Davidson College just announced they were awarded a Mellon Grant “to create a curricular model of digital studies that can be replicated by other small liberal arts colleges.” Pat Sellers coordinated the grant and Mark Sample will be the lead for developing the curricular model. I was particualrly excited that one of the centerpieces of the grant will include “Davidson Domains” which in many ways reinforces some of the work we’re doing with Domain of One’s Own:
Among these initiatives is “Davidson Domains,” which will provide every Davidson student a unique domain name and access to an open source platform like WordPress. The Web domain will serve as a foundation students’ online presence at Davidson and beyond. As students progress through the Davidson curriculum, they will learn how to add content to the domain from any aspect of their experience. Students might use it to display outstanding assignments, samples of internship work or research experience, and more.
This is awesome for Davidson, it’s also awesome for UMW Domains and Reclaim Hosting to help reinforce the value of some of the work we’ve been doing along these lines. External validation works wonders in-house, as I’m sure many of you know. It also helps establish that both the technical and curricular integration of something like Domain of One’s Own are not nearly as crazy as they might have seemed just a year ago. I want to believe we’re beginning to witness a subtle, yet profound, shift in thinking about how institutions can invest in a future of educational technology that is premised around networks that enable everyone on campus to help imagine what’s possible from their own online platforms. The secret sauce is working through how we can divine a sense of coherence as a campus community through syndication, aggregation, and generative juxtaposition. I really think that the fact that Davidson Domains has framing their digital studies curriculum in this way further buoys my sense that this approach defintiely has legs.
It also reaffirms what Mike Caulfield noted on Twitter a while back 
Boss just asked me why she’d never heard of UMW and #ds106 if it was so influential. Told her UMW was like the Velvet Underground of edtech.
— Mike Caulfield (@holden) October 4, 2013
