My latest book is now available for purchase.

Claim Your Domain – and Own Your Online Presence is part of the series “Solutions for Modern Learning” and draws on my work on students “reclaiming” their education and in particularly owning their own domain. (Other titles in the series, edited by Will Richardson and published by Solution Tree, include The End of School as We Know It by Bruce Dixon, Freedom to Learn by Will Richardson, and Make School Meaningful – And Fun by Roger Schank.)

From the publisher’s description:

Help protect student work – and more importantly – student identity. This powerful book puts learners at the forefront of education to ensure they control their schoolwork, content, and data. Dig deep into the digital revolution occurring in schools and classrooms, explore how to incorporate traditional instructional practices in the digital classroom, and understand the skills students need to be digitally literate.

It’s quite a short book and it’s probably familiar territory to those who’ve followed my work. In it, I look at the ways in which students’ personal data is increasingly wrenched from their (or their parents’) control, thanks to new digital technologies that schools compel students to use. I'm interested in pushing back on this particular vision for ed-tech, and I want us to ask: how do we change education technology (and more broadly, education itself) from an extraction effort so something that students have ownership over. One of the cornerstones of this effort is, of course, the University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own Initiative.

Students – all of us really – should work to build and adopt technologies that we control for ourselves. Hopefully this book helps to lay out the groundwork for why this is so crucial.