This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Rachel Bensimhon.
Welcome to the sixth week of Wander Wednesday! I hope that you’re all settling into the routine of the semester well, now that we are in week two. If you haven’t yet, take a look at last week’s post featuring Shu Tang to catch up with the blog. This week, I am happy to present the great Rachel Bensimhon and her expertise on the Domain of One’s Own platform.
Rachel Bensimhon is a junior, majoring in Media and Communication with a double minor in Computer Science and English. Rachel has been part of the DLA team since her sophomore year. As a DLA, she has supported students and faculty through digital workshops and the Camp Design Online summer cohorts. She specializes in digital scholarship research, Berg Builds domains, and WordPress. She has also developed various infographics, art assets, and websites (including this one) for the Digital Learning Team.
Without further ado, let’s hear from Rachel!
“Domain of One’s Own is a project that allows college students and faculty to build their own custom websites in an online space that belongs to them. The Digital Learning Center adopted this practice in 2016 and now provides every student and faculty member with the opportunity to create a custom domain under the banner of BergBuilds Domains.
Domain building is my personal specialty as a DLA, and I find it really fun! I’ve been using BergBuilds Domains since the Spring of my freshman year to store coursework/creative projects, as well as to post reflections on various readings for the courses that require it. My domain (personal website) is divided into various subdomains, which host my classwork and projects from different courses. Through Domains I’ve been able to create a living record of my academic work and easily share it with others. With a little bit of basic WordPress know-how, I’ve also been able to customize the appearance of this record to my liking, so I’m in full control of the way my work is presented to the world.
Moreover, this blog would not exist without the use of a custom domain: mine, in fact. I hope you enjoy reading everyone’s articles as much as I enjoyed building this site to host them!
Custom domains are an extremely effective way to creatively empower students in their academic work. Oftentimes, when students write papers or make creative projects for their classes, these creations have a very limited life. The student submits an assignment to the professor, and then that assignment is quickly forgotten, lost in a pile of papers or in the depths of an old disk drive. Custom domains have the potential to “resuscitate” these works that would otherwise be forgotten. After a semester of hard work, it feels good to have a record of work to look back on, and it’s nice to know that I can easily share my academic writing with others if I choose to do so.
Domains have also helped me practice skills that I’ll need in the future, especially when it comes to managing content, building websites, and designing online portfolios. This might be a good thing to incorporate in your class to help your students in the long-term/beyond the classroom, as they use their online work to find careers.
Custom domains are useful in these respects, and I think classrooms could make use of them a lot more. Only a few of my courses so far have utilized Domains; in my opinion, it remains an underexplored option for coursework. These days, everyone is a citizen of the Internet, and so it’s important for everyone to learn how to cultivate their own digital spaces and interact with the digital ether. Domains can be a great way to facilitate that learning process. Setting them up, managing directories/domains, and installing applications were all learning experiences for me and it took some tinkering and a process of trial-and-error to figure things out. As a result, I think it might be a good idea to integrate these Domains more closely with courses for first-year students so that they can build their domains early and take them all through their college career, as well as beyond graduation if they want to keep their domain. Overall, custom domains are a really powerful tool that can allow students to design their own digital spaces and to maintain a record of their academic growth. I recommend it to anyone who’s looking to add a fun new dimension to their courses!
If you have any questions feel free to contact me at rbensimhon@muhlenberg.edu. Enjoy Domains!”