Author: Lora Taub

OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: History

In a previous post, I highlighted the distinct focus on OER co-creation with students at Muhlenberg. Students have been drivers of digital learning since we began in 2015, and one of the guiding principles of our digital learning work at Muhlenberg is the value of student voice and agency. In this, we connect to a longstanding focus on peer partnership at the College, where student Digital Learning Assistants join up with Writing Assistants, Peer Tutors, and Learning Assistants, to create a strong presence of students as teachers and pedagogical partners in our teaching and learning environment. This was the focus of a 2018 workshop series, “Engaging Students as Partners,” led by Alison Cook-Sather, director of the Teaching and Learning Institute
at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, along with her student collaborators, Melanie Bahti and Sasha Mathrani. In one of those workshops, Tineke D’Haeseleer, Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg, began to consider possibilities for student-teacher co-creation in her pedagogy. This post is dedicated to the creative and often daring digital pedagogy that Professor D’Haeseleer has evolved, focusing in particular on the OER co-authored by students in her Spring 2018 course, China’s Magical Creatures.

https://open.muhlenberg.pub/chinasmagicalcreatures/

The book’s opening begins with the opening of another book, Story of the Stone (or Dream of Red Chambers, Honglou meng in Chinese):

“Gentle Reader,
What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?
Though the answer to this question may at first seem to border on the absurd, reflection will show that there is a good deal more to it than meets the eye.” ^[1]

It is a perfect path into this open text, as Professor D’Haesesleer explains at the end of her introduction:

The magical Stone in the eponymous Story of the Stone was incarnated into the world of humans as a man who lived a full life, before it returned to its existence as a stone in a different plane of existence – but bearing an inscription detailing its adventures. Like the Stone, this textbook is now ready to go out into the world of humans, and hopefully its adventures will also be inscribed in the object itself, as future readers use, reuse, and remix the text.

Not only does Professor D’Haeseleer situate the co-created OER in relation to an important literary text, she alsos invites readers to reflect on what it means for students to situate themselves, and be situated pedagogically, as, co-creators of knowledge:

What meets the eye at first is a set of chapters written by the students who took the course in Spring 2019. The students are not experts at China, they do not know Chinese and thus had to rely on English-language materials available to them through our library and my personal collection. Many are at the start of their journey of learning to write for their college-level peers.
It may seem absurd to let these people write a textbook: shouldn’t we leave that to the experts? But although I know more than my students about Chinese history, and a bit more than they do about its magical creatures, I am not an expert at textbooks: I use them only for some courses, and I haven’t used one as a student would in many, many years. But I teach students who use textbooks all the time, and I thought they would have better ideas about what makes a textbook on the one hand attractive and inviting, or on the other hand abstruse, or otherwise becomes a roadblock to learning and discovery.

At the outset, readers encounter students giving voice to the process, practice, and purpose of the OER work, including the following perspectives:

Nyjah: I feel this online book is a great idea … “Chinese Magical Creatures” is such an odd class, there is not real material for it. Having people in the class help to put it together makes it even better, because as students we know what we like and dislike in textbooks, and we know what we feel was necessary and important to include.
Lauren: In all of my other classes, I have always felt like I gained a lot of knowledge, and then had nowhere to put it all.
Jess: Being part of the project instilled me with a sense of responsibility. I needed to be clear and accurate.

Lushu creature with a horse’s head, and tiger stripes.

As a co-created production, the book encompasses so many diverse topics, including the meanings of a ceramic bowl, creatures that lay within the mountains, the origin of dragons, Taoists exorcism rituals, and many other topics carefully researched, documented, and presented by students for their readers. Their bibliographies for each entry are extensive and invite further, deep exploration into the history of the artifacts and stories they are researching, demonstrating engagement with historical methods and also the affordances of open publishing to open and link to connected content and material.

Professor D’Haeseleer is building on this experience this semester, with another co-creative open educational project underway in her course on Korean history. It is one of many critical and creative ways she is practicing digital and open pedagogies at Muhlenberg. She shares reflections on a lot of this work on Twitter @tinebeest. Follow along! These collaborations have been so rewarding and generative for the Digital Learning Team in the last few years.

