"You look at this overwhelming array of cognitive biases and distortions, and realize how there are so many things that come between us and objective reality," Manoogian explained The Huffington Post. "One of the most overwhelming things to me that came out of this project is humility."

Our biases that result from this kind of thinking include the context effects, the mood-congruent memory bias, or the empathy gap, which makes us underestimate the influence of visceral drives on our attitudes and actions.

Listen better, says Baumann. Understanding the predispositions we bring to the table should make us more open to understanding other people's points of view. If you're not so special, not so right, not so perfect all the time, there's a greater likelihood that you have something valuable to learn from others.

Brain biases can quickly become a hall of mirrors. How you understand and retain knowledge about cognitive shortcuts will determine what, if any, benefits you can derive from the substantial psychological science that's been done around them. Here we take a look at different ways of understanding cognitive biases, and different approaches to learning from them. Enjoy!

You don’t have all day to waste on the intro. You’ve got to get a sense of the whole book, get to the middle of it. Here’s some steps to help you skim your way into the heart of things.

This takes too much time to unpack and it’s not directly relevant to your comprehension of sovereignity: if you don’t understand what he means by the term, you will have to seek comprehension in the text itself or from the dictionary; if you do understand (more or less), then this passage is a diversion. If you were reading this text in a course on the history of the Reformation (which you wouldn’t be) you might need to think about it more.

Why are you reading this: what is the subject of the course, the focus of the discussion? Suppose you’re reading Imagined Communities to think about nationalism: Anderson’s thoughts about the relationship of nationalism to Marxist theory, while not totally irrelevant, aren’t directly germane either. If this were a class centrally concerned with Marxist theories of history, or on Marxist revolutions and their relationship to nationalism, it might be another matter.

The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own edification.

The concept sounds simple enough. But today’s students, facing the constant pressure to prepare for standardized tests, rarely have the chance to learn through problem solving or to be involved in projects that reinforce skills that can be used in multiple settings.

Educators call this “transfer learning” — the ability to generalize core principles and apply them in many different places, which becomes more important as the skills needed to keep up in any job and occupation continue to shift in the future.

Digital media scholars like Howard Rheingold, Cathy Davidson, Neil Postman, and even science communicators like Carl Sagan have been advocating new digital literacies for some time now ― literacies that include things like attention management, network theories, collaboration, and the modern spin on critical thinking, crap detection.

Misinformation abounds. This has always been the case, but the problem has become acute in the age of digital communication.

the

the bmj|BMJ 2018;363:k5094 | doi: 10.1136/bmj.k50941RESEARCHParachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trialRobert W Yeh,1 Linda R Valsdottir,1 Michael W Yeh,2 Changyu Shen,1 Daniel B Kramer,1Jordan B Strom,1 Eric A Secemsky,1 Joanne L Healy,1 Robert M Domeier,3 Dhruv S Kazi,1Brahmajee K Nallamothu4 On behalf of the PARACHUTE InvestigatorsABSTRACTOBJECTIVETo determine if using a parachute prevents death or major traumatic injury when jumping from an aircraft.DESIGNRandomized controlled trial.SETTINGPrivate or commercial aircraft between September 2017 and August 2018.PARTICIPANTS92 aircraft passengers aged 18 and over were screened for participation. 23 agreed to be enrolled and were randomized.INTERVENTIONJumping from an aircraft (airplane or helicopter) with a parachute versus an empty backpack (unblinded).MAIN OUTCOME MEASURESComposite of death or major traumatic injury (defined by an Injury Severity Score over 15) upon impact with the ground measured immediately after landing.RESULTSParachute use did not significantly reduce death or major injury (0% for parachute v 0% for control; P>0.9). This finding was consistent across multiple subgroups.

Under the current copyright laws, instructors are essentially powerless to legally improve the materials they use in their classes. OER provide instructors with free and legal permissions to engage in continuous quality-improvement processes such as incremental adaptation and revision, empowering instructors to take ownership and control over their courses and textbooks in a manner not previously possible.

The $5 textbook: According to U.S. PIRG,2 college textbook prices have increased at nearly four times the rate of inflation for all finished goods since 1994. College students spend an average of $900 per year on textbooks—26 percent of the cost of tuition at a public, four-year university. And this has occurred at the same time tuition and fees at universities have blossomed 130% over the same period, while middle-class incomes have stagnated.3 The cost of textbooks is a significant factor in the cost of higher education, growing beyond the reach of more individuals each year. OER have considerable potential to be a part of the solution to this problem.

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.

