Reclaim Your Workshop

On Wednesday morning I’m facilitating a workshop at the Sloan-C conference titled “Reclaiming your Domain.” Here’s the abstract:

This workshop will provide attendees a focused session to get up and running with a domain name and web hosting account. By the end of this session you will have gotten the following:

• a domain name
• a web hosting account (with instruction of how to manage it)
• Instructions for installing at least one open source application on your web server (such as WordPress, Omeka, etc.)
• Instructions for publishing original content to your space.

Sounds crazy, right? But it’s not, taking control of your online presence and managing your own web space has never been easier. The goal of this workshop is to provide faculty, technologists, and administrators a hands-on overview of how the web works from the inside-out. In a moment when everyone is talking about controlling your data, learning to code, and web literacy—a sandbox space like this is invaluable for taking the first steps in truly interrogating how the web works.

This workshop is what UMW’s DTLT has been laying down to faculty, students, and staff for the last year and a half. It’s becoming second nature. What’s more, we have created the documentation to support it. Think of it as a practical roadmap for Tim Klapdor’s beautiful articulation of the literacy involved in creating the digital self.

I setup a site for the workshop using DokuWiki, and it’s populated with various tutorials DTLT has been creating over the last year. I also got the domain reclaimdemo.com so that all the particpants (if there are any) can login to that cPanel and setup their own subdomain and start navigating the control panel, installing applications, explore file manager, etc. After they do all this they can decide if they want to get a domain and web hosting.

I’ll be sharing a common username and password for all attendees and they can hack around in the cPanel during the workshop. They’ll each create a subdomain based on some variation of their name so we can keep it all straight and don’t have issues with ten people creating the subdomain “blog.”  I’ll just have to make sure they don’t install over my top-level domain DokuWiki install by mistake! Here’s to experimenting!