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We’re honored to have edtech’s patron saint of resisting student surveillance, Ian Linkletter, join us on July 24th at 12 PM Eastern (9 AM Pacific) to discuss the crucial role of ethical edtech in our current moment. As many of you already know, Ian’s experience battling Proctorio’s SLAPP lawsuit has provided him a uniquely personal perspective on the tremendous costs and dangers of ceding control of higher education’s mission to greedy, unscrupulous vendors. His cause is that of anyone who believes education is not only a fundamental right, but provides the basic toolkit for every citizen to battle tyranny. Join us at https://watch.reclaimed.tech/reclaim-open for Ian’s call to action advocating for ethical edtech in the work we do.
Olia Lialina reading old school web publishing books
As part of our Reclaim Open online program we will be hosting scholar and artist Olia Lialina. From her early interactive hypertext My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) to her archival work to resurrect Geocities in the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project. Lialina’s art and criticism have consistently focused on the web as a personal, creative universe to refactor how we imagine space, time, and relationships on the world wide web. She has been a professor of New Media at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart since 1999, and through her teaching, research, art, and writing provides a consistent voice to help us understand early web aesthetics, such the Prof. Dr. Style which highlights the seminal role universities played in the early look and feel of the web. More recently she has been exploring the current trajectory of the web moving “From My to Me.” Her talk at Reclaim, “Seeing 30 years of the WWW through different trajectories,” will map broader design and usability shifts over 30 years of the web through distinct moments and trajectories that highlight the steady loss of agency with monolithic platforms that erase the playful, personal spirit that made this space revolutionary. The talk will be streamed freely for any and all interested on July 17th at 12 PM Eastern (6 PM Central European) at https://watch.reclaimed.tech/reclaim-open
Also, if you’d like to interact with the stream, you can join Reclaim’s Discord instance at http://reclaimed.tech/discord and follow the Reclaim Open channel for live discussion during the event.
It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!
Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.
Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.
To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….
I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:
Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.
Dr. Oblivion!
A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!
So there’s two reasons for this post. The first is that I was going through my list of those miscellaneous ideas that you can do at some point in the future that would be fun or helpful (hopefully) but that you never quite get around to, and I saw something on there that seemed like it would be quick and maybe hopefully useful to someone.
The second one is that, by the deadlines that I personally have set, today is the last day to publish a blog post that will make it into the June newsletter and if I put something out then I will have two blog posts in a newsletter for the first time since October 2022 (I need to blog more).
Anyway, I was going through my to-do list and in the section of “miscellaneous ideas for the future” I saw something about making a diagram of how the three systems of Domain of One’s Own work together. It’s something I have to explain a lot when training new admins, and while I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on the overarching metaphor by now, training usually focuses on each system’s user interface and what admins can do with that system, so I always worry I’ve skimped on making sure they’ve got the full picture.
To that end, I made a diagram.
This was very much something I saw on the list and went “Hey, I could do a pretty version of that in the future given a couple of days and some dedicated resources, or I could do a functional version of that right now using Google Drive’s weird photomanipulation-ish drawing platform.” And functional now is better than pretty later.
So, voila: The Diagram.
Hope I didn’t hype it up too much.
Is this accurate? That’s gonna be a strong “maybe.” But it’s close enough for our purposes, it only took about twenty minutes, and I got this blog post done in time for the Roundup deadline, so I’m going to call this a win.
It’s definitely not perfect. Looking at it now I’m thinking of all the little adjustments that I want to make, both in the text and in the design. But like I said back in October, sometimes you have to let perfection go.
Also, it’s here as a PDF too I guess, since Google Draw also offers that as an export format.
This is the first time I have written about the AI craze that has swept the web over the past 6 months or so. I’ve been intentionally resisting the urge given so many of the hot takes, hysteria, and complaints seem pointless. The only way to start wrapping your head around this post-humanistic beast that cannot die is through art, and so it happened when I was chatting with Michael Branson Smith (MBS) about what he might present at Reclaim Open. We had a wide-ranging chat, as always, and he started talking about using AI to generate a “fake” presentation, all he would need is someone who has written about a topic extensively and we can get access to samples of both their video and audio likeness. I think at that point MBS said something to the effect of, “You know, someone like Alan and his SPLOTs.” BINGO!
Image credit: Alan Levine’s “Combination of one frame from the Reclaim Open 2023 presentation The SPLOT Revolution will be Artificial with a conference logo and a SPLOT logo,” call the whole thing CC BY.
The rest is kind of history, I was thrilled to play some small role as a sounding board for MBS’s epic vision. In fact, I almost torpedoed it by suggesting we do it entirely without letting Alan know beforehand. I was fascinated by what his reaction would be after discovering his likeness and ideas were used to present at Reclaim Open without any prior head’s up. I mean it would give him another reason to rail against AI, right? But this was not so much because I wanted to piss him off, but because I think it would underline the blurry ethical lines where open, available content and credit get deeply complicated in the realm of AI generated content. That said, I also recognized that making a statement about AI and ethics was less important than offending a friend, so we looped Alan in, and he provided video and audio for MBS to train for A.I. Levine’s 5-minute talk on SPLOTs.*
The session was amazing, and you can watch it above in all its glorious hilarity. At the last minute we had the idea to loop Alan into the presentation with the idea of him acting irate and faking indignation at the whole thing. Alan, as expected, was even better than his A.I. likeness, and it was really a joyful, thoughtful session that underscored the serious implications of this new technology without being pedantic or sensational. It was also amazing to have Alan play such a powerful role at Reclaim Open from afar and, of course, he already blogged it.
This session also helped me understand the best way, at least for me, to come to terms with the artificial elephant on the web, namely to think of it as a creative challenge to explore the limits and possibilities of this tech. This spawned the idea of shopping around a new iteration of ds106 that’s centered on AI, which a subsequent session that put ds106 on trial cemented, but more on that in another post.
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*According to MBS, the audio and video he found elsewhere were even more effective, and I am hoping MBS will blog a post-mortem in which he narrrates his process, because it was pretty amazing.
YAPARO! or, yet another post about Reclaim Open 
I’ve been inspired by so many great posts about Reclaim Open, and I’d spend more time summarizing them here, but that’s in the works for Reclaim Roundup, so I’ll try not to duplicate efforts. That said, Tim Klapdor already did a lot of this work in his “Journal – Week 24 2023” post. I love Tim, and he’s one of the many folks we missed dearly at Reclaim Open, but his spirit was very much present, particularly his brilliant thinking in this post about the coming costs of universities outsourcing our IT expertise—I still need to blog it, but let this quote suffice for the moment:
Almost every University now spends millions of dollars every year as a tax to Microsoft and AWS for hardware and a handful of software vendors to run their core business. Without spending that money, the University could not exist. They are now trapped into paying this indefinitely, and because the competition has been eaten up over time, we are now in a monopolistic vice. Over the next few years, we will see the vice tighten and the costs rise.
The only way to exit this state is to escape it entirely. Applying the same ideals as renewable energy – what if the new University set itself up to run independently as a sovereign entity, not reliant on 3rd party vendors and their costs? What if it embraced open-source software and collective hardware, not just as a consumer but as a contributor? What if it then sold those services and knowledge to others?
