Keynote for Transforming Teaching & Technology Conference

1. The Web We Need Students to Give Us:
Pedagogy Toward the Commons
@actualham
#t3snc
Robin
DeRosa

3. “Giving students their
own digital domain is a
radical act. It gives them
the ability to work on
the Web and with the
Web, to have their
scholarship be
meaningful and
accessible by others.
It allows them to
demonstrate their
learning to others
beyond the classroom
walls. To own one’s
domain gives students
an understanding of
how Web technologies
work. It puts them in a
much better position to
control their work,
their data,
their identity online.”
~Audrey Watters

5. Domain of One’s Own
• drag ’n drop → design
• consumer → creator
• data mining → data control
• audience of 1 → public impact
• course’s work→ student’s work
• broadcast web→ synergic web
• ePortfolio → ePort

6. IDS taught me to be responsible for my learning and
growth. You learn to expand your returns. We do
not post our “homework” to a hidden, school
controlled website. We share our work for all of the
world to see. This idea of owning your own domain
allows you to be confident in your work and take
responsibility for what you are learning, how you
make connections in the world, and how you share
your knowledge. Academic settings need to work on
sharing each other’s work, and being engaged in the
world outside of classroom walls.
Madison Roberge
from I’m not graduating
“on time” & that is OK.

7. Interdisciplinary Studies fuels my inner
passions as a learner in a way that I had
been seriously missing in my experience
in higher education.
It allows for non-traditional pedagogical
approaches to learning that spark a fire
in students who are sick of typical
classroom structure. You probably know
what kind of structure I’m talking about –
memorizing vocab words to do well on
weekly quizzes, submitting assignments
to Moodle that disappear when you
graduate, meaningless engagement with
the work we produce. It really makes
university kind of drag. We want to be
doing work that’s relevant to us.
Becca Roberts

8. Thanks to the personal learning network
I’ve created, I recently gained the attention
of a microgreens farm in Denver and sent
them my resumé – fingers crossed!
My future seems really bright. This
summer, I’ll be working at an organic
permaculture farm and medicinal
mushroomery in Oregon. I will be taking
“Intro to Permaculture” at PSU next spring
and I’m excited to be introduced to it
outside, first. As far as the mushroomery
goes, I will be involved in the whole
process: culturing, drying out, and making
into powders and tinctures. I took a class
on mushrooms in Fall 2017, and had
previously learned much about their
medicinal properties through other work
I’ve done. Part of my business someday
will very likely be mushroom-related, so I’m
sure this experience will help me gain
needed skills.

9. What Happens &
What Can Happen

10. Do I Own My Own Domain If You Grade It? If You Police It? If I
Can’t Afford To Keep Paying For It? If I Don’t Have a Credit Card? If I Don’t
Have Access to the Internet at My House? in My School? in My Country?If I don’t have the skills or
support to contribute? If ”The Web” Is Controlled By Corporate Interest? I thought this was going to be a talk about lowering textbook costs…

11. “Having a home is more
than a matter of shelter, it’s
the presentation of a certain
kind of survivorship,
assessed in cultural
competence, the assertion
of literacy, the visible
privilege of know-how. And
like home ownership,
domain ownership is the
practice of insiders,
survivors, using the skills
and languages that flex their
cultural power by asking to
be taken entirely for granted,
not just in terms of what
appears on the screen but

12. “Owning and gentrifying are inseparable
economic forces. So when we talk about
securing a domain of one’s own,
we’re also talking about this
privatising vision of the proper—and we’re
at risk of missing the fragile, important
lesson that just as with homes, the security
of ownership is always measured against
the
temporality of the bodies walking past.”
Kate Bowles

13. Into what Free world am I leading my students?
For whom am I enabling them to be digitally literate?
How will their paths be traced on the internet for whose ends?
What is my responsibility in opening my students to a world
through the lens of a globalised world
vaguely glimpsed on a screen,
where culture is squashed into bits through a browser?
Simon Enser

14. “Shared in public, none
of this is public in terms of
ownership, let’s be clear; this
is almost entirely private
infrastructure. Thus, our rights are
always already limited; and any notion
of ‘ownership’ that we might have based
on physical property does not
necessarily extend to the digital.”
~Audrey Watters
“But the Web – and here I mean
the Web as an ideal, to be sure,
and less the Web in reality –
has a stake in public
scholarship and public
infrastructure.”
~Watters

15. The
Library
Is
OPEN
“ ”

16. I have increasingly come to wonder if “permission-less-ness” as many in “open” movements have
theorized this, is built on some unexamined exploitation and extraction of labor – on invisible
work, on unvalued work. Whose digital utopia does “openness” represent?
Audrey Watters
OER is free to use, but not free to create.
SHARING is a consensual act.
PRIVACY enables openness.
FREEDOM is predicated on justice.

