A bottleneck is a great conceptual metaphor to describe those pedagogical moments where a significant number of learners get stuck. Identifying bottlenecks is the first step toward designing learning pathways through those bottlenecks. I’m borrowing the idea from the Decoding the Disciplines project at Indiana University. As Joan Middendorf, one of the project leaders, puts it, “Bottlenecks are important because they signal where students are unable to grasp crucial ways of knowing in our fields.” The question of bottlenecks is a central concern in the opening weeks of the Davidson Domains Digital Learning Community.
Let me backtrack. What is Davidson Domains? What is the Davidson Domains Learning Community?
Davidson Domains
Davidson Domains is a pilot program that gives faculty, staff, and students a “domain of one’s own”—an online space for blogs, exhibits, research, creative work, portfolios, web development, programming, and more. Users name their domain and maintain control over it. Faculty and students can create a domain for their courses, but they can also use it outside of coursework. The Davidson Domains pilot is a partnership between the Digital Studies program, Davidson’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and our instructional technology team. The pilot is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The mission of Davidson Domains is to enable faculty and students to:
- Develop technical and critical web literacies;
- Forge a digital identity through online publishing;
- Reclaim ownership and control over one’s digital footprint;
- Explore the possibilities of blended learning and social pedagogies.
Underlying this mission is a fundamental concern of the liberal arts: to raise technical, philosophical, artistic, economic, and political questions about the role of the Internet on ourselves, our communities, and our practices.
We quietly launched Davidson Domains a year ago and have seen dramatic growth. To wit:
The number of accounts on Davidson Domains in September 2014: 0
The number of accounts on Davidson Domains in May 2015: 255
The number of accounts on Davidson Domains in September 2015: 500
And we’re about to add capacity for 500 more accounts, making Davidson Domains available to nearly half the campus community. We haven’t tied the roll-out of Davidson Domains to any particular year of students (say, all rising seniors) or program (for example, the First Year Writing Program). Rather, faculty and students are developing their Domains Across the Curriculum (DAC) based on interest and need. Given that we’ve registered 500 accounts in 9 months, that’s a lot of interest and need.
Davidson Domains Learning Community
We kicked off Davidson Domains in December 2014 with a two-day workshop led by Jim Groom and Tim Owens. Jim and Tim are pioneers of the “domain of one’s own” movement and co-founders of Reclaim Hosting, our partner providing the actual domains. My collaborators at Davidson, including Kristen Eshleman, Anelise Shrout, and Katie Wilkes, have worked tirelessly with faculty and students on Davidson Domains as well. But this formal and informal faculty development isn’t enough. We don’t simply want a bunch of people using Davidson Domains, we want to build a community of practice around Davidson Domains.
This desire for—as Etienne Wenger describes a community of practice—a group “of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” is the impetus behind the newly formed Davidson Domains Learning Community. Approximately 25 faculty, staff, and students will meet as a group throughout the semester to think through the rewards, challenges, and possibilities of Davidson Domains. Smaller affinity groups of 3-4 people will also meet on their own to explore more focused topics, for instance, using domains to foster student dialogue or to support longitudinal constructive student projects.
We’ve learned over the past year that faculty have recurring questions about Davidson Domains, which include:
- How do domains fit in with other technologies (like Moodle)?
- Where do we find good models?
- What’s the balance between student agency and scaffolding?
- What about privacy and copyright?
- Can we preserve the work on domains?
We hope to answer these questions for our faculty and students, or at least begin conversations about them. But I also have my own questions about Davidson Domains, more conceptual in nature:
- How does total and free access to online domains change teaching, learning, and research in a liberal arts environment?
- What happens when a community asks the same questions together, and repeatedly, over the course of the semester?
These questions are not simply idle musings. They are research questions. The first tackles the underlying premise of the entire domain of one’s own movement, while the second tackles the notion of a learning community. Working with Kristen Eshleman, Davidson’s Director of Digital Learning Research & Design, I aim to systematically explore these questions, with the Davidson Domains Learning Community serving as our object of study.
The Bottlenecks of Davidson Domains
Which brings me back to the question of bottlenecks. The affinity groups have a topic to discuss during their first meeting, the notes of which they’ll share with the rest of the learning community. That topic is the question of bottlenecks—the essential skills, concepts, and ways of thinking that stump us:
What are the bottlenecks for you or your students for working with Davidson Domains?
As David Pace and Joan Middendorf point out, there is a typology of bottlenecks. Understanding what type of bottlenecks we and our students face makes it easier to design ways of overcoming them. Bottlenecks might be:
- technical (getting the technology itself to work)
- procedural (knowing how to enact conceptual knowledge)
- affective (affective perspectives or emotional responses that hinder us)
- disciplinary (discipline-specific knowledge and practices)
For example, one faculty member told me she struggles with what she calls “Internet shyness”—this is a kind of affective bottleneck. Another faculty member noted that the text- and image-heavy nature of blogs worked against her teaching priorities, which in the performing arts depend upon embodied knowledge. That’s a disciplinary bottleneck. Our students, I’m sure, will face these and many other bottlenecks. But until we articulate them, we’re unable to move forward to address them. (I guess this is the bottleneck of bottlenecks.)
We are just getting started with the learning community, and I can’t wait to see where we end up. I believe that Davidson Domains are essential for the liberal arts in the digital age, and this community of practice will help us explain why. I’ll record our progress here from a more conceptual perspective, while the nitty-gritty progress will show up on our learning community site. In the meantime I’ll leave you with the slides from our first plenary meeting.