WHAT IS “DOMAIN OF ONE’S OWN?”

[Most campus digital publication] is premised upon an individual’s enrollment in a university or college, and when they leave that

school this space will often disappear. [What] if we actually purchased everyone* on campus a domain for one year and

framed the experience in such a way that all students, staff, and professors were able to easily set up and control their online

identity through their own domain? The key here is the crafting of an identity with a purpose, the conscious consideration and

creation of one’s professional/academic identity online: a domain of one’s own! –Jim Groom

DIGITAL LITERACY:

As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name. Over the course of the first year… students would

build out their digital presences (and) assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and

exporting, their internal and external information connections. They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives. In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to

modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond. –Gardner Campbell, A Personal CyberInfrastructure (2009)

At the heart of Groom & Campbell’s vision is curriculum and a pedagogy of civic engagement. Campbell asks higher ed to “change curricula” so as to “empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship.”

REALIZING THE VISION AT UMW: 5 YEARS

In 2012-2013, UMW ran a pilot with 400 students.

In Fall 2013, all entering first-year students were issued domains.

“Instead of giving our students the latest gadget or gizmo out

of Cupertino we’re offering them a chance to build their own space on the web that

they take with them when they leave.”

ELEMENTS OF A DOMAIN PROJECT

o Intentional Publishingo Tools & Platformso Multimodal Content

o Culture of Digital Literacyo Facultyo Students

o Infrastructure of Supporto Writing Programo Other Centers

AUBURN: CURRICULUM DRIVES BEST USE

Auburn’s University Writing Program is rolling out its portfolio support on an application-only basis in “cohorts” of 5

individual departments programs plus 2 other organizations. Each group has to present a detailed plan for integrating

digital publication into the curriculum.

“The Year 1 Cohort included the academic programs in the Departments of Art, Building Sciences, Pharmacy, Nursing, and the MA Program in English, the co-curricular program of Study Abroad, and the student New Media Club.

“For Year 2 (2013-2014) we aim to add up to 5 additional academic programs, 1 additional co-curricular program, and 1 additional student organization.”

At Auburn, curating sample projects and portfolios helps students and faculty to re-imagine the curriculum.

Auburn’s program supports four different easy, visual composing tools: Weebly, Wix, Google Sites and Wordpress.

HOW IT WORKS

During AY 2012-13, two new hires brought their digital pedagogy to Emory and launched a pilot program. In each of 2013-14 and 2014-15 Domain served about 20 faculty and at least 450 students.

o Fully support participating faculty by helping too Develop assignments suitable for digital publicationo Select platforms, acquire domains and publish course websiteso Curate examples and illuminate good practice

o Fully support participating students by providing o In-class visits to introduce platforms & toolso A rich array of support documentation, FAQ and how-to videoo One-on-one tutoring that integrates digital literacy with other

compositional considerations

The Emory Writing Program is committed to:

A WORD ON PLATFORMS: WHY NOT JUST WORDPRESS?

Wordpress is an amazingly powerful and useful publishing tool. It’s simple to use, offers thousands of looks in different themes, and is constantly evolving in a massive developers’ community.

In addition to Wordpress, however, Auburn supports three visual drag and drop editors in its e-portfolio project. Why? For one thing, Wordpress isn’t an ideal tool for creating static web pages. As a menu-driven platform, new WP users tend to create sites that resemble blogs. Many WP themes provide limited design flexibility.

In addition to Wordpress, we’re evaluating WYSIWYG platforms this fall for classroom use in Spring 2016. We will document how to use subdomains to apply new themes & navigation.

With digital publication projects in even one or two courses, and a service project for a cause, plus a site tour for potential employers or grad admissions committees: The personal cyberinfrastructure of a near-future typical student is becoming enormously complex.

Most millennial student site-building was tied to college-supported publication and is de-activated 1-5 years after graduation.

As students demand more stable hosting for their effort, who has stepped in?

Anatomy of A Domain

SYLLABUS PLANNING

Do you prefer to have students introduced to the technology in your class or in supplemental sessions? //Do you have room in your course calendar

for studio time, sharing of work in progress, collaboration and peer review?// Do you want to include low-stakes starter projects in which

students are free to make mistakes? //What is the relationship between your less traditional coursework and more conventional writing?

What difference does publishing make in assignment design? What makes an assignment a good fit for digital publication?

World Without OilArchitecture Without Oil Car Culture Without OilDating Without Oil Eating Without Oil HealthWithout OilImmigration Without Oil Jobs and More Jobs Without OilKnowledge Without OilMusic Without OilNeighborhoods Without OilReal Estate Without Oil Soldiers Without Oil Teens and More Teens Without OilUrban Adventure Without Oil Vision and More Vision Without OilXtreme Partying Without Oil Your Mama Without Oil Zoom Zoom Without Oil

Good civic-engagement assignments use real-world issues to offer multiple contact points for

different students.

“Citizen Science” has become

synonymous with the

crowdsourcing of unpaid labor for big data, as at scistarter.com But is there a real citizen science out

there? Can your class scaffold

legitimate, modest, yet

original contributions to

academic discourse?

If publishing is sharing to a community with an interest in a common suite of problems, what does it take for the shared text—the writing– to matter?

Citizen Science is…

Crowdsourcing Big Data:

Donated labor and funds

Learning is informal & incidental

Intellectual engagement of participants zero to minimal

Citizen Science could be…

Digital Self-Publication of Undergraduate Research:

Student-framed research questions

Original primary data collection

Public scholarship—sharing suggestive findings with interest communities in the academy and beyond.

From BLOTs to MAPs:For innovative educators, the fundamental shift is away from a model of “delivering content” to students and toward active learning practices. If the highest order of active learning is authentic participation, what kind of support do students and faculty need for teaching that facilitates actual participation in academic, professional and public discourse?

