The impact of mental health for Black Ameri-cans will vary between individuals within eachstate (from people who experienced a closeexposure and were impacted directly to otherswho may not have heard of the event). The ef-fects were estimated at a population-level [9]

New data about COVID-19 has revealed an alarmingtrend: Black families face a much higher risk ofcontracting and dying from the virus. Residentsof majority-Black counties have three timesthe rate of infection and almost six times therate of deaths as residents of major-ity-white counties

Black men is only 75 percent the $1,096that white men earn

increases in anxiety and depression, as well asseen the largest changes in theirmental health.In 2019, just 3 percent ofAsian-Americans screened positivefor depression; now that rate hasjumped to 22 percent, and the rateof Asian-Americans experiencinganxiety disorders is now28 percent, upfrom 4 percent

Nearly 35 percent ofBlack Americans areshowing increasedrates of anxiety and/or depression. Hispan-ics are experiencingsimilarly frighteningnumbers. Asian-Ameri-cans have seen marked

Expand access to mental health carethrough telemental health and makepermanent the temporary federaland state policies enacted duringthe pandemic

It willalso save taxpayer money over time, sinceit’s more cost-effective to treat mentaldisorders proactively on an outpatientbasis than on an inpatient one.

Pass legislation for mental healthMedicare reimbursement for olderadults and disabled individuals thathas been stalled in Congress formore than 20 years.

Use tags

analyze don’t summarize

The reality is that Gen C is everywhere. Plenty of millennials belong to this group, but so do lots of Gen Xers and Yers, not to mention lots of Boomers. The digital transformation–and all the cultural changes that have accompanied this upswing in connectivity–has cut across traditional demographics.

Reaching Gen C means having a keen understanding of click-worthy–the art of creating shareable, entertaining, useful and highly visual content. In an era when information and entertainment sources are unlimited, hijacking attention spans with something as mundane as an ad isn’t going to happen.

Streaming video and social media dominate their time spent online. Rather than relying on traditional news sources, they get their information from social media feeds–algorithmic streams on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks that aggregate preferences from their friends and followers. Responding and interacting–through comments, emojis, texts and tweets–is as important as reading or watching. Creating is as critical as consuming. Everything is curated, customized, personalized and optimized.

You can be 15 years old or 85 years old and still be a full-fledged member. Nor is it defined by socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geography or any of the classic demographic markers. Gen C isn’t necessarily rich or poor, urban or suburban, young or old.

Here’s the critical fact: Gen C isn’t an age group at all. It’s a mindset.

But here’s the thing. These traits aren’t unique to millennials and never have been.

researchers found that students who study interdisciplinarity are more likely to develop: affective cognitive skills; reading, writing, speaking, and thinking skills; higher curiosity for learning; more creativity and originality in thought processes; and an ability to integrate traditional ideas with current ideas. The benefits of finding creative and integrative ways to combine disciplines far outweigh the disadvantages of interdisciplinarity.

For example, one of his most influential reforms was advocacy for a curriculum based on students’ interests rather than a pre-established curriculum. He believed that a student, by age eighteen, was old enough to select his own courses and pursue his own imagination (Zakaria 54-7). Interdisciplinarity abides by the same logic. Many educators disagreed with Eliot, arguing that schools exist to guide students through the established hierarchy of education. If students wander around at their own will, these educators argued, they may leave school with an incomplete or inconclusive education.

Interdisciplinary studies, as a concept, would not be possible without the foundational structure of disciplinary studies. In order to break apart and reorganize a system, a preliminary system must already exist.

The question—“how do we do interdisciplinarity?”—is a rhetorical question because everyone is always already doing it.

If students are living their lives in preparation for life, when will they start living? When do rules and regulations pay off? The answer is never. If students aren’t free to be curious, engaged, and invested in what they’re learning, then they may never be curious, engaged, or invested in their lives. Education is about more than passing a test or being accepted to the “right” school, it’s about self-discovery and personal growth as an individual.

Education is real. Education is now. Education is not a simulation preparing students for an imaginary destination. Students arrived at the destination when they opened their eyes for the first time, took their first step, tried their first carrot, and looked up at the sky for the first time, wondering, “why is the sky blue?”

but the decision should come from them for it to be a meaningful, beneficial experience.

