A Domain of One’s Own

To adaptive transformative pedagogy, our group chose to create a prototype of the A Domain of One’s Own project at the University of Mary Washington (umwdomains.com). This technology would serve as an example of a learner-managed open ended system also known as a Personal Learning Network (PLN) that connects together several PLEs. According to the About section of the aDoOO homepage,

A Domain of One’s Own is a project at the University of Mary Washington that, starting Fall 2013, will provide all incoming freshmen with their own domain names and Web space. Students will have the freedom to create subdomains, install any LAMP-compatible software, setup databases and email addresses, and carve out their own space on the web that they own and control.

The project is open to faculty and staff as well as students. The basic idea is that students and faculty are given their own domain space that they can use as they like. They are given a Control Panel full of tools (such as WordPress, Moodle, ELGG, etc) to install as they like on their domain. Individual domains can be connected to others so that learners and faculty can exchange resources. This exchange of resources is often how students “turn in” assignments – they create responses to instructor prompts, tag these artifacts with specific tags, and then software connects that content with the instructor and class behind the scenes. The creators of this system encourage others to use their software and improve it as well (Owens, 2014).

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An Example of a Future Technology Based Learning Envronment