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OER23 Polaroids, Day 1

Collection of polaroids taken during the first day of OER23. This was more of a mellow onboarding, pre-confernece workshop day. Bryan Mathers ran an awesome workshop that I will be blogging in-depth tomorrow, but for now let the images of the awesome people I crossed paths with today suffice.

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Arrival Afternoon in Downtown Inverness #OER23

I did something I haven’t done in a while, I actually posted images to Flickr I took within a few hours and write titles and descriptions, and even tagged them. I know, crazy, right?

In many ways this seemingly moribund practice was resurrected by this discussion with Jon Udell on Mastodon. Jon was generously responding to my post about comparing Web 2.0 and Web3 for a presentation at OER23 this week, and his contributions were insightful (no surprise there) and started me thinking about the way many folks used to blog before the centralized social media sites. It was often for more often, a mix of long and short form, and not nearly as much psychological overhead at the idea of “writing a post.” You were just posting, it could be an image, a quick thought, or an essay, but long and short forms of writing lived together more comfortably, a practice Udell points to mico.blog as helping to preserve. More fodder for the presentation, thanks Jon!

Now, pair this with my recent post remembering the magic of the  blogging conference NorthernVoice, and you might think I am heading for a web nostalgia tailspin. Fair enough, it might be the case, but one thing that was so cool about my looking back on NorthernVoice was the tags in Flickr that allowed me to see and remember the people, spaces, and general sense of that important moment. Many people caught it, and looking back visually was magic. I was like, damn, that’s a cool way to remember.

Scott Beale’s “Northern Voice 2007”

In fact, the founder of Laughing Squid, Scott Beale, wrote a post that included the mage above (forgive the Laughing Squid ads if you click through), providing a textbook example of just this kind of short-form blogging back in the day. He threw up some links to Flickr, quickly let folks know he was in Vancouver at a groovy blog conference hobnobbing with Anil Dash in less than a full paragraph. Not bad for a few minutes work

So, in that spirit, just wanted to let everyone know I arrived in Inverness, Scotland for the OER23 conference that will kick off with  workshops and pre-conference events tomorrow, and then get going Wednesday and Thursday for two full days of re-connecting with some amazing people. I’m not sure what it is, but I am in the conference spirit right now and I am blogging like it is 2007! I will be uploading my pictures from the conference to Flickr with the tag OER23 and will also be posting here on the regular. I might event try and live blog a session or two, can you imagine that! What did Faulkner say? The past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past! Or something like that, that crazy southener!

Inverness was pretty glorious this afternoon.

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Getting Back in the Conference Swing for OER23

I was wracking my brain before starting this post to ensure I was not wrong before proclaiming that OER23 will be the first face-to-face conference I’ve attended since Domains 2019 —is that possible? Has it really been almost four years since I was at event like this in-person? I’m not entirely certain because my mind cannot be fully trusted, but I think it’s true. We did a Reclaim Roadshow in Los Angeles in November 2019, and I think the next conference on the list after that was OER20, but by April 2020 that conference was forced to pivot fully online in just a couple of weeks. Oh the good old, early days of the global pandemic. Now to be clear I travelled a quite a bit during COVID to help build an arcade in Fredericksburg, VA, but in terms of the professional development and relationship building that conferences like OER23 afford, it’s been all online for nearly 48 months. Crazy!

Reclaim Cloud is made up of a bunch of containers that look like VHS tapes, true story

But next week that all changes because Lauren and I will be heading to Inverness, Scotland to present about the “ACTUAL” Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (spoiler: its containers!) and how Reclaim Cloud provides a powerful space for sandboxing the apps and infrastructure undergirding the present/future web.

I’ll also be doing another presentation focused on what happens when “Web 2.0 and Web3 Walk into a Bar…” or how these two moments of the web might be understood in relationship to one another. Having come up as a blogger during the hey day of Web 2.0 and sticking around long enough to watch the space shift towards more populated, centralized networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., it’s been interesting to see the fediverse emerge as an alternative that’s intentionally resists platform centralization; questions the logic of amassing followers; and sneers at the seemingly inexorable logic of becoming a brand on social media.

That said, I struggle with these generalizations a bit because my introduction to Web 2.0 had much of the same liberatory rhetoric around moving the conversation away from mass media networks and creating independent nodes to publish and syndicate as one pleases with fairly easy to manage tools. It’s these unevenly reported parallels that fascinate me, so I’ll be trying to work through some of the early tenets of Web 2.0 (the social web) and Web3 (the federated web) to understand where there’s crossover and consider some of the realities that served to jettison the early optimism of Web 2.0. I figure it’s worth considering if and how any new instantiation of the web can resist the creep of capital.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress that I’ll continue to plug away at for the next several days. And then, if all goes well, I’ll get to share it on Thursday in a room with other colleagues at OER23 who might have similar questions. I relish the idea of connecting at OER23, it’s been way too long!