12569 OL: Domains of Their Own: Piloting Personal Cyber-Infrastructure Projects at Four Disparate Campuses

Organizers: Mikhail Gershovich, Jim Groom, Mark Morvant
Presenters: Jaimie Hoffman, David Morgen, Martha Burtis, Chris Mattia, Adam Croom, Tim Owens

Grounded in data collected over the course of the Fall 2014 term, this session will offer lessons learned from ongoing pilot programs at several disparate campuses of initiatives based on the University of Mary Washington’s ambitious Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) project. In a departure from traditional instructional and IT practices, these programs offer participants what Gardner Campbell termed “persona cyber-infrastructure” — all the tools and resources users need to launch and manage a broad range of websites, to create custom teaching and learning environments, and to curate and manage their online identities on their own terms.

In the Fall of 2014, several disparate institutions piloted programs inspired by the ongoing Domain of One’s Own project at the University of Mary Washington. Each of these projects (CI Keys at CSU Channel Islands, Create at Oklahoma University, and DoOO at UMW and Emory University) gives participants full control over their own web domains and the ability to easily create and launch a wide range of websites. Users were granted access to powerful open source tools that allow them to create online portfolios, exhibits, journals, magazines, wikis, and other digital resources and publications for use in courses, the co-curriculum or however else they choose. These projects embrace the Internet as generative of learning, scholarship and the distribution of knowledge. They enable participants to create unique spaces for teaching, learning, publishing and connecting with others in the open public sphere of the Internet and outside the constraints of a closed Learning Management System. The logic of these programs is that offering users this control means allowing them agency and empowering them to make use of the world-wide-web to serve their own evolving needs as learners, teachers, scholars, and digital citizens.

This reflective session, will present lessons learned across several disparate campuses in pilots of programs that, in a radical updating of traditional IT practices, offer control of IT resources to individual users. We will present the various campus projects and what they might teach us about the broader implications of offering members of a campus community their own domains, web hosting, access to and guidance in deploying a range of web tools to create web spaces for academic and personal use. We are particularly interested in exploring models of curricular integration of these programs and the tools they make available to students and instructors.