March 11, 2022
OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Department Driven

As OpenEd Week continues, it’s clear that one week is not time enough to spotlight and recognize all of the energies and efforts directed towards opening education at Muhlenberg, in relation to open educational resources and open educational practices more broadly. Today, we’re recognizing the momentum in a department, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where the introduction of OERs across multiple courses connects up to a larger department commitment to foster open pedagogies.

In 2016, the Digital Learning Team at Muhlenberg began offering workshops to faculty and staff to raise awareness about open educational resources and the possibilities of this work at Muhlenberg, This included Tech Talks (one of the earliest opened Tech Talks: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6f9132c8-c826-475e-a034-acea003e3ccb&start=7.835123 ) and a campus visit from Robin DeRosa who led a seminar and workshop for faculty and staff (archived here: https://muhlenbergcollege.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=3c8b9c57-4830-4816-8354-acea003e3cb3&start=145.642921 ). In that early moment of the work, it was two professors of Italian who first approached us with an interest in creating their own digital textbook to align with their liberal arts pedagogical practice in a way that no commercial textbook was able to do. In supporting the efforts of Daniela Viale, Lecturer in Italian and French, and Dan Leisawitz, Associate Professor of Italian and director of Italian Studies, we have had opportunity to discover so much that informs our approach to collaboration and partnership with faculty interested in OER, as well as an approach that recognizes the transformative experiences of students who contribute their insights to OER development and iteration.

Buongiorno!
Welcome to Spunti: Italiano elementare 1 – a unique program authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed course available to all college instructor of Italian for use and adaptation…

…Spunti is a work in progress, and we would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, and adaptations that anyone can give us. Our hope for Spunti is that it can benefit from the input of Italian instructors and students from around the world.

A strong foundation of knowledge and experience has been critical to growing department-wide thinking about the value of open educational resources and practices. Alongside the development of OERs in Italian, French professor Eileen McEwan has developed and published her text, Paris à travers les pages, another example of OER co-creation with students, so well suited to the pedagogical context at Muhlenberg:

Paris through the Pages is the culminating project for an advanced level undergraduate French course that explores the images of Paris in literary works from the 17th to 20th centuries. As an open source book, it is intended to be re-used, revised, and repurposed by undergraduate students and academics in French studies.

In our current pedagogical learning community on open education this semester, no department is more strongly represented than Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, where open educational initiatives exist and are expanding in Italian, German, French, and Spanish. Together, they are helping to radically expand access, equity, and engagement in foreign language study at Muhlenberg, a general academic requirement for all students at the College. Their work to create and integrate more OERs contributes importantly to the wider College commitment to foster inclusive pedagogies.

Here are links to some of the OERs created in Pressbooks by faculty in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures:

Cover

Cover

March 10, 2022
OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Political Science

This year, International Women’s Day falls within Open Education Week–an ideal time to highlight an OER focused on women and politics created by Professor Lanethea Mathews-Schultz and her students. In Spring 2019, Professor Mathews-Schultz taught a special topics course called 2018: The Political Year of the Woman, focusing on the record number of women elected to Congress the previous year. Students in the course collective researched and co-authored an OER book, 2018 Political Year of the Woman Election: A Critical Examination.

In the introduction, Professor Mathews-Schultz and student co-author Alison Cummins write:

This collection of papers, authored by undergraduate students at Muhlenberg College in the Spring of 2019, considers how women’s electoral successes and challenges in 2018 are both cause and consequence of the increased saliency of gender and of women’s and gender-related issues in electoral politics. Collectively, the authors include students in the sophomore through senior year and represent a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, with majors ranging from political science to English to psychology to media and communication. Our diversity made this project an especially rewarding one. We offer this research, not as experts, but rather in the spirit of open inquiry, scholarly dialogue, and moving the conversation forward. We view our work as very much “in progress,” and with that in mind, we welcome feedback and dialogue…

This class project, an example of open pedagogy in practice, illustrates the possibilities for supporting students’ development as authors and knowledge-creators, as well as their awareness of scholarship as a collaborative act. It is an early example of the way faculty at Muhlenberg are integrating OER co-creation in their courses, a practice that distinguishes much of the open educational work on campus, to be highlighted throughout this week.

