Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative

I’ve been crazy this last month, and the proof is in the blog archive pudding: only eighteen god damned blog posts for January. I hope February proves to be a bit easier on the bava, but, with that said, January has been pretty awesome. In fact, this week seems like, to quote the oft blogging Andy Rush, “a watershed moment in DTLT history.”  Why? Well, because for the last four days four members of DTLT and Mary Kayler, of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, have been running five cohorts with anywhere form 5-7 faculty talking about the details of both imagining and building their own domain. That’s right, the faculty initiative of Domain of One’s Own is up and running as of this week. What’s been so magical about the whole process is coming into pur offices throughout the week to groups of faculty asking questions about subdomains, digital identity, Installatron, DNS, and more! It’s magic at DTLT right now, and the key is all about thinking at once conceptually and technically about the web.  What’s so satisfying for me, is that each and everyone of us is running our own faculty cohort and we are absolutely killing faculty development right now, 29 faculty participants from fifteen disciplines. Let me say that again, 29 faculty participants from fifteen disciplines! We rock. Tim Owens has designed the Faculty Initiative site wherein you can see the curriculum over the next six weeks, what’s more each faculty member will be setting up there own space and sharing their posts in a syndicated space for faculty’s reflections on Martin Weller’s The Digital Scholar (we’ll be reading the entire book over the six week course) and beyond.  What’s more, we are all working on documenting the technical resources a faculty or student would need to get up and running with their own web host and domain. And that idea of sharing openly what we are doing with the project and keeping in mind the possibility that others might be interested is immediately paying dividends. Emory University’s Writing Program invited Tim Owens and I to participate in the inaugural Emory Symposium on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing. Special thanks to Marc Bousqet and David Morgen from bringing together a brilliant array of folks together from Emory as well as numerous other universities like Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Kennesaw State University. It was a pleasure to meet folks I’ve been following online through Hybrid Pedagogy, like Pete Rorabaugh (whose work is amazing and recent post about the Emory symposium along with his own explorations in this space is more than worthwhile) and Robin Wharton (who may have solved FERPA ;) ), as well as a host of new people like Rebecca Burnett (who was awesome!), Amy Goodloe, and Laura McGrath, whose remarks on Domain of One’s Own marked one of the coolest moments during my short time at Emory. Namely, academics from a wide range of disciplines might possibly converge on an conceptual framework like Domain of One’s Own to theorize and imagine as well as architect and build the future of the web. To quote McGrath’s paper “Remarks on the WHY of Publishing Digital Writing:
I’m interested in thinking about A Domain of One’s Own in terms of  “a sphere of thought and action,” to borrow my favorite definition of domain from the OED. How can we connect writing instruction, a domain as a digital “sphere of thought and action,” and “opportunities to apply digital technologies to solve substantial problems common to the academic, professional, civic, and/or personal realm of their lives”?
I love this whole idea of Domain of One’s Own as simultaneously a sphere of thought and action, and I really got excited to hear people not only interested in the idea, but working towards a theory of the possibilities for their respective disciplines. It’s funny how I always find myself connected to the CUNY Grad Center mafia, this time with Marc Bousquet—a thinker I greatly admire—whose push for imagining Domain of one;s Own as central to the writing curriculum at Emory University is not only flattering for us here at UMW’s DTLT, but truly invigorating. What’s more, it highlights a long history of experimentation and innovation that includes many people that are no longer at UMW, namely Gardner Campbell, Chip German, Patrick, Murray-John, and Cathy Derecki.  I can’t fully explain how fired up we are at UMW right now! “We’re making the myths, Morrison!” Finally, I am a huge fan of E. David Morgen. And with that I will stop ;)

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  1. […] in blogging. After a number of years behind Blackboard and Canvas walls, my university’s Domain of One’s Own project triggers me to write down my thoughts on the process of getting my own web domain […]

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