This outsourcing of core infrastructure and, as a result, staff expertise has absolutely become the rule in higher ed IT. Something folks at OpenETC and CUNY, amongst others, have pushed back on for years, but there is no denying the pandemic accelerated that process. Tim’s idea that the cost vice from these monolithic services will only get tighter and universities need to start considering alternatives sooner than later is right on. His likening that to renewable energy hits on yet another theme from Reclaim Open, and I’m beginning to get a sense that there is a core of edtech thinkers that are converging on some of these ideas and it is exciting to witness (Anne-Marie Scott is another I recently quoted).
And this is where the experience on the ground at Reclaim Open comes in, three days of thinking through this stuff with such awesome people in a loose, congenial environment was the ultimate professional development for the Reclaim Hosting team. Some of the Reclaim crew have only a vague idea of the world wide web of ed tech (whereas others have come up in it), so creating an experience where everyone got to hear, talk, and interact with practitioners in this field was the absolute best experiential learning imaginable.
I mean I hope everyone who came to Reclaim Open had a good time, I sure did, but at the same time this conference was pretty selfish. I wanted this group of passionate, generous educators who showed up to interact with a young, amazing team that’s just getting its feet. I knew the people we had collected could provide a welcome reminder to lead with the heart and the art. Watching the Reclaim team get inspired was the most powerful element of the three-day event. Which was epitomized by the moment when Noah, who started 8 months ago, came up to me after the last day and said “I kept hearing about this Aaron Schwartz guy, so I Googled him and WOW!” That was magic. I knew then and there this was akin to Faculty Academy or Northern Voice during my formative edtech years—I needed that community. Turns out we all do to some extent. Putting together people at different stages in their career provides a longer, inter-generational sense of what was, is, and can be in any field. But particularly in a field like edtech where the story is constantly being hijacked by the industry, erasing the work of many who have been part of a small, human-scaled community using accessible tech for teaching and learning—a noble calling that cannot, as Tim Klapdor reminds us, thrive in the monopolistic vacuum of big tech.
Getting the band back together! image credit: “DTLT at Reclaim Open” by Shannon Hauser
Ok, so there’s that, which brings me to the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology (DTLT) panel that took place during the un-conference. It was another selfish undertaking that brought together many of the original DTLT staff at UMW that worked on campus at some point between the mid 90s through today. All of the people on that panel I consider both friends and amazing colleagues, and they all had a huge impact on my personal and professional career. I cannot overstate how much I love these people, each and every one. So again, I am recognizing some deep bias here. That said, this was a team that many in the world of open web edtech looked at as a “city upon the hill,” we were brash, we wove the web into just about every course on campus, and we did it ethically and humanely. We worked individually with faculty and students alike, we taught some far-out classes to lead by example, and we built* and maintained the infrastructure where all this happened. We did the work and also had a ton of fun doing it, we were a team of people UMW had invested in for more than 20 years and the proof was in the pudding, things got done, the culture changed, and the possibilities of thinking through the web as a core literacy for the liberal arts was not only floated, but buttressed by an entire group that had the tools at their disposal to scale that vision across departments for an entire campus. What happened at UMW was impressive, people took notice, and there was a sense of anything’s possible. The “Dream team,” if you will, but nothing lasts forever, the pendulum swings back, and as Luke noted in his amazing post reflecting on Reclaim Open:
Much of the past decade has been spent refining, defending, and caring for that space with a cadre of comrades, while helping new generations of scholars learn how to build through it towards their goals. Though that work continues, I’ve watched with growing angst as the public university system all around us becomes ever more susceptible to the neoliberal logics of extraction, surveillance, and control. The work has become more tiring, and I came to Reclaim Open hoping to make better sense of my past and present, and to think more about futures I could be proud of, or even energized by.
It has been a tough decade for edtech, and there is a lot to be concerned about for sure, but I wonder if Tim Klapdor’s vision around university’s reclaiming their centrality by investing in people, not vendors, might be one possible future. And I want to believe teams like Reclaim Hosting model a lot of the values and work that was traditionally the domain of universities, that’s part of the education of this emerging team at Reclaim—to understand the deep connection we have to the universities we support, to understand in so many ways we were born of that system, but have also figured out a way to transcend some of its more internecine tendencies when it comes to the plague of our current generation of incompetent administration. This might be where Luke Waltzer’s highlight of the role of Chip German in the formation and preservation of UMW’s DTLT is quite telling:
The convening launched with a panel featuring the DTLT All-Stars reminiscing about what had been, and trying to identify the ingredients in the special sauce that made that unit such a powerhouse of innovation and experimentation 10-15 years ago. I came away thinking: damn, Chip German is the unsung hero of this story. His perspicaciousness and advocacy cleared the space for the DTLT gang to do their thing, and then he protected it.
How much of our current malaise in edtech is driven by a sense of capitulating both agency and vision for our universities to those that simply want to sell us a solution? I do understand the irony of me saying this as a vendor, but at the same time I think Reclaim Hosting is much more than that, and in some ways the state of the university administration and purchasing economy has forced us into a kind of exile, if you will. Is the only space for a dream team like DTLT in 2023 outside the walls of higher ed? I don’t think so, the work Kathleen Fitzpatrick is doing at Michigan State University highlights a powerful node of resistance, as do the aforementioned OpenETC and the CUNY mafia’s open insurrection. I’m sure there are many others, but the key is connecting those stories and collectively weaving a narrative of resistance and hope to battle the exhaustion and disillusionment. I do think Reclaim is a dream team in the making, but what became abundantly clear at Reclaim Open is that cannot happen in a vacuum, this needs to be a networked, connected ‘movement’ (the scare quotes are for Brian Lamb) that both articulates and creates the future of edtech we want to see. I think Reclaim is doing our part, but we need to do it in collaboration with others—that collective action is the thing that will push that pendulum away from its current parabola towards disconnection. And as Meredith Fierro notes in her forward-looking meditation on Reclaim Open:
I’d love to see more younger voices in our community, sharing their work and awesome perspectives. I’d 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.
Voices like Amy Gay, Ruth Carpenter, Annescia Dillard, Nick Plank, and Alex Carney to name just a few were part of a new community of edtech that I want to hear more from, and I would throw that overseas to Lauren Heywood and Alex Masters in the UK. So many awesome folks. In fact, I see a lot of their fellow travelers in the cast of characters that comprises the Reclaim crew, all of whom were fired up about Bryan Alexander’s talk around the future and the importance of sustainability, renewable energy, and a way towards some kind of punk, whether edu, solar, or hope, they all provide an opening beyond our moment.
“The Reclaim Hosting Crew post Reclaim Open” image stolen from Meredith
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*Is installing WordPress building?
Creating a couple of videos highlighting Taylor’s 1-click Mastodon installer for Reclaim Cloud has been on my to-do for too long, so this week I knocked it out. I did two quick videos, the first takes you through the basic install. While the installer is a Docker container and most of the heavy lifting is done for you, there are still some manual pieces like pointing a domain, creating an admin account, and restarting the container. Taylor’s guide goes through these points in detail, so this is really just a video supplement to the docs.
The follow-up video is focused on where and how to update the environment variables in the .env file. You use the .env file to add details for transactional email like Mailgun, as well as to point the media storage to a third-party S3-compatible service like Digital Ocean’s Spaces. Once again, this video serves to reinforce the guide we already have for doing this, so if the video fails you can fallback on the guide.
