A domain of one's own? Personal cyber-infrastructure and open education

Monday 11:30-13:00 (1), Blaydon/Gibbs

Type: Workshop

Theme: Building and linking communities of open practice

#oer14 #abs91

Authors

Mr Jim Groom, DTLT, University of Mary Washington (Virginia) [email protected]
Mr David Kernohan, Programme Manager, Jisc, [email protected]

Abstract

Rationale

One of the advantages of open education is the chance for learners and educators to reclaim control of the tools and materials they make use of - a personal cyberinfrastructure (in the words of Gardner Campbell) of resources that can be managed and added to throughout their digital lives.

Content

Within ds106, the open online Digital Storytelling course, the emphasis has been on developing this ecosystem through - where feasible - encouraging students to own and operate domain names and server space, taking responsibility for their own online persona and expression. Building on this, the University of Mary Washington initiative “Domain of One’s Own” (http://umwdomains.com) is offering every student their own domain and web hosting account so that they can begin developing their digital identity as part of their broader curriculum. In an attempt to more broadly share this approach, Jim Groom and Tim Owens have taken the infrastructure behind “Domain of One’s Own” and made it available to any interested, institutions, departments, faculty and students under as a service called “Reclaim Hosting” (http://reclaimhosting.com/). This initiative allows instructors and learners around the world to enjoy this level of control (and responsibility) with the minimum of effort. This workshop will encourage attendees to consider their own use of owned and shared online space, and to engage with the potential solutions that Reclaim Hosting presents.

But what do we know about how learners (and educators) are using this space? And what relation do these ideas bear to the more usual open preoccupations of licensing and sharing? This workshop will examine both the approach to scaling this for an entire institution as well as the specific examples, possibilities, and limitations of re-imagining how we make a campus community into a distributed publishing hub centered around the individual but premised upon the communal.

Delivery Method

This will be based on a mixture of short informal presentations, multimedia resources and discussions. Participants (and indeed, co-presenters) will be encouraged to challenge and debate the central premise of the argument. Both presenters have a track record of using unusual but effective models of conference session delivery, so this section should be taken as indicative only.

References

Campbell, W.G. (2009). "A personal cyberinfrastructure". (EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 58–59. Available from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/personal-cyberinfrastructure. [Accessed 13 November 2013].
Reclaim Hosting. Available from http://reclaimhosting.com/. [Accessed 13 November 2013].
ds106. Available from http://ds106.us. [Accessed 13 November 2013].

Further details