March 9, 2022
OpenEd Week 2022 Highlight: Philosophy

Between March 7 and 11, Open Education Week, the Digital Learning Team is highlighting open education projects by faculty and students at Muhlenberg, including open educational resources and open educational practices and pedagogies. As we begin to build momentum, support, infrastructure, and expertise, we want to create space for recognizing some of the earliest open education efforts at Muhlenberg that have helped us learn what is possible and what kinds of organization and support are necessary to continue to build these efforts.

The first project we highlight is the recently published OER by Tad Robinson, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Arguments in Context: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, available in our Pressbooks catalog here: https://open.muhlenberg.pub/arguments-in-context/

In his acknowledgements at the outset of the book, Professor Robinson writes, “In my view, courses in ‘Critical Thinking’ are difficult to teach well, and this text is my effort to make this task a little easier.” This OER project grew out of Professor Robinson’s engagement in the 2019-20 pedagogical learning community facilitated by Tim Clarke and Tina Hertel. Tad also acknowledges, in addition to support and feedback from colleagues, “the many students whose questions and comments helped me to improve and refine the text along the way.” With its open license (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial), the text can be adopted and adapted, in part or in whole, by faculty elsewhere teaching critical thinking. “Overall, the text aims to equip readers with a set of tools for working through important decisions and disagreements, and to help them become more careful and active thinkers.”

Choosing to write and openly publish a textbook is an enormous challenge and I recall the questions Professor Robinson posed during the learning community seminars that helped all of us critically consider the case for open educational resources. Two years later, it is very exciting to see this book now published in the open!

March 9, 2022
Expanding Pedagogical Partnership with DLAs
As we anticipate the new semester and the kinds of resources and support we are ready to provide faculty and students in digital learning contexts, we want to highlight one distinctive element of our approach at Muhlenberg: the role and partnership of Digital Learning Assistants.

The earliest conceptualizations of digital learning at Muhlenberg intentionally prioritized the participation of students as partners, drawing from longstanding and successful models of peer assistantship already in place at the College–in the Writing Program and in Academic Support Services, most notably. With their own learning histories, expectations, and hopes, Digital Learning Assistants–DLAs–have partnered in shaping our work from the outset, and their insights continue to inform work that promotes student agency, voice, and privacy in the spaces of digital learning.

Each semester we share the DLA schedule, included below. We encourage faculty to share it with students in any course where digital tools, platforms, or practices are integrated. DLAs will continue to offer a blend of in-person office hours for peer collaboration in the HiVE and online in Zoom.

This semester we also invite faculty to consider possibilities where a DLA’s reflection and constructive feedback might be meaningful. Some instances where opportunity to collaborate with a DLA might be beneficial include:
- framing an assignment integrating digital tools
- brainstorming and identifying a digital tool for a particular learning activity
- thinking through redesigned digital learning materials with a lens on accessibility and inclusion
- imagining and planning support students might need for a digital learning assignment
DLAs are well prepared and intentionally mentored to collaborate with faculty across the campus, not only in their major. In fact, DLAs do not have to be from your discipline to be able to pay close attention and reflect with you, bring forms of knowledge of digital learning to your conversation, or to share constructive observations that offer a window into one kind of student experience.
If you are interested in working with a DLA partner, please contact Jordan Noyes at jordannoyes@muhlenberg.edu to have a conversation about your proposed project and interests.

Wishing you all well as the semester draws near.

Spring 2022 DLA Schedule
January 13, 2022
Wander Wednesday #7: Building Community with Sarah Bui
This is a guest post, written by our Digital Learning Assistant, Lucie Hopkins, in which she interviews her colleague and fellow DLA, Sarah Bui.

Welcome back to Wander Wednesdays after last week’s hiatus! I hope you all have had lovely starts to the semester, and that they continue to be so as we move forward. I am happy to present you the final post of this series with as relevant a topic as I can think of: building community online. Sarah Bui has graced us once again with her insight and knowledge this week to discuss this topic.

Sarah Bui is a rising sophomore. She is double majoring in Media – Communication and Film Studies. She joined the DLA team her freshman year and specializes in WordPress, Hypothes.is, and many digital storytelling tools such as Knightlab Timeline, Story Map and Canva. She also served as a Learning Assistant during the Camp Design program Summer 2020 and provided diverse perspectives as a student to help faculty in polishing their courses. In the future, she wants to expand her knowledge and skills about digital tools in storytelling and social media practices.