“Why do I need to learn this? I’ll never use it in real life.”

Interdisciplinary studies allows students to experiment and ask questions. It encourages them to follow their hearts and enjoy their undergraduate experiences. Learning should be exploratory and fun, exactly what interdisciplinary studies is trying to do.

Academic departments provide the resources and tools that students need to be successful in their fields. Every department has the programs, faculty, staff, and organization it needs to advance learning within its given field, but sometimes the structures across departments do not align with one another, making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challenge.

Communication In every discipline, there is jargon. The special, “key words” that particular groups use to communicate.

Attitude The first barrier facing interdisciplinary students is attitude. An attitudinal barrier is any behavior or perception that prevents students or employees from effectively communicating.

If someone spends 10,000 hours of hands-on, in-depth, focused energy in a discipline, he will be a master of it. That’s eight hours every day for nearly three and a half years. If the practitioner is an undergraduate student, that’s about the time it will take her to finish her bachelor’s degree. If she goes to college and studies a single discipline—like biology—and doesn’t take any classes except ones that pertain to her major, she will graduate as a near-master in her field.

10,000 hours. That’s how long it takes to be a master in any field.

“Open teaching” began as a practice of using technology to open formal university courses for free, informal participation by individuals not officially enrolled in the course. In the university context, open teaching involves devising ways to expose the in-class experiences to those who are not in the class so that they can participate as fully as possible.

“Open access” refers to research articles that are freely and openly available to the public for reading, reviewing, and building upon.

Education is, first and foremost, an enterprise of sharing. In fact, sharing is the sole means by which education is effected. If an instructor is not sharing what he or she knows with students, there is no education happening.

Revise—adapt and improve the OER so it better meets your needs. Remix—combine or “mash up” the OER with other OER to produce new materials. Reuse—use the original or your new version of the OER in a wide range of contexts. Redistribute—make copies and share the original OER or your new version with others. Retain-keep the educational materials permanently.

“Open educational resources” (or OER) have become a widely discussed topic in recent years. Open educational resources are educational materials (e.g., course textbooks, research articles, videos, assessments, simulations, etc.) that are either (a) licensed under an open copyright license (e.g., Creative Commons1) or (b) in the public domain. In both cases, every person in the world enjoys free (no cost) access to the OER and free (no cost) permission to engage in the “5R” activities when using the OER:

OEP, or Open Educational Practices, can be defined as the set of practices that accompany either the use of OERs or, more to our point, the adoption of Open Pedagogy. Here are some simple but profoundly transformative examples of OEPs:

“higher education shall be equally accessible to all.” Yet, even in North America in 2017, “the likelihood of earning a college degree is tied to family income”

“Paquette outlines three sets of foundational values of Open Pedagogy, namely: autonomy and interdependence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation.”

“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.

Without taking an open pedagogy class I would never have realized this about myself.

NOW I was getting it. I was linking the Biology to my personal life which was my inspiration and in doing this I found more links (a genetic link) that I continued to explore even further in my next post.

If there had been a rubric, that would have been the only thing on it.

I’m sure you can only imagine my surprise when I logged into the course to discover my first assignment was to set up a blog and twitter.

I had never taken any sort of online course and the majority of my professors steered clear of using Canvas (BlackBoard/ Easel/ Moodle/ etc.) or any other online platform.

how they interact with each other and in which ways they belong to a social community.

It was easiest to see in high school, the English teachers would gather together, and the social studies teachers especially without very much deviation from their groups. This was partially due to their classrooms being located so close together but also because of their shared disciplines. It never really came to mind that teachers of the same subject were together during the school day simply to discuss developments in their field; I just thought it worked out that they were friends. Looking back, it makes so much more sense that they were able to make lesson plans based off each other’s knowledge and experience.

Connected learning is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward expanding educational, economic or political opportunity. Our learning approach is guided by three key findings that have emerged from this body of learning research: a disconnect between classroom and everyday learning, the meaningful nature of learning that is embedded in valued relationships, practice, and culture the need for learning contexts that bring together in-school and out-of-school learning and activity.

Connected learning looks to digital media and communications to: offer engaging formats for interactivity and self-expression, lower barriers to access for knowledge and information, provide social supports for learning through social media and online affinity groups, link a broader and more diverse range of culture, knowledge, and expertise to educational opportunity.

