A couple of months ago Alan Levine, Martha Burtis, and I sat down with Anya Kamanetz to be be interviewed about ds106 for the Reclaim Open Learning initiative. I just realized this had been published on the Recalim open Learning site , and it’s a good snapshot of how the three of us are thinking about ds106 at the moment. Martha captures the larger spirit of what ds106 has come to mean for us at UMW, it’s part of a longer history of experimenting with what teaching and learning means for narrating and shaping one’s online presence in an increasingly networked world.
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of this grew out of experiences that we have been having at UMW dating back to 2004 where everyone in the division had gotten their own domain name and web hosting space, and it had changed the landscape of our work. This space became a place for narrating our own experiences and the process of learning. That grew into the notion that students could use the space to do that more broadly and more richly.