Without further ado, let’s hear from Sarah!

“It has been a month since this semester started, and I hope all of you faculty members are doing well with all interactive and engaging activities we built during the summer. There was much to be worried about for this semester, but I can tell that you are all more and more confident with what you are doing.

Learning online can be a very isolated experience. You study on your own, attend class on your own and do homework on your own. The feeling of disconnection discourages most students and hugely impacts their productivity in class. Therefore, building the online community within the space of classes is significantly important for each student’s learning experience.

From what I experienced last semester (spring 2020), in the summer and in the last month, I want to share some faculty practices for building community that might be helpful from a student’s perspective.
1. My professors let me know that they care about my learning experience.
What I’ve really appreciated is that often in the beginning of a course, professors would send out prompt questions that let me share about myself and share what I expected from the course. The professors would also share what they expected from us at the beginning of the class, as well as before each assignment, which made the learning process much more enjoyable. Nothing is as difficult as working online when you do not know what to do and you don’t have friends there to ask.

Regarding in-class activities, I believe the best way to know if this activity or practice works or not is to do it, then ask students for their experience. After trying something new in class, my professor always encourages us to send them an email about how we felt about it. Of course, it is optional, but it makes me feel like my opinion in class and the course structure is valued.
1. Often, something in the course seems to be insignificant but has a huge impact.
I watched many lectures in my online classes, and it could be really tiring. If we were in person taking a class, the professor would immediately recognize who in the class did not understand, or would maybe switch to another activity if everyone was overloaded with information. But this cannot happen with video lectures. This is where captions come to the rescue. I have the option to speed up the video to 1.5x speed so I can concentrate more, since my brain has to catch up with the speed, but I can fully understand by reading the captions. Studying by both listening and reading is a helpful way to memorize and process the information given.

I had one online class during the summer which was quite intensive. In that class, my professor broke the long video into smaller sections and named them by the main topics they covered. In our homework, the professor would also refer back to these videos by saying, “You might need to rewatch [name of videos] in the module [week_] for this question.” This was often helpful if we covered many things in class and students later needed to review these topics for assignments and exams.

The amount of time to watch all the videos might be longer for students than only the length of the videos themselves. I often pause videos and in between videos to take notes (and it turns out that I take notes about everything–I realized that online class makes me more worried about missing important information). One of my professors prepared a list of questions and terms as a watching guide so I could focus on the main points of a long lecture and try to understand the key concepts, not just memorize everything in the video.
1. Students may drop into office hours more frequently.
Office hours play a vital role during this time. Personally, I feel more comfortable with online office hours since sometimes I just have a small question or want to discuss more about what my professor said in class. When we have in-person class, I find it harder to just come to a professor’s office for very small questions. Now I can just drop in with little commitment. There are so many things I thought I understood which I realized I did not after these meetings with professors. And sometimes, just talking to someone makes me feel more connected with my class. I believe there are many students who need more help with their studies right now, so offering office hours besides class lectures and meetings are a good practice to help them feel connected.
1. Recorded meetings and discussion notes are helpful resources.
One thing I love about online class is that everything is recorded. Even though I try to take notes very carefully, I cannot take notes and participate in the discussion at the same time. There are many interesting ideas that we talk about in class that I cannot remember or didn’t have the chance to participate in. Going back to these discussion notes and recorded meetings helps me recall the class materials better.
1. Feedback is significantly encouraging.
Feedback is always helpful, and an online environment is no exception. Discussion boards and student responses to materials are good strategies to engage students in class, but it is often more encouraging if we know that our professors in fact read them and value our opinions. Sometimes, I feel myself less likely to contribute to a discussion if my professor only marks it for attendance points and I can’t be sure if they read them or not. In one of my classes, the professor highlights some interesting points of our comments and replies to them with some questions which help us to think further about the materials. I understand it could be exhausting to reply to all of the comments, but highlighting students’ good points is inspiring. It helps me believe that my efforts are recognized.

One thing I’ve learned so far is that online learning is not as scary and stressful as it seems to be before you do it. We all need to plan everything beforehand but be flexible for unexpected things to happen. As a bottom line, reach out to your students. Let them be involved in the building of the community of online classes. Challenge them, but give them the benefit of the doubt. Use your tools from the summer to connect students with one another, as it is so easy to feel isolated at this time.

