Becoming literate digitally in a digitally literate environment of their own
Citation
O’Byrne, W. Ian; Pytash, Kristine E. (2017) Becoming literate digitally in a digitally literate environment of their own. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 60(5), 499–504. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.595
Abstract
A Domain of One’s Own can empower teachers and students to engage in digital literacies while maintaining ownership over their digital identities. With the advent of new and mobile technologies, educators are using a variety of digital spaces and tools to create and curate their digital identities. This piece examines A Domain of One’s Own and how educators and schools can implement this initiative — building and developing a personalized learning space online that archives and documents learning over time, from pre-K through higher education. The authors argue that if we really want students to be digitally literate, they need to have a personalized learning space online that provides more than just a snapshot of their participation in one class or one school year.
Notes
The LMS problem is real and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. When schools moved instruction into systems like Blackboard or Canvas or Google Classroom, they created a structure where everything a student creates — every discussion post, every paper, every artifact of their learning — disappears when the semester ends. The student leaves with a grade. The learning itself evaporates.
A Domain of One’s Own is the alternative: a personalized online space that a learner actually owns and controls, that they can build from pre-K through higher education and carry with them into professional life. The concept goes back to Jim Groom and others at UMary Washington, and Kristine and I were thinking about how to adapt it for K–12 contexts.
What I find most useful about this framing is that it connects digital literacy to identity in a serious way. Your online presence is not separate from who you are as a learner and a professional. It documents your thinking, your growth, your commitments. Leaving that documentation behind a university firewall, subject to deletion by an administrator you’ll never meet, is an identity problem as much as a privacy problem.