We see the roots of interdisciplinarity beginning to show in society; now we need it to grow and show its potential. Much like the fledgling leaf in the photo above, I believe interdisciplinarity will grow out of its vast supply of disciplines and learn from history how to create a new methodology of evaluating and solving problems.

“Now children’s mental health care is interdisciplinary.” The author, Gail Rosenblum, then lists the psychologists, school social workers, case managers, occupational therapists, physical therapists and nurses who are present in developing and preserving a child’s mental well-being.

Without the disciplines, interdisciplinarity would have nothing to build on, nothing to incorporate or weave together in order to find solutions to world problems.

Without the disciplines, Interdisciplinary Studies would have nothing to build on, nothing to incorporate or weave together in order to find solutions to societal problems.

This approach is called Interdisciplinary Studies.

In the early days, students were almost forced into higher education based on societal demands. With fewer fields of study available, most students were taught humanities and religious studies. Nowadays students are allowed to choose what they want to learn about based on their own likes and dislikes.

Mathematics and music were some of the first disciplines that were taught in the Greek era. In the evolution of education, when Plato opened his academy, he taught social issues such as politics and education alongside the already established discipline of mathematics. Continuing with established disciplines, the Romans decided to focus more on the discipline of law.

very few undergraduates can actually define what a “discipline” is. The history of how disciplines emerged is not well-known or fully agreed-upon. The objective definition of “discipline,” and the disciplines themselves are continuously changing as time goes on, making the idea more difficult to define.

Students who took these courses were sent pamphlets and textbooks through the United States Postal Service.  After completing the chapter, they would mail it back and request the next one.  There were no degrees awarded after completion, but it was a way for students to gain extra knowledge and skills.

there is no best method or focus for learning, therefore Harvard will have them all. 

The university was originally a mosque and actually created by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri.

When Plato was 40, he created the open-air “Academy” just outside the city of Athens in 387 B.C.  A majority of the students, approximately nine-tenths, traveled from other cities in order to attend the lectures.  Due to the fact that not many were literate, lessons were passed on verbally.  This academy was an original idea because Socrates was skeptical about a teacher’s ability to transmit knowledge directly to a student.  After Plato’s death the academy still thrived for nearly three centuries.  Unfortunately, it came to an end when the Romans destroyed it.

The first documented academy was believed to be in ancient Greece, only growing in size and popularity from that point, eventually spreading across the world.

The disciplines that we have been taught since the beginning of elementary school have been such a crucial part in who we are as students, and who we become in our careers after graduation.

Many complex or practical problems can only be understood by pulling together insights and methodologies from a variety of disciplines.

Crossdisciplinary Oversights: The gaps among [the social science] disciplines are much too large. . . .  As a result, many sociologists . . .[long continued] to draw their imagery of the Protestant Reformation from Max Weber, although professional historians have long since relegated his theories to the dustbin.

To begin with, a discipline can be conveniently defined as any comparatively self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community of experts. Interdisciplinarity is best seen as bringing together distinctive components of two or more disciplines.

The most widely cited attempts break down interdisciplinarity into components such as multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity.

No people in our own time could rationally proclaim that they knew everything about everything, or even everything about their own fields . . .  Instead of being challenged by the slowly emerging knowledge of the Renaissance, we are now being deluged by torrents of new information almost daily. In self-defense, to avoid drowning and attain some kind of footing, we seek to come ashore on ever-smaller islands of learning and inquiry. . . .  To look beyond . . . is to be overwhelmed by the ocean’s magnitude: better to remain ignorant of all but our own tiny province. . . .  The result in our own time is not just Snow’s “two cultures” but in fact a multitude of cultures, each staking out a territory for itself, each refusing to talk to the other, and each resisting all attempted incursions from surrounding “enemies.”

“Exactly,” the geographer said. “But I am not an explorer. I haven’t a single explorer on my planet. It is not the geographer who goes out to count the towns, the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the oceans, and the deserts. The geographer is much too important to go loafing about. He does not leave his desk.”

epistemology of the discipline. This is tied to both content and methods. An epistemology is a worldview, ideology, or approach to truth and knowledge. For example, in math, the dominant epistemology is one of logic and objectivity.