When faculty use OERs, we aren’t just saving a student money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that student’s ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course.[15] In other words, we are directly impacting that student’s ability to attend, succeed in, and graduate from college. When we talk about OERs, we bring two things into focus: that access is critically important to conversations about academic success, and that faculty and other instructional staff can play a critical role in the process of making learning accessible. If a central gift that OERs bring to students is that they

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:

If a central gift that OERs bring to students is that they make college more affordable, one of the central gifts that they bring to faculty is that of agency, and how this can help us rethink our pedagogies in ways that center on access.

In this way, we can think about Open Pedagogy as a term that is connected to many teaching and learning theories that predate Open Education, but also as a term that is newly energized by its relationship to OERs and the broader ecosystem of open (Open Education, yes, but also Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Open Source, Open Government, etc.).

What are your hopes for education, particularly for higher education? What vision do you work toward when you design your daily professional practices in and out of the classroom? How do you see the roles of the learner and the teacher? What challenges do your students face in their learning environments, and how does your pedagogy address them?

That was it. Read the article and write something about it. That was the assignment. If there had been a rubric, that would have been the only thing on it. It took me a few weeks to finally start to understand. I was very busy with work and graduation and wasn’t putting very much effort into connecting the pieces on my blog. For a few weeks the course, for me, was a large source of frustration.

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.

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.

“Why do I need to learn this? I’ll never use it in real life.” The relevancy of education is often overlooked by students, especially young students who have not yet graduated from high school. “Relevancy” is an essential component of interdisciplinarity. First, what does it mean for something to be relevant? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “relevancy” is “bearing on or connected with the matter in hand; closely relating to the subject or point at issue; pertinent to a specified thing.” In other words, relevancy is constantly changing and dependent on the present moment. One of the biggest downfalls of modern education is the restrictive and controlling aspect of it. 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. If relevancy is correlated with time and circumstance, then students may think differently about algebra II or the Gulf War in five or ten years, but the decision should come from them for it to be a meaningful, beneficial experience.

But How Do We DO Interdisciplinarity? Most, if not every, system in the world depends on interdisciplinarity to function. A doctor can’t diagnose his patients with specific diseases if he doesn’t understand how the entire human body works. Walmart can’t operate if there are no manufacturers supplying them with goods or accountants monitoring their spending or people buying their products. An auto mechanic needs to understand how cars works, in their entirety, to fix a single problem. Everything in the world is interrelated. Every detail is a tiny piece to a very large, complicated whole. If people want to be successful in life, it makes sense to understand the big picture, which is, in a word, interdisciplinarity. The interconnected of life is so complex and massive that it almost seems counterintuitive to teach students single disciplines, completely separated from one another. The question—“how do we do interdisciplinarity?”—is a rhetorical question because everyone is always already doing it. Now the question becomes: how do we combine interdisciplinarity and education to make learning more relevant?

Communication In every discipline, there is jargon. The special, “key words” that particular groups use to communicate. Jargon poses a threat to cross-disciplinary collaboration because people can’t communicate with each other if they can’t understand each other. The communication barrier poses a unique challenge to interdisciplinarity: is collaboration possible without a common language?

Attitude

Why is it desirable to be a “master?” Specialized scholars know the specifics of their fields. They write books with hypothetical titles like “The Horror Film and Beyond: The Possibilities of Horror,” “Ancient Warfare in the Near East: An Archaeological Perspective,” or “Mechanisms of Synaptic Transmission and Plasticity.” Without these scholars, deep, investigative discoveries would be impossible. Society needs people to be masters in specific areas because they contribute to the understanding of the world at large. Knowledge is like a mosaic: every tile represents a scholar who has spent an entire lifetime exploring a single idea. 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. Every tile plays a role in the outcome of a mosaic, but the mosaic wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t an artist, or group of artists, to put the tiles together. As important as it is for there to be highly specialized scholars in every discipline, it’s just as important to have interdisciplinary students building bridges between ideas, creating cohesive, universal collaboration.

Although it is a widely used concept, 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.

According to the Guiness Book of World Records, The University of Al-Karaouine in Morocco, Africa is the oldest continuously operating, degree-granting university in the world.  The university was originally a mosque and actually created by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri.  Al-Azhar University, centered in Egypt, is another academy that was founded by the 10th century.  Both establishments started off teaching rhetoric and religion. Closely following behind the academies in Africa, Oxford University in England became the first for English-speaking individuals.  Universities of this time focused on faith because it was the foundation of their civilizations.  Although these institutions began nearly a millennium ago, it was closer to the 20th century when they expanded to more traditional fields of study.