Although the percentages in this image are highly debatable and hotly contested--especially by corporate-sponsored researchers heavily invested in profits from passive learning--most education researchers believe that the basic contention of the learning pyramid is sound. Active learning radically outperforms passive learning.

#1. Rethink Academic Writing For most faculty, academic writing assignments are simply alternate forms of testing both course-specific and generic learning goals: How well did you understand the material? Can you make an argument?

Conventional writing assignments, especially “researched writing,” usually also test the “hidden curriculum” of schooling: Are you able to engage in or acquire copyediting to produce “standard written English”? Can you meet deadlines? Do you respect the authority of professionals? How quickly can you patch together source materials without actually plagiarizing?

But is “argument” the model for academic and professionals writing? Do we “use sources” to “back up” a hastily-conceived thesis statement?

Patchwriting is bad writing.

Machine scoring can easily replicate human scoring on essays—including much researched writing—because the cycle of assignment, production and assessment is so mechanical.

#2. “Writing” is Media Production

The term “Writing Program” hardly captures the need for institutions to support advanced media literacies in communicating across the curriculum.

Since college writing is—or should be--more than an alternate testing format and vector for the hidden curriculum: Leading programs support faculty in developing the proficiencies essential to their graduates’ future professional lives.

Competency in academic and professional communication now assumes a suite of media-production literacies.

#3. Proficient Writers Compose in:

Hypertext media: Websites and webpages, framing the output of digital tools, charts, graphs, printable documents, films, interviews….

Tactical media: “Spreadable” interventions or memes designed to draw attention, spark action, draw readers, recruit collaborators….

Quantitative media: Data visualizations, charts, graphs, posters, interactive calculators, searchable databases, simulations, models…

Professional social media: Comments, notes, definitions, reviews, downloadable articles, archives, encyclopedia entries….

Web 2.0 Never Killed Hypertext The explosion of bandwidth permitted the transmission of traditional media as well as new social media and more sophisticated digital tools—all of which can be consumed and produced without knowledge of web architecture, much less code. As early as 2000, some observers claimed that “hypertext is dead.”

But for prolific content creators, particularly of multiple media and tool outputs, the problem becomes one of curation: How can one organize, display, and help readers navigate one’s work across incompatible platforms?

Many institutions bought into out-of-the-box “digital portfolios” that were costly, rigid, unnecessarily secure, looked amateurish and enabled institutions to put the word “digital” in front of traditional output.

Many individuals rely on Wordpress blogs and the huge Wordpress developer community. Without at least a minimal knowledge of code, many WP sites look like blogs.

Imaginative Digital Tools Can Support Core Academic and Professional Literacies

Cody’s Bitstrips cartoon version of a lit review is a stage in the process. It allows him to envision the players in the existing conversation not as the building blocks of an argument as real people in a web of existing relationships that he’s trying to enter.

As a preliminary draft of the lit review it shows great success but also room for development. Since Cody’s original contribution is a regression model, he may need to spend more time situating his contribution in the conversation regarding how data is currently used in education policy.

Tactical Media: Memes & Visual Rhetoric

This uses both quantitative literacy and high-order visual re-mix skills.

Quantitative Media: Graphs & Charts

Ariely’s famous graph shows that most Americans believe that wealth inequality is very different from reality.

To get to what Americans think is current reality would require a revolution.

And if you look at what Americans want in terms of equality, you discover that 92% of us are Communists at heart.

Which is more effective? This chart or the Pope’s-hat meme?

Quantitative Media: Maps

Quantitative Media: Infographics

Professional Social Media

A concluding thought exercise:

On the majority of campuses, many disciplines already have “swapped,” by adopting writing-related outcomes, usually as part of a WAC or WID initiative. But as we move toward a digitally rich model, DWID or CID/CAC vs WID/WAC, with a far richer suite of literacies, are we missing the opportunity for “writing programs” and digital humanities courses to adopt outcomes involving quantitative literacy? Isn’t composing with maps, charts, graphs, images, infographics, models and simulations an almost inevitable element of composing for professional audiences?

Can you imagine a digitally-rich humanities class that might realistically adopt such quantitative-literacy learning outcomes as:

1. Demonstrate proficiency in quantitative reasoning in various forms of communication-written, graphic, numerical, and symbolic.

2. Apply statistical tools and inferential methods to matters of cultural or social significance.

–Gavin, Wilder & Bousquet, “Spreadable STEM”

What if We Swapped Learning Outcomes?

NEW MEDIA & DIGITAL

PUBLISHINGSharing with a community of

persons working on

the same suite of problems.

Original

contributions can be

very modest.

o Intentional Publishingo Tools & Platformso Multimodal Content

o Culture of Digital Literacyo Facultyo Students

o Infrastructure of Supporto Writing Programo Other Centers

What distinguishes the Domain of One’s Own project at Emory is its reliance on student-owned domains and non-university hosting. The student retains the content as long as she likes, using it for job interviews, graduate applications and so forth.

Non-university hosting makes the student more self-reliant and relieves the institution of resource burdens that can be allocated toward support:

With digital publication projects in even one or two courses, and a service project for a cause, plus a site tour for potential employers or grad admissions committees: The personal cyberinfrastructure of a near-future typical student is becoming enormously complex.

Most millennial student site-building was tied to college-supported publication and is de-activated 1-5 years after graduation.

As students demand more stable hosting for their effort, who has stepped in?

Contact: Heather Julien, DirectorDomain of One’s Own @ Emory:Heather.Julien@gmail.com

Adapted from two presentations by Marc Bousquet, “Domain of One’s Own @ Emory” and “Citizen Science,” presented to the National Science Foundation Ideas Lab