Solutions for Modern Learning
Claim Your Domain–And Own Your Online Presence
Audrey Watters
Copyright © 2016 by Solution Tree Press
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction of this book in whole or in part in any form.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948500
ISBN: 978-1-942496-23-6 (perfect bound)
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Acknowledgments
A special thanks to Kin Lane, who first convinced me to buy my own domain.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Manila Envelope
Where Is the Digital Manila Envelope?
Creating the Digital Manila Envelope
Chapter 1: The Learner’s Digital Domain
What Data “Count” as Education Records?
Why Education Data Matter
Who Owns Student Data?
Claiming Student Data
Chapter 2: Why Claim Your Domain?
The Web: Your Digital Domain
Claiming Education Technology
The Templated Self
Students: Subjects or Objects of Ed-Tech?
Claiming Your Life Bits
Hosting Life Bits
Personal Data Repositories
Chapter 3: Controlling Our Own Technologies
The Indie Web and Edupunk
A Domain of One’s Own
Domains and the Democratization of Knowledge
Beyond the Portfolio
Claim Is a Verb
Definitions
Resources
About the Author
Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology—the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. Although she was two chapters into her PhD dissertation, she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test—freelance writer.
Audrey has written for The Atlantic, Edutopia, MindShift, Inside Higher Ed, The School Library Journal, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere online and in print. Her work can be found on her website hackeducation.com. She is also the author of The Monsters of Education Technology, a collection of public talks and keynotes that she has delivered.
A self-described serial dropout, Audrey did not complete her bachelor’s degree at The Johns Hopkins University, nor did she complete her PhD at the University of Oregon. She regularly signs up for massive open online courses (MOOCs) that she does not complete. She does, however, hold a master’s degree in folklore from the University of Oregon.
Preface
By Will Richardson
In the 1960s and 1970s, Penguin published a series of what it called education specials, short books from a variety of authors such as Neil Postman, Ivan Illich, Herb Kohl, Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and others. All told, there were more than a dozen works, and they were primarily edgy, provocative essays meant to articulate an acute dissatisfaction with the function of schools at the time. The titles reflected that and included books such as The Underachieving School, Compulsory Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Deschooling Society, and School Is Dead, to name a few. Obviously, the messages of these books were not subtle.
Progressive by nature, the authors generally saw their schools as unequal,