The final piece would be to highlight the simple set of commands to upgrade to a newer Mastodon version. I am working with Taylor to make sure that is working as expected, once that happens I’ll be sure to finish off this trilogy of Mastodon 1-click awesome.
To be clear, it was Taylor Jadin who upgraded my PeerTube instance running at bava.tv from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13. I did watch and learn as he worked through the process, so I’m some the wiser, but I’m still wrapping my head around both working in containers as well as trying to understand the particularities of PostgreSQL.
So in many ways this post is simply a redirect to Taylor’s post “Some notes on upgrading PostgreSQL in Docker” where he provides context and a step-by-step for upgrading PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13, but it probably abstracts pretty well for upgrading a PostgreSQL container more generally.
At this point you might be thinking, “What’s up with you, Groom? Why are you making Taylor update your instance of PeerTube you lazy fascist!” Fair enough, I’m lazy and I do live in Italy, but there are reasons for this beyond those two things.
First off, working together on upgrades like this provides a low-stakes. collaborative opportunity to help us get more comfortable with supporting this awesome open source YouTube alternative.
Secondly, when we make time for projects like this that seem “low priority” it often pushes us to blog it, which is particularly important given there’s not so much help out there for folks tinkering with PeerTube.
So it’s directly related to our bigger push for honing our Reclaim Cloud support game, and Taylor is definitely our lead in that space. What’s more, watching him work not only helps me, but I think helps Reclaim more generally continue to push into the realm of containerized infrastructure. So that is my argument for having him upgrade my PeerTube PostgreSQL version and I am sticking to it!
Thanks Taylor, you rule!
I pretty much knew that my first post about Reclaim Open would be about scale. That was definitely one of the big takeaways from me over that re-invigorating, celebratory 3 day event. Keep in mind I helped organize the event, so I’m owning my bias out the gate. Even better is that Anne-Marie Scott—who travelled all the way from Scotland to join us in Fredericksburg, VA—already got the discussion rolling with her post “#ReclaimOpen – reclaiming human scale.” Anne-Marie is pretty awesome, and her thinking around open infrastructure and understanding scale in terms of augmentation and scaling people’s possibility rather than the metastasizing growth metric it has mutated into as a result of the consolidated social networks that continue to cannibalize any and all healthy cells left to make a buck. The hollowed out corpse was once a vibrant field of discourse. As Anne-Marie notes in the above referenced post:
The drive for scale seems to have become to scourge of our age. Mass education at the expense of meaningful relations and genuine community; AI operating at the scale of planetary effects. I have many more thoughts that I need to sit and digest properly.
The link between our unsustainable relationship with the planet and the ever increasing toxic climate on many of the predominant social networks is nothing new, but it really hit me in the gut at Reclaim Open. And again, as Anne-Marie notes this was a whole theme across sessions, from
Lee Skallerup Bessette challenging us to think about what tech was truly necessary, and Tom Woodward extolling the accessibility and usability virtues of stripping our websites right back.
To Bryan Alexander’s tour-de-force “Thinking about the Future of the Web” (full recording here) that really looked into the abyss with an honest, almost hopeful, take.
Image credit: “Bryan Alexander” by Tom Woodward
But all that while a particulate haze from Canadian forest fires descended on the ‘burg, a kind of Raven for our time. Nevermore, nevermore! It was hard to look away, but it was also helpful to be reminded the stakes are far greater than textbooks and resources when it comes to the open web; we’re fighting for survival in some fundamental ways. Which is probably why things like Hopepunk and Solarpunk were invoked repeatedly (I think I am just re-writing Anne-Marie’s post, is that the ultimate compliment?), as the search for viable alternatives are starting to take on real resonance as the cultural/political lines are being drawn ever more deeply across the US and Europe.
Slide from Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s the talk “The Web was Never Social”
But there was also faith in the seed of blogging in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s pitch-perfect talk about how “We Have Never Been Social: Web 2.0 and What Went Wrong.”
It’s a really brilliant meditation on the “web that was” that remains rooted in the “web that is” and can be with a call to a return to distributed, de-centralized networks. The coolest part of it all is Kathleen practices what she preaches by not only blogging, but helping stand-up one of higher ed’s most compelling Mastodon communities, namely hcommons.social. It’s just this kind of hopeful sense of working with generosity and a purpose that was a necessary adjacent reality to the waves of loss that pervades the social web as we knew it. This uplifting sense that the foundations are still there and the whole reason we got into this thing to begin with: to try to connect and create a sense of community, and that is not something any one platform can take away from us. This message helped balance the competing bouts of pessimism and optimism for what’s to come.
And that is just part of it, but let me stop there and start another post around Rajiv Jhangiani’s meditations on colonization and the open web as well as the UMW reunion session and many, many more. Like with OER23 there is no way I am going to get it all in one post, not need it be, and there are still so many posts I need to reference, so I might draw this out a bit, if even just to hold onto the magic just a bit longer….
Whew– what a week of Reclaim Open! This was Reclaim Hosting’s 4th hosted conference and one of the best I’ve 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 hadn’t 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 I’d spent most of my time in as a student, the Hurley Convergence Center.
I’ve been reflecting on where I’ve been, where I currently am, and where I’m going in the Reclaim Hosting universe!
I’ve been at Reclaim since 2017, and I’ve 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 I’m 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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. There’s something about having the “home base” 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 too– getting to see our Infrastructure team take on the registration table! Noah and Goutam rocked it!
We’re 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 we’d ask questions like:
Then Pilot took very thorough notes on what each participant described and noted the timestamp for each question. After each interview, we’d 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 directors’ 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 they’re 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. They’re excited about the new opportunities the web is bringing into our field, even if they seem bleak (cough cough AI tools)– but they’ve chosen to look at the awesome projects and work that’s coming out of these tools.
In the interview with Lee, she started talking about her optimism for learning and she’s seeing this through her daughter’s experience. Lee was so excited to see how they created online projects and utilized them in storytelling. It’s very reminiscent of the ds106 days.
I am always impressed by Pilot’s thorough note-taking. They were typing away the entire time I was asking questions, and it made things super easy to track through editing!
What’s 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.
I’d love to see more younger voices in our community, sharing their work and awesome perspectives. I’d 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 Alexander’s keynote)? What will that look like?
As for me personally, I’d love to continue working with Reclaim! My time at Reclaim has been awesome so far and I can’t wait to see where it goes! I’d also love to pick up the blog a bit more. I keep telling myself to but I always forget. So whether it’s a short post or a long post covering events I’m going to post more! So here’s to Reclaim Open, a revitalizing event that brings out new ideas to refresh us for the summer and to keep brainstorming new ideas!
Oi. My clever blog post title generator is not really jelling this morning (the unArtificial quasiIntelligence needs more coffee).
The VHS tape for #ReclaimOpen 2023 has reached the end spool, and people are dusting their blogs off to reflect on the tri-part questions of the Open Web: How We Got There, Where We Are, and We Could Go. I was not on the ground there and only caught bits on reruns (apparently my generated spawn crashed the scene).
