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 Business, Matt 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.