Speaker: Laurie Hurson

A team of educational technologists, graduate students, and faculty have been thinking through how to implement a Domains project at The Graduate Center, CUNY. A DoOO at project for graduate students offers open alternatives to the proprietary data management systems offered at CUNY, and could contribute to a broader cultural shift at our university. Graduate students are unique within the 25-campus CUNY ecosystem, often balancing roles as faculty, students, and staff. Since they have much longer and in-depth tenures within the university system, graduate students would benefit from having an established, personal, online space to save, share, and retain ownership of the work that they produce during graduate school. Moreover, developing the digital literacy to manage their own data and cultivating their digital identity may provide opportunities to carry these lessons over through their multiple roles within the university. As a collaboration between the Teaching and Learning Center and the GC Digital Initiatives, seven CUNY graduate students participated in a semester-long Focused Inquiry Group to explore the possibilities and obstacles of starting a DoOO project at The Graduate Center. The group explored cPanel to determine which functions and applications might be most supportive of graduate research, teaching, and scholarship. They also considered how training and support for DoOO might be integrated into PhD coursework, courses in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program, and the Masters in Digital Humanities curricula. They also thought through how a DoOO project might integrate and connect with the CUNY Academic Commons, a well-established open source platform at the Graduate Center. My presentation will provide an overview of the focus group project and share possible entry points and important considerations for a DoOO project at The Graduate Center, CUNY. I will discuss the group’s vision for integrating DoOO account provision and training into existing programming and platforms at the Grad Center, and highlight how this process would allow new users to develop skills while also making clear connections between the digital affordances of Reclaim and cPanel and their own research and scholarship. I will also discuss the possibilities for student-run tech support and governance to cultivate a sense of digital ownership, establish practices for students’ management of their intellectual property, and cultivate a community of support, respect, and professional growth for graduate students at CUNY.