From Jon Udell’s post in Mastodon, I was invigorated by Mo Pelzel’s thoughts on Whence and Whither the Web: Some Thoughts on Reclaim Open, e.g.
…when it comes to appreciating the sheer magic of the hyperlink. To this day I have not lost the sense of wonder about this marvelous invention.
https://morrispelzel.com/uncategorized/whence-and-whither-the-web-some-thoughts-on-reclaim-open/
and teaching me the wonderful concept of anamnesis, — “refers to ‘making present again,’ or experiencing the meaning of past events as being fully present.”
This circles back to something that has been floating as a write worthy topic, and how delightful it is to upend and bend around what you thinks is right. Let a new tape roll.
Ages ago (months) amongst noticing the drying up of colleagues blog posts in my reader and noticing how many were sharing their content in the various social spaces, I was bit taken back. Many resources I saw being created, activities, collections of things, that I typically would have thought people would publish as good ole durable web pages or something in a blog powered platform– were, arggh, shared as Google Docs.
Docs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me the use of the shared document. But really, it is the marginal evolution of the Word Processor. I know why people reach for them – it’s easy to use (who wants to WRITE HTML??) (me), it publishes to the web, and its the environment their work places them for large chunks of the day.
Yet, the creation of doc hosted web pages rings of “being on the web but not of the web” (Have you ever done view source on a Google doc?, can you really grasp the content and meaning it’s un-HTML a melange of JavaScript?). Here’s some beef:
FreshRSS https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pGhX4uWZLJYsyo78nAydlZQ10Z8rBT-QutlYZXugly4U/edit?usp=sharing You cannot even foresee what the link leads to from its URL, not its source (e.g. a domain name) nor any kind of file name that suggests its relevant. I thought I had more. But when I think of the Open Web as the place of where we “got there”, is a Web of Documents really going to be anything more than a google sized pile of free floating papers, only findable by… its search? Is this just on the web but not very web like in spirit?
Yeah, I did not really have well developed case there, just some disgruntlement and seeing an increasing abandonment of creating web content as the kind of web content I know and love, the kind you can inspect as source and learn something or understand how it is constructed.
Hence the blog post never congealed.
I did a complete turn around on my chewing of sour web games when I stumbled across this piece on The Doc Web, published in some thing called “Lens” (c.f. the web as an infinite space that seems to be boundless), even filed in a section called Escape the Algorithm “Remote corners of the internet—through the eyes of its finest explorers” That speaks to me as a rabbit holer.
This article completely undermined my so called “beef”
?No one would mistake a word processor for the front page of the internet, not unless their computer is nothing more than a typewriter. A hammer is not a portal, and Google Docs, the word processor of our time, is nothing more than a hammer to the nail of language. Right?
https://lensmag.xyz/story/the-doc-web
Slow down. Google Docs may wear the clothing of a tool, but their affordances teem over, making them so much more. After all, you’re reading this doc right now, and as far as I know I’m not using a typewriter, and you’re not looking over my shoulder. This doc is public, and so are countless others. These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige. But they form an impossibly large dark web, a web that is dark not as a result of overt obfuscation but because of a softer approach to publishing. I call this space the “doc web,” and these are its axioms.
It’s Axioms knock down my disdain bit by bit. What I saw as a negative in the obfuscation of the web address at foretelling its content, hits on the magic of storytelling, with the element of surprise. An invitation to explore without knowing what’s ahead. And it really range true with the fantastic linked list of examples in Axiom 5, where it shows you the fantastic ways some utterly creative souls have subverted the usual “documentness” of the way 99.9% of use use Google Docs (like ye olde Word Processor) and have created some insanely enjoyable web corners.
Just glance:
I leave it for you to discover, but these are mind blowing examples of web ingenuity subverting the document concept:
I love this kind of stuff. This shows that despite the age of our algorithmic AI wielding web T-Rex’s, there are all kinds of creative mammal scurrying around in the web underbrush.
I can dig this Web of Docs.
Speaking of the web that was- we always talked about the web as “pages” (skeuomorphing as much as “dialing” a phone) — the construct of them with formatting “tags” is very much taken from the old document producing methods that pre-date the web.
And smack my own head in memories- it very much was the need for “publishing” documents in a shared format got me on the web in 1993. In my work then at the central faculty development office at the Maricopa Community Colleges, I was eager to provide across our large system means for people to yes, share resources, but also, our published journal which had been going out in campus mail on paper.
I was driven then to find digital ways to share so much information I saw in paper. And while we had a system wide shared AppleTalk network for mac users, half of the system was on Windows PCs. Until late 1993, I had been making a lot of effort to make resources available on a Gopher server (a Mac II plugged into the network).
I went through some extraordinary (and laborious) efforts once to publish our journal as a HypeCard stack and convert it with some app to Toolbook (which ran on windows). It worked… but was really ugly to do.
In that time I had come across the early text based World Wide Web (as it had to be said them) browsers, you’d have to enter a number on a command line to follow a hyperlink, and most of what I saw was papers of some physics lab in Switzerland. It was not “clicking” yet.
Then, like many lightning bolts I had, a wise figure intervened. In October 1993 I was visiting Phoenix College for a tech showcase event, and a great colleague named Jim Walters, very wizard like, handing me a floppy disc upon which he had written “MOSAIC”. All he said was, “Hey Alan, you like the internet, try this.”
This was always a powerful lesson- Jim was not trying to techsplain to me or show off his vast experience, he handed me an invitation to explore. He made a judgement call that this might be of interest.
That of course changed everything. That the web was navigable in this first visual web browser my clicking links, and it included images, even crude audio/video, was a mind opener. And then when I came across the NCSA Guide to HTML. I saw that with a simple text editor, I could create rich media content, that could be connected to other places with this magic href tags– and best of all, it was in a format that both Mac and PC computers could navigate the same content.
In about two weeks of getting that floppy disc, I came across software that would let me run a public web server from a Mac SE/30 plugged into an ethernet port on my office, and I was off on this journey.
And the bigger light was, yes, I had some know how to set up a web server, but the fact that web pages crafted in HTML could actually be shared on floppy discs or local media, meant that I could help faculty learn to create their own web media documents, etc, becoming maybe my first somewhat successful web project beyond my institution, Writing HTML.
And that still rings to me, here 30 years after my first web server, that the act of writing the web, not just clicking buttons in an interface, or at least conceptually understanding how the href tag works, is the magic light in all the mix.
The very fact, that through mostly a tactile act of writing a tag, I can create a linked connection from my blog here, to say Mo’s post is completely what the open web was and still is about.
The link. And Writing Links is an act of generosity for both the linkee and the reader.
A web of Documents or the Doc Web? It does not matter, it’s all webbed.
Featured Image:
Coming off of Reclaim Open, one of the things I’m thinking about is online resources for self-teaching beginners. When we were interviewing people for the documentary, we asked people what they were glad the internet had now, in the present, that it hadn’t had in the past. And a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot — talked about how there’s a plethora of learning resources for beginners on just about any subject. Which got me thinking about the learning resources that I’ve used and the tutorials I’ve tried to follow.
