title of this book is Claim Your Domain. It’s a nod in part to the Domain of One’s Own initiative (http://umw.domains) out of the University of Mary Washington (UMW). (You will read more about this initiative in chapter 3.) The Domain of One’s Own project gives every student and staff member his or her own domain. It isn’t simply web space on the university servers—an .edu with a slash tilde namespace. The initiative gives students and staff members their own personal domains located at their own chosen URLs, for example: www.whatever-they-want.com. The university pays for domain registration and hosting while students are enrolled. When students graduate, the domain and the data go with them. It’s theirs—their own domains.
This book stresses that the word domain matters—a digital home. Students should have their own space on the web, a space for a blog or multiple blogs. They should have a digital portfolio for their academic work that can become a professional portfolio if they so choose—a place to store their digital material in the cloud—their own manila envelope.
The word claim matters too. We’ve let students’ digital data go elsewhere for a while now. We have built systems in which students’ digital data are not under their control. Students do not have a say in what happens to their data or who has access to them. They do not have a say in storage or sharing. They do not control their data as users of computers and certainly not as learners.
To claim your domain means just that: put students in control of their schoolwork, content, and data. Put them in charge of their learning as well as the demonstration of that learning.
Chapter Overview
The information in this book attempts to claim education technology and, more importantly, to claim learning for learners themselves.
Chapter 1 looks at the state of learners’ digital domains today. This chapter explores what it means now that more and more schoolwork is digital. It attempts to answer the questions: What student data are being collected? What happens to those data? Who owns those data?
Chapter 2 examines alternatives to the current state of education technology. It looks at the current technological alternatives as well as those that have been imagined by authors of another era, those who want to see a more progressive and learner-centered world. It also provides some practical strategies for claiming your domain, at least as much as you can within today’s education technology.
Chapter 3 asks what education and other technologies—that learners can actually control for themselves—could and should look like (philosophically as well as technologically). What must we demand of students and parents in terms of data literacy and computer literacy if we plan on turning over these efforts to them? Claiming a learner’s domain is incredibly powerful and radical and, admittedly, very ambitious. There is much in both the current state of education and education technology that stands in the way of these efforts. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
My mother gave me a manila envelope full of some of the work I’d done as a K–12 student. It was her collection and curation of my work. It’s hard for me to challenge her role as the curator and collector. I recognize that not everyone has a mom like mine. Nonetheless, I recognize the power of curation and collection. And I want us to think about what that means as we move from paper to digital.
How do we make sure that students control their work? How do we make sure their work persists? How do we make sure they have a say about who can see and share it? Sharing is an important feature unlocked by digital technologies. Unlike a manila envelope full of papers—the one my mother gave me is now tucked away in my closet, I confess—a digital envelope is more easily accessible, duplicable, durable, and sharable.
Chapter 1
The Learner’s Digital Domain
In the third century BC, the Library of Alexandria was tasked with collecting all the world’s knowledge, storing a copy of every written work in scroll and book form. Of course, papyrus isn’t particularly durable, as the infamous burning of the library unfortunately demonstrated. Even without fire, paper records are precariously fragile and temporary.
Now that so much of our writing and recordkeeping are digital, we might presume that all the world’s knowledge is safe from loss or destruction. You’ll often hear people say that the Internet is forever. Once you post something online, it never goes away. And while it’s true that making copies no longer requires labor-intensive transcription or paper-intensive reprinting, we face new challenges. The Internet isn’t forever. Certainly technologies become obsolete. Websites go away. Links “rot,” sometimes faster than paper does.
The preservation of digital materials requires us to think differently about storage, in part because of the ever-changing formats in which we store data—Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Google Docs, PDFs, Rich Text Format—which of these will be around and legible thousands of years from now?
We must rethink storage too, because the amount of that digital material we are tasked with preserving is skyrocketing. All of the Library of Alexandria—about 500,000 scrolls—could fit onto a single USB drive today. In 2012, IBM (n.d.) estimated that the digital universe contains 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. No doubt, that number has continued to grow exponentially since then. It’s hard for people to fathom a number that big; it’s also hard to fathom that the contents of the Library of Alexandria can now fit in your pocket.
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