean for Digital Learning, joined a group of peers from a variety of campuses to collectively brainstorm and shape a report on Domain of One’s Own for Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know series. Together with Martha Burtis, Sundi Richard, Jim Groom, and Keegan Long-Wheeler, we collaborated with ELI’s Malcolm Brown, Greg Dobbin, and Stephen G Pelletier to attempt to synthesize and explain Domains for a wide audience. Each of the contributors represent different contexts and practices in the Domains community, yet there was still a remarkable shared sense of the connective tissue that joins this expanding network. With the very first question, “What is it?” the conversation was catapulted into pedagogical, philosophical, and political directions:
A way of thinking as well as an application of technology, Domain of One’s Own refers to the practice of giving students, faculty, and staff the opportunity to obtain a domain with hosted web space of their own …. By enabling users to build environments for learning and sharing, such domains make possible a liberating array of practices that encourage users to explore how they interact with and present themselves in the online world. While giving users more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity, these domains encourage an ethos of openness, freedom, and exploration and nurture a practice for shaping and thinking about one’s presence on the web. DoOO also draws users into a community of practice focused on collaboration and sharing.
It was an honor for Muhlenberg to be among those communities featured in this story, a reflection of how far our work with Domains has evolved in such a short timeframe and the creative practices and partnerships emerging around Berg Builds. The Educause article is here: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/10/7-things-you-should-know-about-a-domain-of-ones-own
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