There are so many things that I want to learn. I’ve got a post in the works about teaching myself to draw. About a month ago, I hit a milestone on my Duolingo streak (800 days!). I used to practice guitar, though I’ve fallen out of that habit in the past year. For a while I was experimenting with some of the beginner guides to Unity. I have an abundance of tutorials and resources on various topics bookmarked — a beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails, Codecademy, HackerRank, etc. — which I’ve used… at some point in the past. I keep a list of topics to research that only gets longer and longer.
All this, and I still feel like a dabbler in everything. Part of it is that I’ve put aside topics for long periods of time (almost everything except Duolingo, honestly). That’s naturally led to skill atrophy and forgetting what I was doing, which means difficulty picking up where I left off. But for the one thing I have stuck with, I don’t feel like I’m getting any better — my Italian is beginner-level at best, with a poor grasp of grammar and difficulty remembering vocabulary when I need it.
So I’m thinking: what are the differences in the resources I’ve looked at? What do they require? Where do they go together, and where do they fall short?
The framework I’ve got in my head right now for self-teaching is structured vs unstructured learning resources.
Structured resources are things like Duolingo or Codecademy, a series of tutorials designed to build on each other. Unstructured resources are more like the Youtube video tutorials that exist for drawing or guitar, and their related practice tools (guitar tab websites, figure drawing photo banks).
Structured resources are designed methodically by one group in a way that emphasizes logical progress from point A to point B to point C. There’s a general focus on fundamentals first, then building up to more advanced concepts, with exercises designed to practice each new topic. The exercises are usually short and easy enough that lessons can be completed in 5-10 minutes max, to encourage making learning a routine and habitual practice. The focus is on progressing through the course.
Unstructured resources means that there’s a wide range of sources from various unconnected groups, which all specialize in different topics. Learning is self-directed, since there’s no clear path connecting everything, and there are few if any pre-built exercises (a given resource might have 2 or 3, but none of them hang together). Learners can focus their studying in their weakest areas, or specialize in the topics that most interest them, and the lack of pre-built exercises means that their learning goals shape what they’re working on — which means that there’s more intrinsic motivation to learn, since they’re tailoring their practice to their own interests. The most common advice I hear for people who want to learn guitar is “Pick a song you like, and learn to play it.” There’s simplified versions of just about every song out there so beginners can learn the most basic version, and once they have that, they can try something more advanced. It’s learning by doing.
With structured learning, there’s issues of pacing, attention span and motivation. Short, easy lessons are designed to keep attention and build routine, so you can do a little bit every day, but if you do only a little bit every day it might feel like you’re taking months or years to get anywhere. That damages motivation, which is doubly bad because you’re working towards proficiency but not a specific intrinsic goal; that makes it extra-hard to measure progress.
Curated and designed exercises may also not be right for all learners, or self-structured online learning may create certain pitfalls. For example, one major issue I have with Duolingo is that because of the way its lessons are structured, there’s no way to have exercises strengthening true composition (written or spoken). There’s options for translating back and forth between your native language and your target language, but there’s nothing along the lines of “Write a paragraph about your favorite book” or “Talk about your most recent vacation”. That’s a major barrier to fluency, since being able to read and listen in your target language is only one half of communication, and it’s the less challenging half.
With unstructured learning, though, you still get pacing, attention span and motivation issues. This time the issue is that it’s hard to know how much time to spend on certain topics, and where to start or how to build on them. Dumping time into something while feeling like you’re stumbling in the dark trying to figure out what you need to do next is a sure way to damage motivation, which can in turn make your attention focus elsewhere.
Exercises for unstructured learning can also feel repetitive, since your resources only give you a few. Everyone says the way to get good at drawing is to practice figure drawing, which is true — I have definitely improved as a result — but I don’t know how to vary it up to keep learning fresh or which details to pay attention to in order to practice most effectively. And if it’s not repetitive, it’s chaotic — everyone has an opinion, and everyone disagrees. Who do you listen to, and how do you cut through the noise and really decide how to spend your time?
This is a long way of saying: I’ve never learned to teach, and I don’t know how to learn to learn. Because self-structured learning is way different than learning in a classroom, or in a group, or with a mentor. There’s no external framework to keep you accountable, or to provide feedback, or to provide any of the other benefits that come with a learning community.
When it comes to self-directed learning, there’s so many principles I keep hearing about — resilience, goal-setting, failing forward, varying your practice, etc. — but all the resources I’ve found assume learners are coming to them with those principles already well-developed, and that all that’s left is the skill-building section.
Which makes sense! Teaching your learners how to self-teach before teaching them what they actually came to learn, is an absurd thing to ask. But for pretty much everything I learned in school, I learned from other people; I almost never got practice teaching myself.
So there’s a lot of beginner-friendly resources out there. And they’re great for if you have one or two specific things you need to learn. But for people starting in total ignorance who want to work their way up to overarching mastery, how beginner-friendly are they really?
I think it’s about time that I dust this blog off!
It’s been almost a year since I last blogged about one of Reclaim’s first Flex Courses in Reclaim Ed Tech, and now we’ve completed the first year! Throughout that year we’ve 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 One’s Own Workshops. We’ve got most of these in our Reclaim Hosting EdTech Discord so I would highly recommend checking it out! We’ve 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 you’re looking to start streaming to Youtube or Twitch. I really enjoyed working with this software in an educational light, and it’s been vital to the Flex Course filming. I’ve only used it a handful of times until then and I’ve 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 server– and throughout the month we looked at how Reclaim uses Discord to host virtual events.
This month; We’re 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.
It’s been really fun to work on the Ed Tech team on the side. While I’m still incredibly involved with the Support Team, I’m loving the crossover we have between all the teams lately, keeping support at the core of Reclaim’s values. And it’s been so fun to work with my coworkers on some fun courses!
There are many more Flex Courses to come and I’m 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.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how schools can successfully run WordPress Multisite, Domain of One’s Own, and Reclaim Cloud Sandbox spaces together in a way that feels integrated and seamless. We’ve always led with the idea that these tools don’t compete with each other, and that actually the opposite is true: by running them in parallel to each other you can offer a little bit of something for everyone. Perhaps even in tiers or layers as described in my Nashville recap post from 2021. But how can we do that while still keeping the digital footprint for landing pages and end user sites as simple and intuitive as possible? I last explored this in my blog post called A New Model for Domains: DoOO & WPMS and shared how some schools like Coventry University and Oklahoma University are directing traffic and handling domain structures for landing pages and end user sites (which can feel like half the battle).
I love how some of our DoOO and WPMS schools are controlling growth on these platforms, as well as keeping things sustainable, by pushing all new signups to the WordPress Multisite by default. The WPMS then has a very limited set of plugins and themes that are easy to support and maintain for a large group of users. From there, if an end user wants to install a different theme, or explore a different application entirely, they’re directed to Domain of One’s Own. There’s more freedom here, but it likely involves a request form submission or a conversation with an admin before a cPanel account is granted. What’s ultimately happening now is that there are two paths for a user to take. And especially if we’re looking to add a third (Reclaim Cloud for next generation apps or sites that need more resources) it’s important for Reclaim to assist schools with correctly carving out these paths and creating very clear entry points.
This concept has come up in so many different conversations ranging from the visuals and metaphors we use to explain different topics, to how we’re articulating it in support scenarios, to how we’re providing more data for admins to make decisions, to how we’re pulling in these tools to help users choose the path that makes the most sense for them. We’ve been working on a few side projects to help with these scenarios, and now it feels like the right time to compile everything together.