Methods are the way that we study the content of a discipline. It is the how of a discipline.

Content is generally what is “covered” by coursework in the discipline. It can include facts, concepts, ideas, and texts. Content is the what of a discipline.

Setting in Context: Sometimes we actually don’t want to carve a problem or concept into small bits, but instead want to see how something specific fits into a larger pattern or fabric.  This is called “setting the problem or issue in context.”

Drilling Down: Sometimes we break problems down into smaller parts so that we can solve it piece by piece.  This is called “drilling down” a problem. We can also think of breaking a larger whole into its parts in order to understand the whole more fully, and this is called “systems thinking.” Both are very useful for interdisciplinarians, since breaking a problem or concept down may help us see the different disciplines that are involved, which will then allow us to organize our research approach.

One criteria in determining the amalgamation quotient of our particular dish would be the number of different fruits involved. A mixture involving apples and oranges is less amalgamated than one involving apples, oranges, and plums. A second criterion would be distance: mixing Mackintosh and Winesap apples would result in less amalgamation than the mixing of oranges and grapefruits, and still less than the mixing of oranges and cherries. Third, there is the novelty of the mixture itself. In Western societies now, for instance, mixing bananas, apples, and grapes is not as creative, and unusual, as the mixing of guavas, kiwis, and blueberries. Fourth, and perhaps most important, is the degree of blending or integration. The various fruits can be served side by side, they can be chopped up and served as a fruit salad, or they can be finely blended so that the distinctive flavor of each is no longer recognizable, yielding instead the delectable experience of the smoothie. Note that the amalgamation quotient says nothing about quality: in some circumstances, a plain mango will surpass all the smoothies in the world; in others, only a fruit salad will do.

amalgamation

Experience suggests that this discussion can be best approached … by means of a homely metaphor of mixing fruits

16 The BIG Terms

As a people, we need to understand where we were, where we are, and where we are going. The challenge for higher education, then, is not the choice between pure research and practical application but, rather, the integration and synthesis of compartmentalized knowledge. On our campuses, we must create an intellectual climate that encourages faculty members and students to make connections among seemingly disparate disciplines, discoveries, events, and trends — and to build bridges among them that benefit the understanding of us all.

Clearly we have to re-evaluate our entire system of education for what it is: an 18- year learning continuum that prepares citizens for a life of learning. We must rid it of unnecessary and wasteful duplication, and create coherence and integrity in our curricula.

In fact, students have much less time than four years. Because many high schools don’t do their jobs, 53 percent of college students, including those who attend community colleges, require remedial courses. In addition, almost 60 percent of students attend two or more colleges, and many students have family or work responsibilities

“The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.”

As a society, we tend to pay lip service to the complexity of problems and then continue to gamble on simplistic solutions, such as building prisons to solve the crime and drug problems. But as Bela H. Banathy, a systems theorist, writes: “A technical problem of transportation, such as the building of a freeway, becomes a land-use problem, linked with economic, environmental, conservation, ethical, and political issues. Can we really draw a boundary? When we ask to improve a situation, particularly if it is a public one, we find ourselves facing not a problem, but a cluster of problems … and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods.”

We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge. While that may sound esoteric, especially to some outside the academy, it is really just shorthand for saying that the complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap — economics and sociology, law and psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and political science.

But a major failure of our higher-education system is that it has largely come to serve as a job-readiness program. Instead of helping students learn and grow as individuals, find meaning in their lives, or understand their role in society, college has become a chaotic maze where students try to pick up something useful as they search for the exit: the degree needed to obtain decent employment. Today’s students fulfill general-education requirements, take specialized courses in their majors, and fill out their schedule with some electives, but while college catalogs euphemistically describe this as a “curriculum,” it is rarely more than a collection of courses, devoid of planning, context, and coherence.

For most students, college is a time for self-discovery, for developing passionate interests, and for trying to weave them into a meaningful career.

