me.com - Personal Web Presence and Learning Portfolio
Just read an interesting blog post over at the Cog Dog Blog called: My Own URL
Levine discusses some really important issues that educators and students need be mindful of.
What happens when you move from your institution? What happens to your online identity? What happens to your personal learning environment? (Portfolio.)
Levine makes a great observation about permanent presence on an espace that is not your own:
So very true. As an ESL teacher, and as somone working very hard to build my own company, I plan to make extensive use of online presence with my clients- but I must be so very wary of trying to own it."…to me the catch-22 of electronic portfolios- I cannot really see much personal investment into documenting one’s self on some other system, unless you feel extremely content (a) it will not be yanked or (b) you cannot extract it in a form that will be useful. The popularity of photo sharing sites, blog hosts lies deeply in the realm of how much it belongs to the individual, with the larger group payoff a layer behind, but if it is ours, we can have some say over the longevity of the humble URL."(My Own URL. Levine 2006)
PLE’s should be just that. Personal. Not the school’s. Not the district’s. Not the teacher’s. The student’s. Period. The student simply provides all of the above with an rss feed or link.
I followed the url www.gardnercampbell.net which Levine mentions as an example of an educator who decided to own his online presence rather than leave it to his employer. On his page, I found this very interesting comment - a comment left on Levine’s blog.
"And I agree wholeheartedly to what you’re saying here about domains. Several of us here have been talking about having students select their own domains when they enter college, and learn to manage their own web presence as part of their overall learning in higher education and beyond. That’s a conversation I’d love to have–soon."
What a really smart idea. And why not? Domain names and web hosting accounts are not expensive. Godaddy.com has some great prices and options. I’ve used them before, and I’ll likely do it again. But I digress.
So new thought:Don’t make space on your server for your students. Instead, help them to build their own identity online. There will be folks who aren’t interested, and you won’t be able to get everyone to buy into the idea of owning their own space on the net, but I sure think this could be a trend for the future don’t you?
Instead of a business card, I hand you a weblink.
I’ve been saying this for a long time. I really don’t like to use any free services for web presence because in the end they’re going to cost you due to your inability to move them when you want.
I’d rather pay $100 a year for a domain and web space that I can customize the way I like and not have any restrictions or worries associated with free providers.
Comment by EFL Geek — August 9, 2006 @ 6:35 pm
Aaron, again your post is timely as tomorrow, I head to a training day for my action research project on Web 2.0 eportfolios. The opposite train of thought to owning your own URL is the concept of “free ranging” as defined by Leigh Blackall where one distributes their bits and pieces freely around the web, tagging them and aggregating them so that if it was me, I would only need to tell people to Google “Graham Wegner” to access the loosely joined pieces of my online presence. Leigh has also posted about this at TALO Groups but I can’t pin down his exact words that I’ve paraphrased above. Still, your own URL, free ranging, it’s still about being free of the shackles of being solely hosted by an institution’s server.
Comment by Graham Wegner — August 9, 2006 @ 7:28 pm