In mid-October, Jim Groom and Lauren Brumfeld of Reclaim Hosting spent two jam-packed days with us at Muhlenberg, helping us open the door (or Pandora’s Box, as Jim might argue) to our Domain of One’s Own faculty and student learning community. Time spent with Jim and Lauren was everything we’d hoped it would be–catalyzing and supportive, a chance to peer around some corners to glimpse “what might be” even while we’re in the thick of what is needed now to get off to a strong start. I’ve reflected on our work with Jim and Lauren here in some detail, but in this post I just want to provide a roundup of the several blogs that have spun out of those two October days.
Over on his domain, Tim Clarke is inviting us to consider What Would a Domain of One’s Own Implementation Cohort Look Like?
This post is my effort to extend this question, and share my thinking about what may, and what may not be helpful to schools as they implement Domain of One’s Own initiatives. I’m especially interested in teasing out if there is enough commonality among institutions, or enough similarity around this work, or enough fun to be had, to warrant effort to form an implementation cohort.
One of the things that strengthens our Domain of One’s Own initiative is the multiple perspectives and backgrounds of the people collaborating to make it happen. Jen Jarson, over on the ACRLog blog, situates Domain of One’s Own in the context of her work on information literacy within librarianship. In her post, Jen asks, “What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like?” and is connecting our work on Domains to larger interests in open pedagogy:
The success of Domains, Jim said in his keynote, is not about technology. Instead, its success is the openness it facilitates: thinking out loud, engaging in reflective practice with a community of peers. As part of the Domains story, Jim shared his experiences creating ds106, an open, online course on digital storytelling. As described on the site, the course was “part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.” The course embodied openness in many ways. UMW students enrolled in the semester-long course and served as its core community, but the course was open to anyone who wanted to participate alongside the UMW students. But the part that piqued my interest most was its open pedagogy; Jim talked about how he did the assignments with the students and also described how students created the assignments. “The only reason it worked,” Jim said, “was because we built an open ecosystem for it to thrive.
Jen’s post concludes with the observation that “Open pedagogy is about being flexible and responsive. It means meeting learners where they are, rather than where we think they are or should be”–and this seems to me another excellent way to think about the value of students working with/on their own domains.
We were really excited that Lauren Brumfeld accompanied Jim on this campus visit, because as a recent graduate, she paid close attention to student perspectives and experiences. This is a focal point in her reflections on A Visit to Muhlenberg College where she casts special attention on our student Digital Learning Assistants:
The Digital Learning Assistants, DLA’s for short, are in the beginning stages of something very similar to UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center. The DLA’s are a diverse group ranging from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors. These students are all at different stages of finding their “niche” in the digital world. This semester they’re framing out what it means to provide peer tutoring to other students, and how they can best teach themselves and learn from each other.
Jim and I had a chance to chat with them on Friday afternoon about what this teaching and learning could look like. Any passerby could have seen how much excitement was sitting in that room- the DLA’s are so ready & willing to better themselves and their peers. I loved it.
One of the DLAs, Meredith Salisbury, has published her Notes on DLAing on her domain–her first ever blog post.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life nerding out about social media + new media research. I have this fascination with how we portray ourselves and communicate with others online. I wonder how the concept of a DoOO impacts the ways in which we think about what we put online and how it will be different then the existing social media and web presences that we have already. What’s different about domains is that I own whatever I put on my site instead of it living in something like canvas or being sold as data by Facebook or Tumblr. But, the thing is that sites like ello were created with the same concept and they didn’t get adopted… I guess my lasting question is do students (or anyone) care about owning our data or are people so used to being the product that its to late…
P.S. Follow the DLAs on Twitter cause we’re the best
Really, follow the DLAs on Twitter @bergDLAs. They are the best!