Pomona College now offers all students, faculty, and staff their own domain and hosted webspace. This new service empowers users to become active participants in their experience of the World Wide Web while expanding their skills and knowledge of how digital technologies work.
This new service—referred to as a Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) – affords students faculty, and staff access to their own website through the latest open-source tools such as WordPress, Scalar, Omeka S, MediaWiki, and Drupal. DoOO can be utilized for course blogging, building student websites, creating galleries or portfolios of work. Students, faculty, and staff can build individual websites or collaborate on websites with multiple authors.
DoOO is a movement and philosophy that grew out of a project at the University of Mary Washington aimed at providing users the opportunity to build a web presence that is uniquely theirs. Named after the Virginia Woolf essay, “A Room of One's Own,” DoOO is based on the idea that offering students, faculty, and staff a domain and hosted webspace allows them more opportunity to share their scholarship, control their data, and develop their online persona. In doing so, users create environments for learning, sharing, and exploring how they interact with and present themselves to the digital world.
Over the last five years, there has been widespread adoption of DoOO ideas across numerous colleges and universities. These online spaces offer institutions a robust ecosystem that promotes digital literacy, reflective engagement, and broader interdisciplinary conversations.
In some cases, DoOO has expanded the means by which course materials and assignments are shared. For example, faculty at Muhlenberg College have chosen to build their course sites through DoOO rather than a traditional Learning Management System (LMS) such as Sakai. At the University of Oklahoma, students of structural and landscape architecture use DoOO to share their projects within online portfolios. The process of posting content on one’s own website gives students, faculty, and staff greater control over the digital infrastructure they depend on. At Pomona College, we hope DoOOs will further promote digital literacy as well as a community focused on collaboration and sharing—the original purpose of the Web.
How does it work?
To get started, go to sites.pomona.edu and click the 'Get Started’ button. From there, log in with your Pomona account and complete the Pomona College “Request Form” to register for your domain.
Every account by default has:
- Full cPanel access, a web-based hosting control panel
- One-click installation of over 100 open-source applications
- Blogs, Digital Scholarship, and Gallery Systems
- Five subdomains
- Full FTP
- Databases
If you have any questions or need assistance in getting started, reach out to us by sending an email to ServiceDesk@pomona.edu or calling us at (909)-621-8061. We wish you a great spring semester!