#DoOO #DoOO #DoOO Lookin Out Our Backdoor: Toward A Domain of One’s Own

backyard flickr photo by gagilas shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license Moving Toward a Domain of One’s Own

My wife takes our daughters out every day to Early Year Centres, the library or any other drop-in she can find. The girls can enjoy the crafts and songs and socializing with other kids and she can commiserate a little about the trials and tribulations of raising these little hurricanes. (Lucky hurricanes to have such a good mom who takes them to these hurricane meet-ups every day. She should have a business card with Storm Chaser as her title). One of the songs that’s invariably sung goes simply something like:

a smooth road, a smooth road, a smooth road, a smooth road

a rough road, a rough road, a rough road, a rough road

a windy road, a windy road, a windy road, a windy road

a bumpy road, a bumpy road, a bumpy road, a bumpy road

You have your kid(s) on your lap and you bump them up and down according to the lyrics. It’s fun and easy enough that I remember how to do it for the most part.

At my work, we’re on a road with similar varying conditions. One which I hope is leading us toward being a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) college. It’s baby steps, it’s not written down anywhere yet, and we don’t want to force it. But it’s one of them number one, ultimate goals. We don’t need to call it DoOO yet, for now it’s just “Hey! Blog a bit! Put your work out there! Have a look at your peers’ work!” To me, DoOO truly encapsulates all that online learning can and should be. It’s open, it’s human, it’s connected, it’s constructive. It’s not Internet bells and whistles so that a machine can teach you something and then tell you what you should do next. It’s sharing your take on something so that we can all scaffold off of each other. So we can understand each other. Choral explanations, in a sense.

It’s a smooth, windy, rough, bumpy, smooth road. It’s been a little windy lately so I wanted to write this down, for myself, to remind me that the journey is the best part. So today I’m just stopped, looking out the backdoor, and remembering to enjoy the journey. I hope we get there. it’s worth it regardless.

Now back to those hurricanes.

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