Engaging in this study has had me step back from each discipline of my choice, and relate the assumptions of both, which has ended up teaching me a lot about myself. But most importantly, this study is really able to highlight my love of learning. Declaring this major feels like me declaring, “I will not settle for less! I will make the most of my opportunities!” And that feels really good because unlike many other majors where it is easy to feel trapped or to feel stuck in this routine that everyone who has graduated with your degree has gone through- the same process; this study has me standing alone and in this case, that isn’t a bad thing.

metacognition. Metacognition is the “awareness of your own learning and thinking process” (Repko 57). With metacognition, you are able to take your mind out of society’s views and have your own views

Secondly, being able to think abstractly, is very significant to me. It is so important to have different ideas that may even seem impossible.

Engaging in Interdisciplinary studies has broadened my understanding of entrepreneurship, abstract thinking, metacognition, and love of learning. Starting with entrepreneurship, majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies has given me the confidence to create something of my own that may not be out there yet. I am creating and envisioning a possibility that others may not see or may not have the confidence to direct. That possibility is going to open so many doors for me.

In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.

students not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments ranging from multimodal writing to information science, knowledge management, bibliographic instruction, and social networking. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression, and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own “engagement streams” throughout the learning environment.

To build a cyberinfrastructure that scales without stiflling innovation, that is self-supporting without being isolated or fatally idiosyncratic, we must start with the individual learners. Those of us who work with students must guide them to build their own personal cyberinfrastructures, to embark on their own web odysseys. And yes, we must be ready to receive their guidance as well.

These days were exciting, but they were also difficult. Only a few faculty had the curiosity or stamina to brave this new world. Staff time was largely occupied by keeping the system up and running. And few people understood how to bring students into this world, aside from assigning them e-mail addresses during orientation.

Sometimes, however, progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context. This is the type of progress needed in higher education today, as students, faculty, and staff inhabit and co-create their online lives.

‘Domains’ is radical not because it is a technological shift, but because it encourages a pedagogical shift. The domains project isn’t revolutionary to the traditional classroom, but it is revolutionary to a classroom reimagined around public scholarship, student agency and experimentation. It makes sense when students find ownership in what they choose to create, how they put it online, and how it engages a broader audience. The question bigger than data ownership is how to make ownership over ideas happen.

If no one wants to read the hastily constructed blog post for a class participation grade, then what is the purpose of making it public? If assignments are going to live online, don’t they need to be connected to a public dialogue? Don’t they need to be oriented at the proper audience? The web is a network for conversations, and if students still see their audience as a teacher with a red pen, then nothing changes.

It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.”

Interdisciplinary studies allows students to experiment and ask questions. It encourages them to follow their hearts and enjoy their undergraduate experiences. Learning should be exploratory and fun, exactly what interdisciplinary studies is trying to do.

An overarching fear of interdisciplinarity is the “10,000 hour rule,” meaning interdisciplinary students might graduate as masters of nothing. Instead of graduating with a comprehensive understanding of a single discipline like anthropology or economics, they graduate with a smattering of knowledge, spread across many fields.

An interdisciplinary contribution might not qualify a professor for tenure in any department because his study is not a formal subject attached to a single discipline.

sometimes the structures across departments do not align with one another, making interdisciplinarity collaboration a challenge.

Jargon poses a threat to cross-disciplinary collaboration because people can’t communicate with each other if they can’t understand each other.

An attitudinal barrier is any behavior or perception that prevents students or employees from effectively communicating.

There would be no place for interdisciplinarity if the disciplines didn’t come first, but collaboration is sometimes just as important, if not more important, than individualized focus.

If students go to school and pursue a single degree without challenging their minds with different perspectives and disciplines, aren’t they depriving themselves of a brilliant opportunity to grow as an individual?

study interdisciplinarity are more likely to develop: affective cognitive skills; reading, writing, speaking, and thinking skills; higher curiosity for learning; more creativity and originality in thought processes; and an ability to integrate traditional ideas with current ideas.

By challenging themselves with a variety of educational experiences, interdisciplinary students become better critical thinkers, gain more self-awareness, and grow more confident in the way their brains work and who they are as people.

Many students entering college for the first time are surprised by the way it changes their thinking, identity, and perspective.

Education is exploration, a phenomenon that cannot be neatly packaged and universally distributed.

If students wander around at their own will, these educators argued, they may leave school with an incomplete or inconclusive education.

