What We’re Up To
Over a several week experience we will work as a community of learners to gain skills and understanding. We will learn and practice the management of a web domain of our own, and create places to express and share ideas, knowledge, materials without the influence of corporate platforms.
Building On Past Work and Community
This Muhlenberg Domain of One’s Own Pedagogical Learning Community, running through January and February of 2021, builds upon a series of talks and workshops held during the 2016-2017 Academic Year.
On October 13th and 14th, 2016, Jim Groom and Lauren Hanks from Reclaim Hosting visited campus. Jim’s public talk, “A Pandora’s Box for Teaching, Scholarship, and Identity,” is captured below and presents some background on Domain of One’s Own and provides a rationale for working openly on the web. We look forward to welcoming Jim back (virtually) for a conversation about Domains on January 28th, 2021.
In the days after Jim’s and Lauren’s initial visit, a number of blog posts reflecting on the experience were published by learning community participants. A round up of those blogs is available here: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/2016/10/31/blogging-is-everything/.
Jim published his own blog reflection here http://bavatuesdays.com/muhlenberg-college-the-berg-builds/ and Adam Croom, the director of digital learning at Oklahoma University and another visitor during our first Domains Learning Community, blogged about Muhlenberg’s nascent Domains project here: http://adamcroom.com/2016/10/muhlenberg-is-the-word/.
Assignment
Please claim your Berg Builds domain! A recorded walk-through for selecting a domain name and setting up your Berg Builds space on the web will be sent to all participants. For those new to Berg Builds Domains, we will also cover installing WordPress, software built for publishing your content on the web. WordPress is free and open source software initially released in 2003 as a way for people to blog (or host a “web log”) without needing to learn a lot of technical markup or computer programming. In the years since, WordPress has continued to grow and improve. Today, though its blogging origins are clearly there, WordPress is considered a fully capable “content management system” or CMS. WordPress powers some of the most popular sites on the Web, and to date is used by more than 60 million websites around the world. It is estimated that about one-third of all websites currently run WordPress. If you need any assistance claiming your domain or getting WordPress set up and running, please contact Tim Clarke.
Please also read the various blog posts linked above, and consider writing and sharing your own blog post. Introducing yourself through a blog post is a great way to connect with other members of this learning community. To get started, here are a few guiding questions:
- How might you like to use your Berg Builds domain for teaching, research, and scholarship?
- What have you seen on the web that you might like to try doing, yourself?
- Have you had experiences using corporate, proprietary tools or sites on the web that might be made better by owning your own domain and hosting your own website?
- What are one or two particular things you’d like to know about the web?
Please feel free to share the URL of your blog post in the comment area below. Or if you prefer, please share your URL with Tim Clarke and Lora Taub and a roundup of posts will be shared with others in our learning community.