The advanced colleges and universities we know today have only been around for a few centuries, but the idea of having a designated place to learn has been around for over a millennium.  The academy began with teachers simply preaching a topic of their interest.  As time progressed, universities began to focus their efforts on religion and eventually evolved to where we are today.  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.

Many students entering college for the first time are surprised by the way it changes their thinking, identity, and perspective. The unique environment created by residential college life is an incredible experience for most young, college-aged students. It’s such a transformative experience for so many people that it seems almost irrational to expect students to know what they want from it before they arrive. Interdisciplinary studies allows students to enter college and assume the role of captain in their personalized exploration of knowledge.

The rise of specialization has created a codependent relationship between student and society, reinforcing preexisting systems and making it more difficult to enact change. Many students pursue higher education to learn a specific skill or trade because they have the expectation that there is a need for their skill or trade in society at large. Over the past few decades, with the advent of the technological revolution, the negative consequences of a specialized education are becoming more apparent, demonstrating that graduates need more than one kind of skill if they want to compete in today’s job market. Graduates with degrees in art history may seem—at face value—less desirable than students who graduate with degrees in computational biology, but a science, technology, engineering, or math degree does not guarantee a job. If an applicant can’t work in a team, write a grant, or engage meaningfully with other people, he may be turned away from a job or his career may not flourish.

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. In the case of education, the modern disciplines—science, art, social science, humanities, and applied science—are considered the prologue to interdisciplinarity. Without these pre-established academic fields, interdisciplinary studies would not be possible. Understanding the history of education is essential to understanding the current academic climate surrounding interdisciplinarity.

The medical field is most likely one of the most specialized fields in the world, even though it seems the human body and its complex systems would be the number one use for interdisciplinary study. This concerns me because it is my ultimate goal to become a dermatologist. Considering this, I already know that nutrition, age, and mental state all contribute to the health of one’s skin, and I would love to be able to study these interactions with other specialists outside my discipline one day. Already we see much collaboration in medicine between researchers and doctors, but how much of it is multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary as it should be?

Our society is only starting to get the ball rolling on interdisciplinary communication.

Without the disciplines, interdisciplinarity would have nothing to build on, nothing to incorporate or weave together in order to find solutions to world problems. If it ever seems as though the disciplines are scorned, the only thing we deem negative is their lack of integration with other disciplines. Even when grouping together to attempt solving a problem as a team, an interdisciplinary attempt can end up being multidisciplinary, where insights can come from two or more disciplines, but lack integration.

…the disciplines are the place where we begin, but not where we end.” This quote from Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies by Allen F. Repko captures the essence of where interdisciplinary study comes from. The disciplines, where we find wealths of specific knowledge and, on occasion, narrow-minded specialists, are the very building blocks of interdisciplinary studies.

Law of Diminishing Returns: The law of diminishing returns states that, beyond a certain point, the yield on fixed increments of input gets progressively smaller. It takes hours to learn chess, months to get to be reasonably good, and years to become an expert.

Unity of Knowledge: It is of course impossible, in our age, to become an expert in everything. But if we mistake disciplinary knowledge for wisdom; if we forget how much we don’t know; if we forget how much we cannot know; if we don’t set for ourselves, in principle at least, the ideal of the unity of knowledge; we lose something of great importance. By persistently aiming at the hazy target of omniscience, interdisciplinarians help us remember these things. They thus spur us to see the various components of human knowledge for what they are: pieces in a panoramic jigsaw puzzle. And they inspire us to recall that “the power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on him who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts, and not as a whole” (Pliny, 1977, p. 581).

Complex or Practical Problems: Suppose that you wished to understand the Soviet-American Cold War. Suppose further that you were interested in fathoming this entire conflict, not merely one or another of its aspects. A few years and a few bookshelves later, you might realize that most experts have failed to arrive at a self-contained portrait because they examined this subject from a single disciplinary perspective. An integrated approach, you might conclude, holds a greater promise of bringing you closer to a firm grasp of this complex subject than any important but one-sided study. Thus, in this particular instance, you may begin with history. At some point of your ambitious undertaking, you would realize that history falls short, and that the Third World policies of both America and Russia are important to your subject. At another point you might conclude that the theories and practices of totalitarianism and democracy must be understood as well. You may prolong this branching out process for a while, until a reasonably coherent picture emerges. If you persevered, your broad synthesis may well embody a deeper understanding than any uni-disciplinary approach could possibly muster.

