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.
Thanks for that link, Jim!
Also, Gardner Campbell’s The Personal Cyber Infrastructure article is an excellent fleshing out of the “Domain of One’s Own” idea:
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431