Where do we learn how to read, write, and communicate in these digital spaces?
If you’re like me, it’s a lot of trial and error. It’s spending your own time making and breaking things online. Watching the work of others to see what you would like to create. It is also a lot of time and money spent testing out new tools, platforms, and ideas as many new ones pop up daily.
Becoming digitally literate in a domain of one’s own
In trying to identify opportunities to build the skills and practices individuals will need in digital environments, Kristy Pytash and I wrote up a submission for the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. In this submission, we contend that if we really want students to be digitally literate, they need to have a personalized learning space online that provides more than just a snapshot of their participation in one class or one school year. We argue that students should have a “domain of one’s own” or one canonical address online that students build up from Pre-K through higher ed.
With a place of their own online, they can read, write, and participate, and build, edit, revise, and iterate as if it were a digital portfolio. In this commentary we’ll examine exactly what a “domain of one’s own” is and how teachers and schools can implement this initiative. In addition, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities of providing each student with a domain of one’s own to use as they start their literate career in our schools. We believe students need opportunities online where they can create, build, and modify digital artifacts that represent their identities as learners.
Request for comments
We would love your commentary on the manuscript that was submitted for review. We will address any & all comments and suggestions and fold the feedback into the final published version. You can access (and comment on) the Google Doc for the commentary here.
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I provided comments and suggestions on your Google doc and also shared it with a few colleagues here at UT Arlington who work closely with Jim Groom and are working on developing the Domain of One’s Own idea here at UT Arlington. I also tagged Jim Groom on a Tweet!
Awesome to see a broader research paper argument link Domain of One’s Own to idea like the block chain, distributed identity management, and more. Very cool. I think one particular bit about Domain of One’s own that might be important to clarify is that the actual pilot started in 2012, and was in planning for almost a year before the MIT hackathon. I think the MIT Hackathon really galvanized broader visions around reclaim as a movement, and led to Reclaim Your Domain and Reclaim Hosting. A bit in the weeds, I know, but the edtech work at UMW since the mid 2000s made much of what would be Domain of One’s Own possible, including folks like Gardner Campbell, Jerry Slezak, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, and particulary Tim Owens who cam on board in 2011 and built out the infrastructure in 2011 and 2012. In fact, the name came from this post in 2008 on the bava: http://bavatuesdays.com/a-domain-of-ones-own/. And that was still myopic-thinking about mapping domains on WP because the idea of giving faculty and students their own web hosting was unimaginable. Not until ds106 was a laboratory for seeing if students could do this fairly easily dod the whole thing start to seem more and more possible. That when we knew we could run a pilot at UMW in Fall 2012 and have 400 faculty and students actually get their own domain and web ho, but it does provide a bit of context for the 2013 hackathon. Simmering, simmering simmering, meeting Kin and Audrey for the first time brought the whole thing to a boil.
Thanks again for the close read Jim.
We’ll fold that nuance in. I think that a common point of the piece is that there are things that are evolving, changing, and could/should be.
As this is published…I’ll reach out again for a video interview to add some depth to the piece.
Thanks again. – Ian