As I wrap up, it is sad for me to say that today’s post is the last post on Wander Wednesdays. It was our pleasure as Digital Learning Assistants to have an amazing journey working with faculty members this summer and sharing our perspectives throughout to help build our online communities. On the behalf of the Digital Learning Assistant Team, I want to say thank you for everything you’ve done and are doing for your classes. We are proud of everyone and we believe together we shall overcome this challenge successfully and memorably.”

Sarah can be contacted via email: tbui@muhlenberg.edu. Thank you all dearly for your readership this summer and semester, and I wish you all the best rest of the semester possible. You can contact me at lehopkins@muhlenberg.edu.
September 21, 2020
Keeping Hope Alive in Online Learning

Students and faculty have completed the first three weeks of the semester at Muhlenberg. Most teaching and learning is happening online, with a smaller number of courses for first year students being taught on campus or in a blended environment that integrates in-person and online learning activities. We dedicated the summer to helping faculty prepare for this semester, offering 14 sessions of our faculty development course Camp Design Online. Throughout the summer, we were awed by the generosity staff and faculty poured into this effort, as well as an outstanding and dedicated group of student Digital Learning Assistants who ensured that student perspectives were present and shaping conversations around online course design and instruction.

This is one of several upcoming posts featuring the variety of practices animating and humanizing online courses at Muhlenberg. A good place to begin for those interested in understanding more about teaching and learning online is this video interview with Flower Darby, a leader in online learning and author of the text Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science to Online Classes.

The video is also available here:

https://video.muhlenberg.edu/media/Looking+at+Online+Learning+with+Fresh+Eyes_+A+Conversation+with+Flower+Darby+%28New%29/1_jaoqkcx3

Read more by Flower Darby in her column in the Chronicle of Higher Education: https://www.chronicle.com/author/flower-darby

September 14, 2020
Open Educational Resources for Online Community-Building

As the second week of the semester comes to a close, I’m thinking about the experiences of teaching and learning online in a pandemic that will likely stay with us for a long while. Throughout the summer, as faculty at Muhlenberg prepared for what President Harring has called “the most distinctive academic year in Muhlenberg’s history,” one concern wove throughout each week of Camp Design Online, every discussion board, every video conversation, and the text informing our work together: how do we foster and feed community in online learning?

The conversation among faculty on this enduring topic generated many examples, approaches, and possibilities. Guidance from the Camp Design Online instructors, together with creativity and insights from Faculty Digital Fellows and Digital Learning Assistants, contributed greatly to an expansive sense of possibility. Many of these possibilities are documented and available in Canvas discussion boards for Camp Design Online cohorts, where faculty can continue to draw inspiration from peers.

To further widen our sense of what may be possible in building community in online learning, I am excited to share this expanding resource from a diverse group of educators and scholars who bring critical, caring, expert voices to these challenges. Co-facilitators of Equity Unbound,“an equity-focused, open, connected learning experience,” have partnered with OneHE to develop, curate and share a growing variety of open educational resources for online community-building. Here are the co-creators of this initiative with an overview of what you’ll find here and why they created it:

Our approach to online learning in the liberal arts has always framed this work around the importance of community. In centering community in digital learning, we also invite reflection on our assumptions about what constitutes community, who is included and who is excluded, where community resides and how it is accessed and sustained. This is more vital than ever, as students and faculty alike carry on teaching and learning amidst the everyday experiences of a protracted pandemic. Our efforts to build hospitable, inclusive, productive space for learning occurs against the backdrop of loss, grief, and trauma, lived and experienced unevenly by our students and their families. This only amplifies the need for efforts value and enact community. In the above video, Autumm Caines, of the University of Michigan at Dearborn, describes this as the practice of “intentionally equitable hospitality.” Autumm and co-authors define this concept more fully in this article, “Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of virtually connecting.” The practices shared and available for adaptation on this website aim to support and extend practices of intentionally equitable hospitality in online learning spaces. They invite educators to pay close attention to the ways that digital spaces are both welcoming and unwelcoming, open and closed, inclusive and exclusive, hospitable and inhospitable. As the co-creators note:

Any technique can block some people out, make them feel unwelcomed, or be used in a way that privileges some and makes it harder on others. All of these techniques should be used in conjunction with pedagogies of care and what we call Intentionally Equitable Hospitality.
http://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/activities/community-building-online-open-resources-from-oneheglobal-unboundeq/

As the opening weeks of the semester fade and we get deeper into the heart of our courses, remember that community-building happens over the long haul and requires a kind of consideration of ethics, power, privacy, and risk. In remarks on safety considerations in online community-building, Kate Bowles (University of Wollongong, Australia) observes:

The community building activities that are shared here have been designed to suit learners in many different cultural contexts, and they are framed by a philosophy of intentionally equitable hospitality and a pedagogy of care.
Most instructors will have the experience and knowledge of their students’ situation to make wise choices about activities that will work best.
However, when choosing community building activities that ask students to disclose information about themselves, and especially about how they are feeling, it is important to recognise the risk of unintended harm.

Indeed, this is what I find most valuable and distinct about this collection of resources for faculty teaching online. While each resource is accompanied by a video demonstrating or describing the practice, as well as slides and further artifacts that can be remixed and reused, informing the entire project is the awareness and attention directed towards the possibility that “[a]ny technique can block some people out, make them feel unwelcomed, or be used in a way that privileges some and makes it harder on others.” For that reason, the co-creators invite critical engagement and reflection on activities and exercises that, in your own practice, you find inhospitable or unwelcoming in whatever way.

If you would like to talk with an instructional designer about any of these activities for building community online, or share practices you’ve developed, please sign up for an appointment from the weekly schedule here: https://archive.diglearn.bergbuilds.domains/getting-assistance-faculty-staff/

September 2, 2020
Wander Wednesday #6: Domain of One’s Own with Rachel Bensimhon

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!”

September 2, 2020
Students and their domains in “People and their stuff in Chinese history”

The semester had barely begun when my colleague, Professor Tineke D’Haeseleer (History) tweeted:

Professor D’Haeseleer’s tweet on August 26, 2020

This was the tweet we all needed, after a day when the videoconferencing platform was down, along with the media platform in Canvas! No sweat for Professor D’Haeseleer, who centers Domain of One’s Own in her online pedagogy. This post spotlights her work with Domains and the exciting ways her students are beginning to build their digital presence–not only in the course featured in this post, “People and their stuff in Chinese history,” but across all of her courses. For Professor D’Haeseleer, blogs are central to the ways she aims to create and expand a community of explorers and writers.

Professor Tineke D’Haeseleer opened her course, “People and their stuff in Chinese history,” a week prior to the start of the semester. Built entirely on her own domain, which she’s been growing and evolving since she connected with the Berg Builds initiative in her first year at Muhlenberg, Professor D’Haeseleer’s course invites students to participate as co-creators in the online learning environment. As they construct their own domains, students expand the digital ecology of the course, guided by weekly assignments that critically engage and reflect upon course readings and materials. Deep engagement with Domain of One’s Own is one of the fundamental ways that Dr. D’Haeseleer creates opportunities for students’ “thoughtful participation in the learning community.”

By the first week, students were already digging into their domains. The night before the semester officially started, Jose Maldonado published his first post and a welcome on his site, http://josethenotjose.bergbuilds.domains/. “Hello everyone! My name is Jose Maldonado and I live in the suburbs of Chicago. This site is, for now, a blog for my People and their stuff in Chinese History course at Muhlenberg College. I hope to not only learn about Chinese history but to also manage websites and properly broadcast my thoughts/ideas.”

Homepage of Jose Maldonado’s blog at http://josethenotjose.bergbuilds.domains’

With guidelines for their very first post from Professor D’Haeseleer, students learn to insert an image and a hyperlink, add it to a category, and add tags–skills they will need for later posts. What better way to initiate this practice than with Growth Mindset Cats! In their first post assignment, students are pointed to http:/growthmindsetmemes.blogspot.com/p/cat-index.html where they must find a Growth Mindset cat that speaks to them and write about how it resonates. Along the way, students also learn about captions, Alt text for accessibility, and categories.

You can check out Jose’s blog (URL above) and Professor D’Haeseleer’s course here: https://hst137.tdh.bergbuilds.domains/week1/.

August 31, 2020