Short answer: learning management systems.
….I’ve been working on a broader narrative for contextualizing the work we’re doing at University of Mary Washington with Domain of One’s Own. This initiative offers students and faculty a domain and web hosting so that they can more deeply inhabit and interrogate the web. For some, it’s most easily explained as an eportfolio, but for me that explanation is far too short-sighted. What’s more, it ignores higher education’s ongoing over-dependence on learning management systems (or siloed teaching and learning) for well over a decade.
Martha Burtis has been on a blog tear as of late framing our expeirence with Domain of One’s Own six months on, how we are building out community through community.umwdomains.com, as well as how faculty and students are using UMW Domains. I recommend reading Martha’s trifecta of awesome posts for a detailed account of where we are with Domains of One’s Own to date.
In terms of the DML presentation, after briefly explaining Domain of One’s Own and blowing the audience’s collective mind with the greatest Richard Scarry cannibalistic pig analogy ever used for explaining how domains/web hosting work based on this post (which accounts for the first 14 slides) I moved into the core of the presentation, at least for me, ”A Brief and Incomplete History of Personal Web Spaces” starting at slide fifteen (see slide deck at bottom of post).