Whewโ what a week of Reclaim Open! This was Reclaim Hostingโs 4th hosted conference and one of the best Iโve attended to date (and hopefully many more to come!). It was my first in-person conference since the pandemic and it absolutely did not disappoint!
The week overall was incredible, full of laughter, catching up with people I hadnโt seen for several years, and even a trip down memory lane to visit the campus at UMW. Even more, attending a conference in the building Iโd spent most of my time in as a student, the Hurley Convergence Center.
Iโve been reflecting on where Iโve been, where I currently am, and where Iโm going in the Reclaim Hosting universe!
Iโve been at Reclaim since 2017, and Iโve worn many hats and everyone at the company really has! I started out as an intern focused on building out the Support documentation and learning the ropes of the support world. That evolved into a Customer Support Specialist role, where I became the frontline agent helping customers gain experience and confidence when working with their websites and student projects. Reclaim Hosting grew throughout the years, expanding teams. We now have our Infrastructure, Account Management, and Ed Tech teams! Before I knew it, Reclaim went to a 4 person team of 11 people on the team!
With the team growing, my position has changed a bit! While Iโm still working on the support team as the Senior Support Specialist, where I continue to work with our end users, my role at Reclaim has changed throughout the years. Now Iโve shifted from the Support Team Manager to working between the internal teams. I coordinate internal work requests with our Infrastructure team, train our new employees on support, and diagnoses migrations, and Iโve started joining all the awesome things happening on the Ed Tech team.
And with all the fun things currently happening, this included planning Reclaim Open! The Ed Tech team had a blast planning all of the happenings for Reclaim Open!
I knew this conference would be different since we were in person in Fredericksburg. Thereโs something about having the โhome baseโ of Fredericksburg. The other Reclaim conferences were fun, as we could travel to other cities in the States, and even conquered the internet with an online conference. Still, it was so nice to be in a familiar place in Fredericksburg.
I always enjoy hosting so I was excited to host everyone in town! There are a ton of fun things to do in Downtown Fredericksburg, and of course, Reclaim Arcade! Seeing everyone in one space after the pandemic was refreshing and uplifting. With all the ideas coming through every session from the Unconference to the scheduled sessions was great!
What was super cool tooโ getting to see our Infrastructure team take on the registration table! Noah and Goutam rocked it!
Weโre moving through the decades! Since we held the conference at the Hurley Convergence Center, we wanted to create a throwback and recreate a living room for the Art Fair! This time we went 10 years in the future to create a living room from the 90s.
We found a desk from a second-hand store and sifted through Goodwill for decorations. Tim lent some video game consoles from the Arcade. Taylor grabbed a monitor and computer tower on eBay to use a Mister to emulate Windows 95 too. I had the monitor and computer tower in my dining room for a solid couple of weeks before the conference started.
Outside of the pre-conference prep, we decided to film a documentary! This was such an amazing feat in itself, Taylor, Amanda, Pilot, and I created. This was an idea Jim wanted to create live during the conference, showcasing the themes, Where the Web Was, Is, and Will Be.
I was in charge of asking the questions during each interview, where weโd ask questions like:
Then Pilot took very thorough notes on what each participant described and noted the timestamp for each question. After each interview, weโd upload the files to Google Drive to send off to Amanda in New York to clip/edit! Finally, Amanda would upload the edited clips for Taylor to edit the full video together. It turned out so well! Stay tuned for the full release and directorsโ cut in July!
I was so grateful to interview all of the participants! Everyone had so many thoughtful and interesting perspectives. Their experience with the web, what theyโre working on now, what work they want to see in the community continue to grow, and where the web is going!
Everyone was super hopeful and optimistic. Theyโre excited about the new opportunities the web is bringing into our field, even if they seem bleak (cough cough AI tools)โ but theyโve chosen to look at the awesome projects and work thatโs coming out of these tools.
In the interview with Lee, she started talking about her optimism for learning and sheโs seeing this through her daughterโs experience. Lee was so excited to see how they created online projects and utilized them in storytelling. Itโs very reminiscent of the ds106 days.
I am always impressed by Pilotโs thorough note-taking. They were typing away the entire time I was asking questions, and it made things super easy to track through editing!
Whatโs more, everyone who presented was amazing! I caught a few presentations and every keynote was thought-provoking and inspiring. Thank goodness we were able to pull off the hybrid element to the conference as I still have a lot fo catching up to do.
So now the question is, where are we going? The future is always interesting to talk about. Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years? I always like to say the future is optimistic.
Iโd love to see more younger voices in our community, sharing their work and awesome perspectives. Iโd love to explore how our work can be sustainable too. Working online has its perks, but finding small ways to help the environment a bit, will help keep it around far longer.
Will our lives turn out to be Solar Punk (one of my key takeaways throughout Bryan Alexanderโs keynote)? What will that look like?
As for me personally, Iโd love to continue working with Reclaim! My time at Reclaim has been awesome so far and I canโt wait to see where it goes! Iโd also love to pick up the blog a bit more. I keep telling myself to but I always forget. So whether itโs a short post or a long post covering events Iโm going to post more! So hereโs to Reclaim Open, a revitalizing event that brings out new ideas to refresh us for the summer and to keep brainstorming new ideas!
I think itโs about time that I dust this blog off!
Itโs been almost a year since I last blogged about one of Reclaimโs first Flex Courses in Reclaim Ed Tech, and now weโve completed the first year! Throughout that year weโve put on several flex courses, workshops, and even planning for a Conference! (P.S. You should go register for all the awesome stuff planned!)
Towards the latter half of the year, I started participating in a lot of the Flex Courses and even the WordPress Multisite and Domain of Oneโs Own Workshops. Weโve got most of these in our Reclaim Hosting EdTech Discord so I would highly recommend checking it out! Weโve got a ton of goodness going on in that Discord that anyone from the Reclaim Hosting community can join in!
So to talk more about the Flex Courses, I joined in during the OBS sessions back in January starting with OBS, Open Broadcaster Software.
OBS is such great software if youโre looking to start streaming to Youtube or Twitch. I really enjoyed working with this software in an educational light, and itโs been vital to the Flex Course filming. Iโve only used it a handful of times until then and Iโve seen a bunch of people I follow use it for their gaming streams.
Next, was a Discord course! This was taking a dive into how you can set up a Discord server for your class, club or any large group in general. The session I worked through was with Pilot looking at setting up the server and using templates, and what you can do with your serverโ and throughout the month we looked at how Reclaim uses Discord to host virtual events.
This month; Weโre wrapping up our Flex Course around Installatron applications. Most folks know you can install WordPress easily through Installatron, so we wanted to highlight some of the lesser-known applications like Omeka Classic and Omeka S as well as YOURLs, Matomo and Scalar. I was working on the Omkea Classic and Omeka S Sessions with Amanda and joined Taylor for the YOURLs session. These are some really awesome tools to use for any projects/classes/archives.
Itโs been really fun to work on the Ed Tech team on the side. While Iโm still incredibly involved with the Support Team, Iโm loving the crossover we have between all the teams lately, keeping support at the core of Reclaimโs values. And itโs been so fun to work with my coworkers on some fun courses!
There are many more Flex Courses to come and Iโm excited to see where year 2 of Ed Tech takes us! Check out the Youtube channel and discord when you get a chance too, to stay up to date on all things Ed Tech.