Interdisciplinary studies, as a concept, would not be possible without the foundational structure of disciplinary studies. In order to break apart and reorganize a system, a preliminary system must already exist

If students are not engaged with a subject because they believe it’s irrelevant, no amount of force will change their minds, or if they do change their minds, the decision comes from outside, not from within

Interdisciplinary studies is a disruptive ideology that takes control away from educators and puts it where it belongs: in the hands of students.

If people want to be successful in life, it makes sense to understand the big picture, which is, in a word, interdisciplinarity.

A doctor can’t diagnose his patients with specific diseases if he doesn’t understand how the entire human body

Students learn what Sha calls “synthesis,” the ability to combine knowledge and insights from everyone and everything, including from constraints.

Electives can feel like afterthoughts rather than survival skills.

It’s an old saw: higher education can never change because, after all, it hasn’t in the 2,500 years since Socrates paced the Academy. There’s only one problem. That’s not true. It has not been the case in the past, and it should not be so — especially now.

Without the disciplines, interdisciplinarity would have nothing to build on, nothing to incorporate or weave together in order to find solutions to world problems. 

The first academy was open to the elements, but now they have entire buildings dedicated to each individual field of study.

The disciplines that we know today started as scholars specializing in that field of interest then continuing to share their knowledge with others.

religion- and military-centered

education was strictly for the upper class

Some disciplines have been around as long as the academy, while some have just blossomed within the last few years.

Unity of Knowledge

Flexibility of Research: Most fields experience exciting periods of rapid, sometimes revolutionary, advances, followed by periods of comparative stagnation. Most people stick it out through thick and thin; without their dedication, the world of culture would have been in a sorry shape. (Although sometimes, as we have seen, immigrants bring fresh perspectives and thereby contribute to their new subspecialties or disciplines.) Be that as it may, in personal terms, individual scholars eager to migrate an obvious personal reward of the willingness to cross disciplinary boundaries.

“The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.”

and none of these problems can be tackled using linear or sequential methods.”

complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap — economics and sociology, law and psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and political science.

breaking it up into smaller and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization

fragmentation of knowledge itself

In fact, mass higher education is heading toward what I call the Home Depot approach to education, where there is no differentiation between consumption and digestion, or between information and learning, and no guidance — or even questioning — about what it means to be an educated and cultured person. Colleges are becoming academic superstores, vast collections of courses, stacked up like sinks and lumber for do-it-yourselfers to try to assemble on their own into a meaningful whole.

Declaring this major feels like me declaring, “I will not settle for less! I will make the most of my opportunities!” And that feels really good because unlike many other majors where it is easy to feel trapped or to feel stuck in this routine that everyone who has graduated with your degree has gone through- the same process; this study has me standing alone and in this case, that isn’t a bad thing.

You can be your own self and that is who you should want to be most!

Metacognition is the “awareness of your own learning and thinking process”

In today’s world one of the top aspects an employer will look for when hiring an individual, is creativity. Will this person be able to benefit my company with creative, new, and different ideas? Can they use creativity to solve complex problems in the workplace that haven’t been used in the past?

2. The student does not want to be represented by their assignments?

t is a living portfolio, my representation in the digital world.

So, how might colleges and universities shape curricula to support and inspire the imaginations that students need? Here’s one idea. Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers — not 1GB folders in the institution’s web space but honest-to-goodness virtualized web servers of the kind available for $7.99 a month from a variety of hosting services, with built-in affordances ranging from database maintenance to web analytics. As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name. Over the course of the first year, in a set of lab seminars facilitated by instructional technologists, librarians, and faculty advisors from across the curriculum, students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. They would experiment with server management tools via graphical user interfaces such as cPanel or other commodity equivalents. They would install scripts with one-click installers such as SimpleScripts. They would play with wikis and blogs; they would tinker and begin to assemble a platform to support their publishing, their archiving, their importing and exporting, their internal and external information connections. They would become, in myriad small but important ways, system administrators for their own digital lives.3 In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.

Sometimes, however, progress means looping back to earlier ideas whose vitality and importance were unrecognized or underexplored at the time, and bringing those ideas back into play in a new context

that provides low-cost Web hosting and helps educators offer their students their own domains.

not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives

And then – contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student’s work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over – the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

much like they have little agency in education itself.