When a new school comes to Reclaim to set up DoOO, WPMS, and the Cloud, I want them to have a cohesive menu of things that they can select or add to their setup to make it work to their preference. I’ve alluded to this with support articles like Domain of One’s Own Setup Features, which covers different signup workflows and cPanel customizations available for DoOO so a new admin can go through and decide what they’ll need. Even still, this article doesn’t quite capture everything that’s available in DoOO anymore, and it definitely doesn’t pull in WPMS & Reclaim Cloud. Where this “menu” lives or how it’s delivered is still a question mark (maybe as simple as adding in a few more guides) but for the purposes of this post I want to share a running list of some of the other projects we’ve been working on with the help of folks like Tom Woodward and Bryan Mathers to think more broadly about user choices, carving out paths, and connecting tools together.
While the landing page can be designed however admins prefer and even framed as a choice between WPMS and DoOO, you could still opt to push new signups to a default starting point. In that case, the above “landing page” would actually live on the WPMS directly, integrate with SSO, and be able to reflect what plugins/themes are in use like the demo above. An example domain might be sites.school.edu for the homepage and sites.school.edu/user for end-user sites.
If users decide they want more flexibility in cPanel, they would click a menu link that takes them to a homepage for DoOO like domains.school.edu. This space has its own SSO integration and signup workflow, so users can create or request accounts depending on admin preference.
^This dashboard was shared more thoroughly at the end of the last DoOO 201 workshop, and you can watch the final session called What’s Next for Domain of One’s Own for more info about how it works!
The admin landing page has worked well as a home base for new schools because it’s simple and to the point. But how is this WP install managed or updated long term? Do admins still find this space useful 2-3 years in? What if the landing page “quick links” were instead pulled into the WP dashboard, similar to Taylor’s Data Dashboard work or similarly to what the Ultimate Dashboard plugin does?
Similarly, I’d love to keep thinking about the future of end-user support docs. As mentioned above, this project gets complicated quickly because it becomes quite difficult for Reclaim to update each documentation site after they’ve been delivered to an institution. (Especially if the admin makes changes after the fact– we don’t want to overwrite those.) There’s a balance of ownership between what Reclaim can do to help and what admins choose to make available as a support resource, but I’m all for Reclaim providing starting templates where we can.
My latest thinking is that it may make sense for Reclaim to bring these templated guides into our main knowledge base under a new category of our Domain of One’s Own section. From there, new admins have two choices: they can point their users directly to those guides, which would have to be pretty generic to work for all/most setups, or admins could adopt articles for their own knowledge base sites. If and when Reclaim makes changes to one of our article templates, admins are notified by subscribing to the knowledge base section (already possible) and by hearing about it in our monthly newsletter.
I also think we’re not far off from really improving how we’re keeping different types of folks notified at Reclaim. In the early days we truly had 1 mailing list for the capital A “Administrator” of a project to get all notifications. Through the years we’ve been able to start separating out billing, support, SSO, and server maintenance notifications. We’ve also added the Roundup mailing list and Reclaim event notifications to the mix as well. It’s not a totally perfect system yet, but Pilot’s newest project setup questionnaire is a testament to how far we’ve come:
Pilot killed it with their work to improve how we’re collecting initial information from admins for new server/project setups. How we got by with a .PDF for so long, I’ll never know. :)
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!
Next Tuesday is the start of the free Reclaim EdTech Flex Course focused on building community on the social platform Discord. In the first episode airing next week on April 4th at 12 PM Eastern Lauren Hanks and I will discuss some of the inspirations that led us to using the social platform Discord in combination with the live streaming service Streamyard to run our sessions for OERxDomains21.
MBS’s TV Guide-inspired design for theOERxDomains21 Schedule
That experience was so amazing on so many levels, and it led us to use that same combination soon after to run our Domains Workshop for admins in June of 2021 (still referred to as the Reclaim Roadshow). Lauren built out a template for the work she did during OERxDomains21 in Discord, as she will do, and over the course of the next year we used that for our workshops.
Our first full blown virtual workshop after OERxDomains21 integrating Discord and Streamyard to great effect
But we felt like we missing out on some of the potential for more sustained interactions and connections Discord offered, so we started imagining what it might be like to hold more regular events for our community in an always-on Discord server to start getting more intentional about outreach and community building. And in April 2022 a whole new division of EdTech at Reclaim Hosting was born using Discord and Streamyard as our primary means for running regular workshops and flex courses. We learned a lot in our first year and we’re planning on unveiling what’s in store for year two of Reclaim EdTech at Reclaim Open, but in the interim you should really join our Discord server next week to see how you, too, can build community in Discord!
What kinds of web footprints are you leaving? Or does it matter since they just blow away? Where do you choose to do your walking?
I am not talking about your data trails, am talking about the trails you make as a contribution for others.
I know my answers, which are just mine, and are not likely anywhere near yours. But with each day of 2023, the web I walked into in November 1993 with the widest sense of wonder (I wonder about when I last wondered about wonder), is fraying away, or being left behind for the commodified mall of platforms. Ot just left as error messages. The 404 web.
I could go darker, I say to my 3 or 4 readers. But. The Wonder is still there, I need to trust in that, and perhaps just extremely unevenly distributed as the past future used to go.
I don’t know why I reached for numerical headings, but am again borrowing your style, Kate Bowles. You see, like the current inevitable technical overlord, my mind is “trained” on stuff (though training is a narrow word for what I think my grey matter CPU does). All I have read and seen is in me, and then I generate something from it. Who ya callin’ Artificial?
There was an online discuss–well thread? blip? where some others I do “follow” and are friends I have been in the same room together, were talking about a certain aviary named technology dying.
My internal storage database went rummaging around for an article a long time ago I read from a rather prominent writer who had driven an interesting stake into the heart of claims that technology “dies”. I remember they had pulled a random page of tools (like implements) from a 1890s?1900s? Sears Catalog, all would be echnologies one would guess are dead. But the author found somewhere in the world, some artisan was still making them.
I could not for the life of me remember the author’s name. I tried the old oracle of knowledge with searches like “writer who found tools from old catalog still in use” and came up empty, just stuff about library catalogs. A few more failed. Is it the search fail or my weak prompts? Because apparently, all future work will be typing prompts into boxes.
Then I remembered I had likely blogged about it. My blog, my outboard brain! And shazam, my own blog search on old catalog tools still being made hits it as a first result- from Feb 1, 2011 Not One Tech Extinction reconnects my neurons! That was Kevin Kelly, a big shot that back then I had as a guest for an NMC online show I did (those footprints of course are wiped out, as is the recording done in old Adobe Connect).
But I did find what I sought, Kelly’s 2006 blog post on Immortal Technologies:
One of my hypothesis is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the developed world but quite common in the developing world. For instance, Burma is full of ox-cart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning still thriving in Bolivia. A technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or second rate, but it still may be in small-time use, as many old-fashioned ways are.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/immortal_techno.php
Yep, these days a blog is “enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction” its posts in small-time use, left as durable footprints on the web, right there sitting where it was 17 years ago.
