- May 2022
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policyreview.info policyreview.info
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For example, Campbell talks about personal cyberinfrastructures when he suggests providing students with hosting space and their own domain as soon as they start their studies: Suppose that when students matriculate, they are assigned their own web servers […] As part of the first-year orientation, each student would pick a domain name […] students would build out their digital presences in an environment made of the medium of the web itself. […] In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure— one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career—and beyond. (Campbell, 2013, p. 101–102)
Giving a student their own cyberinfrastructures, a set of digital tools, is not too dissimilar from encouraging them to bring tools like notebooks, paper, index cards, pens, and paper in the early 20th century or slate and chalk generations earlier.
Having the best tools for the job and showing them how to use them is paramount in education. Too often we take our tools for thought for granted in the education space. Students aren't actively taught to use their pens and paper, their voices, their memories, or their digital technologies in the ways that they had been in the past. In the past decade we've focused more on digital technologies, in part, because the teachers were learning to use them in tandem with their students, but this isn't the case with note taking methods like commonplacing, card indexes (or zettelkasten). Some of these methods have been taken for granted to such an extent that some of them are no longer commonplace within education.
I'll quickly note that they don't seem to have a reference to Campbell in their list. (oops!) Presumably they're referencing Gardner Campbell, though his concept here seems to date to 2009 and was mentioned heavily in the ds106 community.
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