March 29, 2024

UMW Domains in the News

UMW’s innovative initiative Domain of One’s Own has been receiving recognition in trade and academic publications alike. University Business, a publication for IT managers, published an article last week framing this innovative new approach to giving members of their campus the keys to the server. The author of the article for University BusinessMatt Zalaznick,  talked with Tim Owens of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies about the project and below is an excerpt from the article.

The tools provided by the “Domain of One’s Own” initiative make it easier for students to carve out their own space on the web, and control and customize it…

“Students want to make something their own—to personalize it and say this is my space, this is who I am, in a way to personify themselves on the web,” Owens says.

Users have complete control over the content and the design of the page. Mary Washington students can install a variety of open source software, such as the blogging platform WordPress, to help them design their sites.

Additionally, David Morgen (Emory University) and Pete Rorbaugh (Southern Polytechnic State University) published an article in Hybrid Pedagogy this week framing the theoretical context for building a cross-institutional community around web literacies at this moment. What’s more, they used the work happening at the Unviersity of Mary Washington with UWM Domains as their inspiration:

UMW’s Domain of One’s Own initiative offers a possible link between the experimental workings of a connectivist MOOC and an on-ground or hybrid course offered at an institution. The move toward hybridity goes both ways, and while higher education has been mostly exploring how to export a serviceable replica of face-to-face culture into online space (short answer: we can’t, and that culture has to be re-imagined in a fresh context) some of us have been interested in taking the networked values of viable online communities and dragging them across the boundary into our classrooms.

University of Mary Washington Powering Students’ Web Presence (University Business)

Domain of One’s Own Project and DTLT Featured in Center for Digital Education

The Domain of One’s Own project, an initiative being run at the University of Mary Washington by the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, was featured in the Center for Digital Education in an article by Tanya Roscorla. The article notes the unique nature of the program amongst peer institutions across the nation, as well as the profound need for such a program to exist. The Domain of One’s Own project successfully ran a pilot with over 400 students and faculty, and will open fully to the incoming freshman class this fall.

Tim Owens, Jim Groom Presented at Emory University

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Jim Groom

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Tim Owens

On Tuesday, January 29th, Tim Owens and Jim Groom, in the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, were invited to speak about Domain of One’s Own at Emory University’s inaugural “Symposium on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing.” The presentation covered the current pilot of UMW’s Domain of One’s Own while sharing the remarkable faculty development initiative happening around the pilot as well as the full blown implementation of this project come Fall 2013 wherein UMW gives all of its incoming freshman sponsored access to their own domain and web hosting.