Thanks, everyone, for a great discussion last Wednesday. Here are links to a few sites I mentioned in the course of our conversation:

Two ideas from Jim Groom, Instructional Technologist at University of Mary Washington and blogger at Bavatuesdays:

• A Domain of One’s Own, in which he discusses the idea of giving students control over their own domain/server spaces.
• The Digital Five Ring binder, in which discusses the idea of giving every student a blog and syndicating content from student blogs to aggregated course sites.

Also, I wanted to mention two other resources that can be used to create digital spaces for your classes:

• Ning: Ning allows users to created social networks around topics of their choosing. Like WordPress.com, it is a hosted solution. It has two problematic aspects: it is not open source, and non-premium accounts have text ads in the sidebar. But it does offer a very easy-to-use social environment that my students, at least, have responded to very positively.
• Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. If you have your own server, you can use the open-source Elgg platform to create a social site for your courses.

Finally, here’s a reminder of the chapters we’re reading from Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks:

Chapter 1 Introduction pp. 1-28
Part One Intro. The Networked Information Economy pp. 29-34
Part Two Intro. The Political Economy of Property and Commons pp. 129-132
Chapter 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media pp. 176-211
Chapter 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere pp. 212-272
Chapter 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical pp. 273-300
Chapter 10. Social Ties: Networking Together pp. 356-377

Benkler’s text is available online in many formats, including PDF, Google Books, HTML, and others.

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