For all that follows, there’s much more to be said–but if I try to say it all, the post will never be written or shared. So let’s get started with this beginning.

Recently a Twitter thread emerged on the origins of the “Domain of One’s Own” project (usually abbreviated DoOO). Jon Udell’s epic talk at the 2007 Seminars on Academic Computing meeting came up as part of the thread. Jon was gracious to mention me as his scheduled co-presenter at that meeting, noting that I couldn’t make it because my flight had been cancelled when a snowstorm hit Denver.

DGA557603 Athena revealing Ithaca to Ulysses, by Giuseppe Bottani (1717-1784), oil on canvas, 47×72 cm; Artwork-location: Pavia, Musei Civici Del Castello Visconteo, Pinacoteca Malaspina (Art Gallery)); De Agostini Picture Library / out of copyright.

When I saw the mention, I chimed in about the Bluehost experiment, which Jon had written about for InfoWorld following his epic talk at Faculty Academy 2006 at the University of Mary Washington, where at the time I was a professor of English and assistant vice-president for teaching and learning technologies. (Jon’s talks are routinely epic, if that’s not an oxymoron.) I then tweeted about the Odyssey Project as another point of origin for DoOO, realizing as I did so that very few people outside of UMW had ever heard of this project. Given all the interest in how DoOO got going, I thought it might be a good time to share some of the Odyssey story, one that I think also has important implications for how domains-based projects might be more effective.

The project involved a grant application to the MacArthur Foundation through Duke University’s HASTAC initiative. These grants and initiatives were, as I recall, part of Phase One of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning initiative. In my view, that phase of the MacArthur initiative included some of the truly interesting efforts to bring higher education into a wider and deeper awareness of the possibilities of the Web for teaching and learning. The initiatives came to an end, as they do. Much of the potential for deep and beneficial change evaporated when the urge to learn was replaced by the urge to produce, to monetize, and to centralize. Some of the potential was overtaken by academic culture. Some of it was overtaken by worthy but secondary concerns such as badging and upskilling. (You can form your own conclusions by reading through this history.) And then, between the enduring choke-hold of Learning Management Systems (sic) and the sudden flood of Gates Foundation money (bringing with it LMS 2.0, the so-called “next generation digital learning environment” that became courseware and brutal adaptive learning paradigms) and the co-opting fevers of MOOC mania and analytics and all the rest of it, talk about participatory culture and wikis and blogging soon fell to a whisper–not entirely gone, but no longer such a vibrant, plangent melody.

But in 2007, that hadn’t happened yet, and it seemed a good time to take what UMW had learned from the Bluehost experiment and our growing experience with UMW Blogs (now that WordPress had a reliable and scalable multi-site version) and see what might be built as a next step or even a leapfrog jump into something even more ambitious. Hence the Odyssey Project.

At the time, I had returned to UMW from a difficult semester at the University of Richmond in the fall of 2006, but now with no official leadership role (that’s another story, one involving–I kid you not–projector bulbs). I was grateful for the chance to engage with this grant application opportunity. The Odyssey Project application allowed me to use what I’d learned during my time as assistant vice-president for teaching and learning technologies, and director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT), and try to craft an initiative that would continue that work in a particular direction and with a particular focus. As the project narrative clearly demonstrates, I was trying to synthesize earlier work at DTLT with my growing awareness of Doug Engelbart’s “bootstrap” approach as well as what I had learned about IT in higher education from my time at the Frye Leadership Seminar in the summer of 2005. I should add that my experience with the Virginia Governor’s School helped shape my thinking about the possibilities for an intensive summer program to prepare a cohort of faculty and students to take advantage of the opportunities the Odyssey Project would make available, and to pave the way for the project to become a part of the curriculum in some way.

In retrospect, I can see that, among other things, the project was trying to take ideas of digital literacy and web literacy and turn them into an approach to metacognition and information literacy generally, all in an effort to bring faculty and students into a heightened and urgent awareness of how the Web might be understood and built and used as a working symbol of human consciousness itself. That sounds quite grand, if not grandiose, but all of my experience to that point–and all my experience since then–taught me that without such a comprehensive view of the real enterprise of learning and communication, the discussion immediately and permanently devolves into what Doug Engelbart memorably rejected as “isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations.”

I have always thought, and still think, that education generally, and higher education in particular, not only can do better than that but must do better than that if we hope to build a just and sustainable world that supports human flourishing in community. The goal is not simply a domain of one’s own, as catchy and satisfying as the allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous essay may be. The goal must be what Engelbart calls an integrated domain: within the learner, within the learning environment, within the network itself.

Easier said than done, as most worthy goals are. Yet once we have that goal in mind, and once we know enough about networked computing to understand what it represents and can empower if we’re smart and thoughtful about it, then we can have meaningful discussions about teaching and learning, about curriculum, about disciplines, about budgets and planning and outcomes, etc.

Or we can talk about isolated clever tricks and then act surprised when their consequences drive out the mission they purport to serve.

So I crafted the Odyssey Project, with the help of folks at DTLT as well as colleagues like Chip German and Andrew Treloar and Jon Udell (though there really aren’t any colleagues like them). I later wrote my “Personal Cyberinfrastructure” piece as a kind of manifesto to explain some of the ideas behind the Odyssey Project, though that project was never mentioned. (The project was not funded, and I’d moved to Baylor University by then to become the founding director of their new Academy for Teaching and Learning.) When that essay was published, UMW’s “Domain of One’s Own” initiative had begun, as I noted in the essay, linking to Jim Groom’s post on the idea. I’m sure the timing seemed odd, as it appeared that my essay addressed the DoOO project, but in fact the “Personal Cyberinfrastructure” essay was the last light from the Odyssey Project.

Jim briefly mentioned the Odyssey Project in a comment on his post, writing that “Yeah, I think this idea has been bandied ab out a bit, and I don’t think it is entirely original. Much of it plays off of Gardner’s idea for the Odyssey project, which was give a select group of 50 faculty and students a Bluehost account each, and work closely with them for development. i like that idea, but the overhead with throwing fifty folks into their own Bluehost account to me seemed steep.” Jim thought domain mapping through WPMu (as it was then called) would be easier. Later in the same comment, though, Jim writes that “it is the culture of educating and getting people excited about this space both in classes and outside of them that would be the real challenge.”

Yes, that is the real challenge, and that’s the challenge the Odyssey Project tried to address. There was never a question of throwing anyone into anything. Rather the opposite. The idea was to understand the steep overhead and accept that challenge. The questions of “what is this for?” and “why should I care about those things?” are central to education, indeed to all human growth and development. We ask those questions from our first words to our last breaths. The second question is always the hardest, as it involves deeper learning and many non-obvious things. Answering that second question is always difficult and never finished. Indeed, sometimes what we learn reveals we should not care about certain things anymore, or that we shouldn’t ever have cared about them. And sometimes what we learn reveals we cared deeply about second things because they were easier to articulate and attend to than the first things we should have cared about but couldn’t find the time, energy, or will to engage with. Real learning is always a double-loop activity in that way, always taking us to places of revision or reaffirmation, or both.

What follows, then, is the narrative of the Odyssey Project that was submitted in the grant application. As I’ve noted, there’s a lot more to say than this post can manage just now. I will say, however, that the ideas of networking, deep information literacy, and metacognitive attention to emergent phenomena seem to me to be crucial, as does the notion of a special course of study devoted to empowering cohorts of faculty (including, crucially, librarians) and students to think seriously and effectively about the information environment they are given and will co-create.

Sort of like an orientation to the idea of college, not simply an orientation that shows you where the services are, important as that is, too. A seminar in the idea of seminars. Or perhaps, at last, as Walker Percy writes in another context, the revelation of “a garden of delights that beckons to one.”

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