Disciplinary Cracks: According to most interdisciplinary theorists, some problems of knowledge are neglected because they “fail to fit in with disciplinary boundaries thus falling in the interstices between them” (Huber, 1992, p. 285; see also Campbell, 1969; Kavaloski, 1979; Kockelmans, 1979). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that psychology has something to do with price raising, but, in 1977, this problem fell outside the domain of both psychology and economics; it therefore received insufficient attention (Boulding, 1977).

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. In the same way, sociologists long continued to draw their imagery of primitive societies from Patterns of Culture far after the time when anthropologists had dismissed Benedict’s ethnographic depictions as quite misleading. In neither case does the rejection of the work deny the intriguing quality of the conceptual scheme, but it does brand the specific historical or ethnographic accounts as so fallacious empirically that the concepts would not be utilized without the most careful reconsideration. And, both cases serve to illustrate how the gap between disciplines has led to one of them relying on theories and data which are quite invalidated among the originating discipline (Wax, 1969, pp. 81-82).

Outsider’s Perspective: According to some observers (Becher, 1989, p. 118), “career mobility . . . is among the most potent sources of innovation and development within a discipline.” For instance, seventeen out of forty-one scientists in the phage group (which played a decisive role in mid-century biology) were physicists or chemists by training. Heinrich Schwabe was a pharmacist, James Joule a brewer, Paul Gauguin a stockbroker. Thomas Hunt Morgan was trained as an embryologist, A. E. Housman as a classicist, Somerset Maugham as a physician. There is a pattern here, which demands an explanation.

Creative Breakthroughs: The very act of creation often involves the bringing together of previously unrelated ideas (Koestler, 1964). Highly creative artists and thinkers form unconventional but fruitful permutations of disparate ideas (Simonton, 1988). The combined aspects may be drawn from a single discipline, as in Torricelli’s sea of air hypothesis, or from everyday experiences and a single discipline, as in Archimedes’ celebrated “eureka” case. The act of creation may also arise from the permutation of ideas from two or more disciplines. Thomas Kuhn, for instance, noticed the striking similarity between a gestalt switch (psychology) and a paradigmatic shift (history of science).

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.

Interdisciplinary knowledge and research are demanding. To keep reasonably abreast of just two fields, for instance, requires tremendous investment of time and intellectual energy.

At times, interdisciplinary perspectives may prove a handicap. Indiscriminate attempts to apply one discipline to others have often had unsavory consequences. Both Archimedes’ physics and Spinoza’s philosophy suffered for being clad in an ill-fitting mathematical dress. Evolutionary theory suffers because it contradicts religious beliefs. Some people believe that the social sciences could advance faster by blazing trails with their own axes, not with fancy imports from the natural sciences.

Although many have tried to define interdisciplinarity (Berger, 1972; Kockelmans, 1979; Mayville, 1978; Stember, 1991), it still seems “to defy definition” (Klein, 1990). The most widely cited attempts break down interdisciplinarity into components such as multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Because these subdivisions throw little light on the theory and practice of interdisciplinarity, elsewhere (Nissani, 1995a) I have proposed their replacement with a more appropriate definition. 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. In academic discourse, interdisciplinarity typically applies to four realms: knowledge, research, education, and theory. Interdisciplinary knowledge involves familiarity with components of two or more disciplines. Interdisciplinary research combines components of two or more disciplines in the search or creation of new knowledge, operations, or artistic expressions. Interdisciplinary education merges components of two or more disciplines in a single program of instruction. Interdisciplinary theory takes interdisciplinary knowledge, research, or education as its main objects of study.

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.”

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.

Third, there is the 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.

Second, there are the methods of the discipline. Methods are the way that we study the content of a discipline. It is the how of a discipline. For example, your disciplines may be primarily quantitative, using numbers, measurements, and empirical research to understand its content.

Disciplines are made up of many parts. First, and most obviously, there is the content of the 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.

“Interdisciplinarity” is more like a fruit smoothie, where the disciplines are blended together–integrated– to create something new. Both multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are valid ways to bring different academic perspectives together.

Interdisciplinarity: Incorporates several fields of study to allow collaboration among diverse disciplines to either specify or broaden students’ education, to gain understanding, and/or to problem solve. Interdisciplinary is the adjectival form of the word. Interdiscipline is a field that emerges when two or more disciplines are combined.

Discipline: A concentrated and bounded academic field of study.

But while technology allows us to access more information, faster and in a more usable form, we must keep in mind the author and media critic Neil Postman’s caution: “The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking.”