Someone’s re-share in Mastodon (oh yes boost), maybe it was Roland Tanglao brought a sad note to see from Boris Mann (who I crossed paths with long ago in the Northern Voice Vancouver days)
Boris’s message marked the passing away of Darren Barefoot, who was the co-founder of Northern Voice. In his last days before cancer closed the lights, or maybe it was ahead of time, Darren’s blog left his last web footprint, a post on his own blog/domain, They Were All Splendid.
I will not even taint it by trying to summarize. Read it yourself. I had some memories of seeing his earlier posts (tweeted maybe by Boris or Roland?) or perhaps in flickr photos of Darren’s Splendid things.
His site lists a long set of footprints, his first web site in 1999, but what I remember, his post describing the idea that lead to a survey that led to the first Northern Voice conference in 2005. I became aware of it of course because Brian Lamb blogged about it (more web footprints still visible), and I think reached out to me as I went to Northern Voice for the first of several times in 2006.
I can’t say I knew Darren, I probably met him, but I was there in that era, when nothing was proven and everything possible for the web. I can say I was there.So many things for me came as an outgrowth of Northern Voice, the connections, friendships, photos.
Web footprints that will be there for while.
Sadly, Darren was not the first Northern Voicer to blog their own last post- I remember being astonished/amazed at the web footprint left behind by Derek Miller in 2011, alas also a victim of cancer.
Northern Voice attracted a bunch of digital photography nerds, running informal sessions where people would gather and share/talk about gear, software, and invariably, go out on the Vancouver streets for a photo walk.
That’s where I met Derek. I cannot remember interactions, but that he was always gracious. The thing that is hard to describe about those Northern Voice conferences, is how there was no prestige hierarchy, it was flat, even though it drew upon people from not often overlapping Venn regions- tech nerds, educators, and social activists.
I remember using Derek’s example photos for How a Camera Works, showing visually how aperture shutter speed affected images.
Speaking of web footprints, I forgot Derek’s penmachine.com domain from one of my own Northern Voice talks in 2011- Looking Through the Lens where I tried to make analogies between the functions/settings for photography and learning.
But looking at that old site (broken links, dead flash embeds), are URLs that spark memories- I always liked using Kris Krug’s story that went behind a photo that went beyond viral on flickr. Kris too was like a rock star photographer, yet treated me as a young tech head and just starting in digital photography, as an equal.
I see in my links something stunningly relevant, a post from Kris’s blog:
What we leave behind is our digital footprint (Kris Krug) http://www.kriskrug.com/2011/02/01/what-we-leave-behind-is-our-digital-footprint/
With sad irony, that digital footprint link ends up at a domain for sale sign. Fortunately, ghosts can be summoned from the Wayback Machine.
Our future is being documented by us in our present. Each and everyone of us who has a digital camera, a cellphone, a computer or even a camera phone has the task of creating our living digital history in real time. Our digital landscape has changed drastically from the meaningless dribble that once was in a stream of collective consciousness that is being contributed to by all of us. Collectively everything that we capture is part of our digital footprint that will exist as a living breathing legacy of ourselves online.
…..
The combination of our collective task of documentation and incentive of sharing has joined forces with the thriving Open Source culture. Not only are we inspired to create and then share but we are also infusing the two into spaces, like unconferences and camps, which allow for both situations to transpire. These spaces are open to everyone, sustained by all and owned by none. It only makes perfect sense that our changing interaction with our present state would happen collectively in our own making.
What we leave behind is our digital footprint Kris Krug, Feb 1, 2011
Hello from 2023.
To go back to where this started, mobius strip like, I said “dying” not dead.
I am not contemplating my mountain of web sites as some kind of legacy that matters. Taking care of and preserving my web tracks is not about my last blog post as a goodbye. If anything, it’s perhaps about the first one, and all the ones in between, all of my Pinboard bookmarks (and earlier ones imported from del.icio.us), my flickr photos, the bits and bobs of my archived web sites and ones I have rescued from the dead when others closed shop.
I firmly believe in the web we have woven ourselves (not done by others for us) and the one we care for as individuals. I hate being responsible for breaking any link I have created.
If your followers, likes, and LinkedIn connections are the tracks you care about so be it.
My stuff matters. To me, and I care about that fading dream of the web. Without it, what is there?
There’s always stuff to add after publishing! I wonder if I should comment on my own posts (it helps with the illusion that no one reads me). But sitting in an open tab was Jason Kotke’s marking of his 25th year of leaving footprints
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch Fire:
https://kottke.org/23/03/kottke-is-25-years-old-todayWhen I tell people about the first time I saw the Web, I sheepishly describe it as love at first sight. Logging on that first time, using an early version of NCSA Mosaic with a network login borrowed from my physics advisor, was the only time in my life I have ever seen something so clearly, been sure of anything so completely. It was a like a thunderclap — “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending” — and I just knew this was for me and that it was going to be huge and important. I know how ridiculous this sounds, but the Web is the true love of my life and ever since I’ve been trying to live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it.
I too want to be on the web and “live inside the feeling I had when I first saw it” (back when we had to refer to it as the “World Wide Web” and not simply “the web”).
Featured Image: A combination of two of my own photo, which have their own tracks– Steps into Time flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and 2016/366/292 The Web is a Tentative Thing flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Darren Barefoot’s “Art for 2007 Northern Voice poster”
With just a little over two months before Reclaim Open happens I’m thankful we had the forethought to add a day before the official event to host an unconference. My first event of this kind was back in 2007 at Northern Voice’s MooseCamp, and I have to say it was transformative. If you follow the previous link you’ll see the sessions that were run that day,* and I have to say many of them seem quite relevant 15 years on.
But the thing about MooseCamp that was so special were the souls who showed up and worked together for the first hour or so to pitch topics they wanted to discuss, and as a result a schedule for the day emerged that was for and by the people. It allowed for an informal space for folks who may not have had the time or inclination to submit a formal presentation to share, which made room for all kinds of serendipitous connections, different voices, and impromptu discussions that were timely and relevant.
Image of the wall of sessions pitched the morning of MooseCamp
Image credit: Cyprien Lomas’s “Northern Voice 07 – MooseCamp”
What’s more, it was foundational for my own sense of an edtech blogging community that was thinking more broadly about how these new publishing forms would impact our culture—in many ways MooseCamp was far more memorable that the official event the following day, and part of that was because it took on the shape of those present in that moment in some truly powerful ways. Also, while only remotely connected to him as a result of the NorthVoice events I had participated in, I was really sorry to hear of the recent passing of one of the organizers of that amazing conference, namely Darren Barefoot—his final post in this world tells the tale of a life worth living.
I’ve since participated in other unconferences, mot recently the University API at BYU, and again found this sense of connection, generosity, and community generative for a memorable event, so I figured it was high time to try it for a Reclaim Hosting conference. And, as often happens, the need for it has becoming increasingly more apparent. Just yesterday Shannon Hauser asked about whether we might be able to fit in another panel to our already full programme about web archiving. And while previously we might have had to politely turn it down, as of now we have an entire day wherein anyone can propose and run sessions about anything from web archiving to Geocities to photography to the fediverse to privacy and security, or whatever else folks with a shared interest care to come together and think through. It’s in many ways a huge attraction of Reclaim Open, the ability to show up for a full day where you can share your interests in the moment if you like, as well as support and learn from others who want to do the same. And who knows, you might even find some magic like I did back in 2007.
