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I probably don’t have to convince anyone attending THATCamp that it’s important to cultivate – and to teach our students to cultivate – an online presence. But what does it mean, in practice, to build and maintain a personal cyberinfrastructure?

I can imagine taking a session like this in a couple different, and not necessarily mutually exclusive directions:

1. The technical · How do you get started with a website of your own? How do you use personal web space as a hub, an aggregator, and an archiver of the content you produce in places scattered around the web?
2. The theoretical and the political · Most of us live our digital lives in many places. The content I create lives on my blog, on group blogs, on Twitter, on Github, on Gmail, etc. Some of these places are under my direct control, others are not. What are the personal-data-related arguments for moving away from third-party content-storage services like Twitter and Google? On the other hand, is there a tension between the idea that we should create content only in our own spaces and the underlying distributed spirit of the Internet itself? In short, is a truly personal cyberinfrastructure something we should even be aspiring for?
3. The pedagogical · Ed tech gurus like Gardner Campbell (from whom I believe I’m stealing the phrase ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’) and Jim Groom have experimented with and theorized about cyberinfrastructure in the classroom, teaching their students how to set up their own servers and also how to think about their identities as full citizens of the web. What is to be gained by such an exercise? Is it worth your class time to teach students about things like cPanel and WordPress? Should we fight the apparent tendency for our students to live their online lives in third-party silos like Facebook?

What do you think? Is there the makings of a session here?