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.

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.

Anyone who has spent time in a college classroom knows what students want from higher education. For most students, college is a time for self-discovery, for developing passionate interests, and for trying to weave them into a meaningful career. Studies bear this out: In 1999 the Mellman Group, a market-research consulting firm, surveyed college students younger than 31 years old and found that 80 percent said it is “very important” for them to find work that “will make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

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.

Declaring this major feels like me declaring, “I will not settle for less!

On the subject of thinking, Interdisciplinary Studies also greatly fosters the ideals of 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. You can be your own self and that is who you should want to be most! Because at the end of the day, your opinion and your thoughts matter, and you need to make those important to you before they are important to anyone else.

Interdisciplinary studies in and of itself is thinking abstractly and creatively. It is bringing things together to create this abstractness that people will appreciate just for that fact that it is a different way of thinking—a new perspective.

In today’s world one of the top aspects an employer will look for when hiring an individual, is creativity.

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.

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.

‘Domains’ is radical not because it is a technological shift, but because it encourages a pedagogical shift.

They are questioning how their student’s ‘domains’ can engage broader audiences and promote high quality, original scholarship.

The first type of ‘Domain’ took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn’t necessarily empower. The problems with the second approach can be wrapped up into two key questions beginning with: Why post an assignment online if…

“In developing this ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’ through the Domain of One’s Own initiative, UMW gives students agency and control; they are the subjects of their learning, not the objects of education technology software.”

“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.”

Universities across the country are giving personal web domains to their students. I picked andrewrikard.com. Davidson College, where I’m a junior, pitched it as an opportunity to own my own data. I could create a WordPress blog from scratch. I could play with HTML, CSS, and Javascript and create experimental projects for courses. I could even keep the domain after graduation. It is a living portfolio, my representation in the digital world.

To provide students the guidance they need to reach these goals, faculty and staff must be willing to lead by example — to demonstrate and discuss, as fellow learners, how they have created and connected their own personal cyberinfrastructures. Like the students, faculty and staff must awaken their own self-efficacy within the myriad creative possibilities that emerge from the new web.

For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged. Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity. To get there, students must be effective architects, narrators, curators, and inhabitants of their own digital lives.6 Students with this kind of digital fluency will be well-prepared for creative and responsible leadership in the post-Gutenberg age. Without such fluency, students cannot compete economically or intellectually, and the astonishing promise of the digital medium will never be fully realized.

This vision goes beyond the “personal learning environment”5 in that it asks students to think about the web at the level of the server, with the tools and affordances that such an environment prompts and provides.

In building that personal cyberinfrastructure, 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.4 Like Doug Engelbart’s bootstrappers in the Augmentation Research Center, these students would study the design and function of their digital environments, share their findings, and develop the tools for even richer and more effective metacognition, all within a medium that provides the most flexible and extensible environment for creativity and expression that human beings have ever built.

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.

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.

The “digital facelift” helped higher education deny both the needs and the opportunities emerging with this new medium.

Yet higher education largely failed to empower the strong and effective imaginations that students need for creative citizenship in this new medium.

Higher education, which should be in the business of thinking the unthinkable, stood in line and bought its own version of the digital facelift. At the turn of the century, higher education looked in the mirror and, seeing its portals, its easy-to-use LMSs, and its “digital campuses,” admired itself as sleek, youthful, attractive. But the mirror lied.

Then an answer seemed to appear: template-driven, plug-and-play, turnkey web applications that would empower all faculty, even the most mulish Luddites, to “put their courses online.” Staff could manage everything centrally, with great economies of scale and a lot more uptime. Students would have the convenience of one-stop, single-sign-on activities, from registering for classes to participating in online discussion to seeing grades mere seconds after they were posted. This answer seemed to be the way forward into a world of easy-to-use affordances that would empower faculty, staff, and students without their having to learn the dreaded alphabet soup of HTML, FTP, and CSS. As far as faculty were concerned, the only letters they needed to know were L-M-S. Best of all, faculty could bring students into these environments without fear that they would be embarrassed by their lack of skill or challenged by students’ unfamiliar innovations.

Sometimes progress is linear. Sometimes progress is exponential: according to the durable Moore’s Law, for example, computing power doubles about every two years. 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.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online. Students have little agency when it comes to education technology – much like they have little agency in education itself.

The Domain of One’s Own initiative at University of Mary Washington (UMW) is helping to recast the conversation about student data. Instead of focusing on protecting and restricting students’ Web presence, UMW helps them have more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity.