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Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy Vol. 60 No. 5 pp. 499–504 doi: 10.1002/jaal.595 © 2017 International Literacy Association
COMMENTARY
A Domain of One’s Own can empower teachers and students to engage in digital
literacies while maintaining ownership over their digital identities.
W
ith the advent of new and mobile technolo-
gies, educators are using a variety of digital
spaces and tools to create and curate their
digital identities. Professors have personal webpages
linked to their university’s website. Social media tools
are used to tweet, blog, and post about research, teach-
ing, and important events in the field. Digital platforms
such as Google Classroom and PBworks are used to
store and distribute teaching materials. This network of
platforms and tools is interconnected to scholarly and
personal spaces, which provides opportunities to build
and maintain digital identities that complement offline
versions of identity. Challenges and questions certainly
arise as teachers engage in these literacy practices; yet,
there is the potential to utilize these varied platforms
and connections that exist in the online collaborative
space to act as networked, social scholars and practitio-
ners (Wise & O’Byrne, 2015).
There is also a need for students to engage in these
practices with online texts as they develop and modify
their identities. Specifically, learners from pre-K up
through higher education need places online where they
can create, build, and modify digital artifacts that repre-
sent their identities as learners. To this end, we propose
that students need to develop and maintain a domain
of their own, one address online that students build up
from pre-K through higher education that archives and
documents their learning over time. Students can use it
to read, write, participate, build, edit, revise, and iter-
ate as if it were a digital portfolio. We believe that this
direction is necessary, as it builds aspects of ownership,
agency, and empowerment of learners in online and
hybrid spaces (O’Byrne & Pytash, 2015). Furthermore,
we contend that if we really want students to be digitally
literate, they need to have a personalized learning space
online that provides more than just a snapshot of their
participation in one class or one school year.
In this piece, we examine A Domain of One’s Own
and how educators and schools can implement this ini-
tiative. We contend that the building and developing of
A Domain of One’s Own showcases the ways that schools
can engage students in complex and meaningful literacy
practices. We conduct this examination by looking at the
challenges and opportunities of providing each student
with a domain of his or her own in elementary school,
middle grades, high school, and higher education.
Such an initiative raises key questions for literacy
educators and students about tools, privacy, security,
and hegemony in the current system. As educators
explore the changes that technology is enacting on
literacy practices (Leu, 1997), we need to prepare for
future changes. We hope this piece will spark these
discussions now and in the future as we encourage our
colleagues in the field to push for a more informed, lon-
gitudinal use of new and digital literacies across the
lifespan of learners.
Becoming Literate Digitally
in a Digitally Literate
Environment of Their Own
W. Ian O’Byrne, Kristine E. Pytash
W. IAN O’BYRNE is an assistant professor of literacy
education at the College of Charleston, SC, USA;
e-mail wiobyrne@gmail.com.
KRISTINE E. PYTASH is an associate professor in the
School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies
at Kent State University, OH, USA; e-mail kpytash@
kent.edu.