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*Getting to run a session about using WordPress for “More Than Just a Blog” alongside Candace Nast and D’Arcy Norman remains one of my all-time favorite conference moments. People were truly in it.
While I did happen to set a personal best on the Galaxian cabinet in the bavacade as my account was being migrated to our newest shared hosting server named after that 1979 classic alien space shooter, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the amazing work Reclaim’s sysadmin Chris Blankenship has been doing behind the scenes to get our cPanel servers running on Ubuntu. It’s a long story and Chris does an amazing job narrating why we have to move our infrastructure from Centos7 to alternative Linux distros on his blog, but the short version is they killed Centos7 and Kenny, so we have come up with alternatives over the next 18-24 months. Read Chris’s post for the bigger, longer, and uncut version of the story.
The milestone the post title refers to is running a cPanel server on top of Ubuntu rather than CentOS, the shared hosting server Galaxian located in Frankfurt, Germany is doing just that, and I believe we’ll have another, Galaga, running on the West Coast of the USA. It’s a big deal because we wanted to ensure in 2023 that all new shared hosting servers were were running on Ubuntu in order to future-proof our server fleet. The upgrading of our existing infrastructure will be a big job and we will be doing it over the course of at least two years, but this moment highlights the beginning of that shift, and that is really exciting. Sometimes the work of infrastructure can be not only invisible but thankless given the only time folks are knocking on their door is when something goes wrong. So join me in celebrating the awesome work happening, as hidden as it might be, when something not only goes right, but marks a path for moving our entire fleet of servers into the future. Avanti sysadmins of the world, and avanti Reclaim!
I actually got pretty excited when they finally announced CentOS 8.
Why?
Because I’m a weird computer guy who likes to try out different operating systems. Hell, I still have an OpenSolaris Live DVD from 2009 and I reseed Haiku torrents. I once even bought an overpriced 15-20 year old Mac desktop tower from a pawn shop just to play around with Mac OS 9.
So, as soon as I could, I spun up a local VM to test things out.
I had only been at Reclaim Hosting for a few months at that point, and had only officially been our SysAdmin for, like, a day when they announced CentOS 8. And my new role meant that I was going to be dealing with CentOS 8 quite a bit, seeing as how it was going to be the next version of the OS we run/ran quite a bit of our infrastructure on.
And then they killed CentOS.
And I had no idea what the hell we were supposed to do. Because if you’re running an enterprise Linux server then you’re gonna with the premier enterprise Linux distro: RHEL.
But if you’re running a ton of enterprise Linux servers and don’t have the budget to get a RHEL licenses for every single one, then you’ll go with the free and community supported distro that’s, like, 99% compatible with RHEL: CentOS.
Well, I guess not anymore…
I mean, rationally, I knew that alternatives/replacements were going to spring up. Eventually. Far too many people were far too reliant on CentOS to just let it die like that. But in the moment it was a little worrying, because:
So, yeah, very worrying in the moment.
But then cPanel made a great announcement: they were going to support Ubuntu.
I’ve run Ubuntu on both desktop and servers, and I’ll readily admit that I’ve had my problems with it (there are reasons why I run Manjaro on my desktop and not Ubuntu or one of its derivatives). apt can get weird awful sometimes with dependencies and I absolutely hate snaps. But it’s not all bad with Ubuntu. It’s pretty straightforward to use, and I also like how there are ways to upgrade the server between releases (which is something that can’t be said for CentOS/RHEL, or even Debian, at least if I recall correctly). Oh, and (to my knowledge) they haven’t EOL’d a major release of an OS that is relied on by countless people out of nowhere for no good reason.
So, I was rather content to start working on getting us Ubuntu-ready in preparation for CentOS 7’s EOL.
But the Ubuntu stuff was still going to be a lot of work.
While both Ubuntu and CentOS are Linux, there’s differences in package managers, package names and dependencies, paths to configuration files, and so on. So it wasn’t going to be a matter of just picking up our scripts from a CentOS machine and running them as they are on an Ubuntu machine. I had to test each part of the process, each script, each server vendor, each PHP module, and so on. If all of these tedious and repetitive little things weren’t part of the process to automate something, I may have gone insane, and so on.
For the most part it was simple. Replace yum with apt, replace checks for 7 with checks for 20.04, change the paths of some binaries, AND SO ON.
Maybe the tedium and repetition did drive me to madness, and so on.
It was actually the install processes for cPanel and Bitninja that caused the most headaches during the process.
Bitninja needed a specific dependency before it could be installed on Ubuntu, and a botched install of cPanel did something weird to the repos. So I had to install that package prior to doing anything else.
apt install apt-transport-https --yesAnd then the reason why the cPanel install was getting botched was that it didn’t like the installed-by-default MySQL client. So that (and its dependencies) had to be uninstalled rather early as well. It also had trouble installing a few dependencies, so I installed these right after.
apt remove snmp libsnmp35 libmysqlclient21 --yes && \
apt install libnl-genl-3-200 libnl-3-200 --yesBut even after all of that the cPanel install kept stalling up because service restarts (and outdated kernel versions) needed to be acknowledged interactively. So I had to make a conf change to just let those things happen automatically.
sed -i "s/^\#\$nrconf{restart}.*$/\$nrconf{restart} \= \'a\'\;/" /etc/needrestart/needrestart.conf && \
sed -i "s/^\#\$nrconf{kernelhints}.*$/\$nrconf{kernelhints} \= \-1\;/" /etc/needrestart/needrestart.confAnd then after cPanel was finally installed, I realized that the test WordPress instance I setup was totally broken. And after digging through cPanel’s PHP settings I saw that quite a few critical Easy Apache modules were not installed. Turns out that while CentOS has their package names like mod_whatever, Ubuntu has them like mod-whatever. But this was easy enough to fix with more sed.
sed -i "s/mod_/mod\-/g" /path/to/ea4modules.jsonSo after quite a bit of trial and error, quite a bit of reading the logs, and quite a bit of yelling at my machine, I finally was able to get an Ubuntu server running cPanel and all the other normal stuff! And after a few more tweaks and fixes, I was able to get another one up; and that second one became our first Shared Hosting server running Ubuntu as opposed to CentOS.
Speaking of which, that’s where you’re reading this from now. Yeah, my sites are now being served from a new Ubuntu server rather than a CentOS server. I was my own test subject. Partly because I wanted to hold off on subjecting anyone else to my OS experiments, and partly because FIRST ACCOUNT ON OUR FIRST UBUNTU SHARED HOSTING SERVER. WOO.
So that’s nice.
Ubuntu is definitely going to be our future. At least on the cPanel front.
But we’re not gonna be fully locked in to Ubuntu like we were with CentOS. Just in case, y’know? Because while cPanel is a big part of what Reclaim Hosting does, it isn’t the only thing, and some of the things we run do require something CentOS-ish. And that something CentOS-ish is shaping up to be AlmaLinux.
And maybe (thanks to cPanel) we might even be able use AlmaLinux to extend the lives of our existing servers through in-place upgrades from CentOS 7!
Maybe.
That’s something I still need to look into.
But I’ll talk about that more when we get there.
