Cultivating Open Blended Learning with Domain of One's Own
Submission Type
20-minute Presentation
Abstract
“Giving students [and faculty] their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.” –Audrey Watters, The Web We Need to Give Our Students
“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 73).
This presentation introduces participants to a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) initiative at Muhlenberg College. Joining a growing number of liberal arts colleges adopting DoOO, our project at Muhlenberg hopes to leverage DoOO as a space for open blended learning that centers student agency, critical digital literacy, and greater control over their learning and data.
In September 2016, the Digital Learning Team (DLT) launched a yearlong pilot to introduce the campus to Domain of One’s Own. We organized this initiative as a Faculty Learning Community, providing participating faculty and their students their own domain name and hosted web space, at no cost. Through the yearlong FLC, faculty and members of the DLT are exploring, designing, and building a digital presence for their teaching and scholarship. Students enrolled in their courses are experiencing new kinds of open blended learning. With their own domains and web hosting, students in the DoOO pilot are empowered to select from and install and work with various open source tools that support blended learning—including MediaWiki, Wordpress, Omeka, and Scalar.
Our goals for the DoOO Faculty Learning Community are to:
- Explore approaches to integrating Domain of One’s Own into blended learning practices in order to shape critical and meaningful digital experiences for students at Muhlenberg.
- Increase understanding, awareness, and integration of critical digital pedagogies for open blended learning.
- Cultivate projects that will foster students’ awareness and critical digital literacies necessary for exercising a greater degree of ownership, creativity, and control over their learning, data, presence and identity online.
- Contribute meaningfully to a culture of digital learning that empowers faculty and student agency, authorship, and voice.
Throughout the year, we held 8 workshops exploring the affordances of DoOO to help faculty and students reclaim the web for open digital learning, for constructing and controlling one’s digital identity, and for producing and sharing digital scholarship. This presentation will offer reflections on this process and suggestions for institutions interested in implementing Domain of One’s Own to help cultivate open blended learning in the liberal arts.
Session
Presentation
Location
Thomas 224
Start Date
5-17-2017 2:40 PM
End Date
5-17-2017 4:00 PM
Cultivating Open Blended Learning with Domain of One's Own
Thomas 224
“Giving students [and faculty] their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web.” –Audrey Watters, The Web We Need to Give Our Students
“The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 73).
This presentation introduces participants to a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) initiative at Muhlenberg College. Joining a growing number of liberal arts colleges adopting DoOO, our project at Muhlenberg hopes to leverage DoOO as a space for open blended learning that centers student agency, critical digital literacy, and greater control over their learning and data.
In September 2016, the Digital Learning Team (DLT) launched a yearlong pilot to introduce the campus to Domain of One’s Own. We organized this initiative as a Faculty Learning Community, providing participating faculty and their students their own domain name and hosted web space, at no cost. Through the yearlong FLC, faculty and members of the DLT are exploring, designing, and building a digital presence for their teaching and scholarship. Students enrolled in their courses are experiencing new kinds of open blended learning. With their own domains and web hosting, students in the DoOO pilot are empowered to select from and install and work with various open source tools that support blended learning—including MediaWiki, Wordpress, Omeka, and Scalar.
Our goals for the DoOO Faculty Learning Community are to:
- Explore approaches to integrating Domain of One’s Own into blended learning practices in order to shape critical and meaningful digital experiences for students at Muhlenberg.
- Increase understanding, awareness, and integration of critical digital pedagogies for open blended learning.
- Cultivate projects that will foster students’ awareness and critical digital literacies necessary for exercising a greater degree of ownership, creativity, and control over their learning, data, presence and identity online.
- Contribute meaningfully to a culture of digital learning that empowers faculty and student agency, authorship, and voice.
Throughout the year, we held 8 workshops exploring the affordances of DoOO to help faculty and students reclaim the web for open digital learning, for constructing and controlling one’s digital identity, and for producing and sharing digital scholarship. This presentation will offer reflections on this process and suggestions for institutions interested in implementing Domain of One’s Own to help cultivate open blended learning in the liberal arts.
Comments
Excited to participate! If possible, we will have a faculty or student participant join us in presenting this work.