A Domain of One’s Own for use as a personal Learning Management System (pLMS)

I love that Johannes Klingbiel’s article Building a new website highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn.

To learn—A rather obvious one, but I wanted to challenge myself again. 

While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it’s also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: “to build”. It’s much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It’s not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren’t custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren’t good at these last two things, but are built for making it easier for a course facilitator to distribute and grade material.

We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small “p” to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others’ LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

[[Flancian]]’s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it’s pieces.

A Session Proposal for IndieWebCamp East: A Domain of One’s Own LMS

IndieWebCamp East (Online) is coming up on the weekend of November 14-15, 2020, so I’ve tentatively proposed a session on creating an IndieWeb/Domain of One’s Own Learning Management System.

Proposal:

A Domain of One’s Own LMS

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly forced educators to flee online where there is a wealth of predatory, amoral, and questionable platforms for managing online pedagogy. Starting closer to first principles, how might we design and build an LMS (Learning Management System) based on IndieWeb principles or using the related ideas behind A Domain of One’s Own where the teacher and students own their own content, learning content, and personal learning network.

Can we dovetails ideas and principles from the Open Educational Resources (OER) space with this at the same time?

Let’s get together to look at some common patterns in our online coursework to leverage existing technologies that privilege ownership, agency, control, and privacy to see how we might build and use our own infrastructure rather than relying on unethical corporations.

Session hashtag:


Naturally anyone with a website is welcome to join us for the BarCamp-style IndieWebCamp that weekend, but I would specifically like to invite all the educators, teachers, course designers, and students who are using their own domains or who are in a Domain of One’s Own program to join us.

It would be great to see others either share their knowledge or experiences or even lead brainstorming sessions so we can all work at improving our websites and adding additional useful functionality to make them do the things we’d like them to. I’d love nothing more than to get enough people show up on Saturday to create an entire “Education” focused track to appear and then have everyone return on Sunday to help each other get our hands dirty in building or improving our sites to create something together.

You can RSVP for the weekend for free here: https://2020.indieweb.org/east.

If you have any questions about proposing sessions, either in advance or preparing to propose them the morning of camp, don’t hesitate to reach out.