17. The commons is frequently confused with an
open-access regime—a free-for-all in which a
resource is essentially open to everyone without
restriction; common resources are taken for sale
on markets. In contrast, a real commons has a "social
infrastructure" of cultural institutions, rules, and
traditions, and the
resources are restricted
to personal (non-market)
uses by members of the
community. Without that
infrastructure, the only
operative social value
is private profit for the
most aggressive
appropriators.
David Bollier

18. A DoOO program is not about just handing over a deed to students,
it’s giving them a chance to develop that presence,
and then to make a choice of deciding its value.
Alan Levine

19. What is real is standing apart from
what we’ve long done on the Web in our schools
by proclaiming that people deserve to have spaces
on the Web over which they have as much control
as we can give them.
They deserve to
own their data,
to take it with them
when they need to,
and to delete it
when they want to.
Martha Burtis
It’s not perfect, but perfect isn’t real.

20. What would a
public
infrastructure
look like
on the web?
What would a
web commons
look like?
Can we get there
from here?

21. Commons is a verb.
Jim Luke

24. The web we need
to give students
is the web they will need to
understand,
use,
engineer,
&
subvert
in order to build
the web we need,
the web that they
can give us.

25. Questions at the ❤ of My Practice
• Do I own my own domain if you grade it?
greenlight grading and student-generated policies
• Do I have to build an ePort?
Why contribute? Why not? And how? (K, T, R)
• Can students build PLNs without Twitter?
Why connect? And how? (V, D, S)
• What’s OER got to do, got to do with it?
resources (OER) social justice (access+)
pedagogy (Open Ped) ecosystems (the commons)
(verb)

26. Works Cited
• Opening article is Watters, Audrey. The Web We Need
to Give Students.
http://hackeducation.com/2015/10/19/domains
• Domain of One’s Own is from Reclaim Hosting: An
Instructional Technologist and a Developer Team Up to
Provide Practical and Simple Hosting for Universities.
http://bit.ly/ReclaimBlog
• Student ePort excerpt:
http://madisongroberge.plymouthcreate.net/
• Student ePort excerpt:
http://rebeccacroberts.com/uncategorized/82/
• Student ePort excerpt:
https://helpinghanded.wordpress.com/2017/05/09/m
usic-the-brain-and-why-it-matters
• Kate’s quotes are from Bowles, Kate. For Now, Our
Own. http://bit.ly/KBowles
• Short poetic excerpt is Enser, Simon. Nagasaki mon
amour. http://bit.ly/EnserS
• Audrey’s follow-up is from A Domain of One’s Own in
a Post-Ownership Society.
http://bit.ly/WattersDomain
• Photoshopping of the NYPL is by Joshua Perks
• Commons definition is from Bollier, David. Reclaiming
the Commons. http://bit.ly/Bollier
• Most recent Audrey piece here is Watters, Audrey.
Invisible Labor and Digital Utopias.
http://hackeducation.com/2018/05/04/cuny-labor-
open
• Alan Levine’s quote is from comments at
https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-
2/i-dont-own-my-domain-i-rent-it-dooo/ (Thanks,
Maha!)
• And Martha Burtis’ is also a comment at
https://blog.mahabali.me/educational-technology-
2/i-dont-own-my-domain-i-rent-it-dooo/
• Karen Cangialosi’s Open Ped diagram is CCBY from a
forthcoming article. Ok I had to cut this diagram, but
wait til you see it. It’s brilliant!
• Most uncredited photos are from Unsplash. I tweeted
credit while building the slides, but that’s still not
enough attribution according to some commons
norms. What do you think?