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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!
One of the smartest things Reclaim Hosting has ever done was to partner with Bryan Mathers for our art. The prospect of sitting down with Bryan to collaboratively brainstorm how to communicate what we do visually is an absolute joy, I cannot recommend the experience highly enough. Our brand was in many ways grounded in his first Reclaim Hosting vinyl logo Bryan doodled while we were chatting in Barcelona back in April of 2015. It was love at first sight. And that has since been the basis of an entire Reclaim brand that has been consistently fun and fetching.
Original Reclaim Hosting visual Bryan Mathers doodled
We have used him innumerable times since then to prepare our various products as well as teaming with ALT to build out an entire conference theme for OERxDomains21—which may be a high-water mark for our collaborations. Anyway, Bryan is amazing and few months ago we worked with him to not come up with an aesthetic for our upcoming conference Reclaim Open (which we have yet to unveil in its entirety) as well as try and upgrade our main site header image to subtly suggest the changing nature of our business thanks to the advent of Reclaim Cloud—which is now almost 3 years old, which is insane to even think about.
A sneak peek of some of the Reclaim open art in technicolor
As you can see from the header old reclaimhosting.com header image that we had on our site for close to 8 or 9 years, the VHS tapes were applications that could be easily run within cPanel, such as Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, Scalar, Omeka, etc. All supporting the “Zombies” home recorded tape All of this not only assumes the coming of the copyright zombies and the learning undead, but also that you would be “playing” these tapes within cPanel.
Old Reclaim Hosting Header image
Our new header image sticks with the VHS metaphor (although it might be begging for a laserdisc or DVD makeover here soon) but cPanel is now just one of the tapes you can play. What’s more, several of these tapes (namely Scalar, WordPress, Omeka, and WordPress) can be played in either cPanel or Reclaim Cloud, while others (like PeerTube, Ghost, and Docker) are exclusive to the new Reclaim Cloud containers. It begs all kinds of format and backward compatibility parallels that the old media metaphors real map on our shift from an exclusively cPanel shop to a much broader library of applications for folks to choose from.
Reclaim Hosting’s New Site Header
Again, Bryan works on so many levels that are both inviting and soothing while at the same time epitomizing these subtle, yet crucial, changes we are trying to communicate to our community. What’s more, all of these tapes on the Reclaim shelf fall under the aegis of a new element of Reclaim Hosting rolled almost a year ago now: Reclaim EdTech. And that tapes sits horizontally above the other to highlight an umbrella of support for both cPanel and Reclaim Cloud. It’s so beautiful!
You’ll also notice nothing changed with the “My Blog” tape, that one is sacred
Yesterday Maren Deepwell, Kerry Pinny, Taylor Jadin and I ran the first of three sessions introducing Mission Mastodon. “What is that?” you wisely ask. Well, it’s a collaboration between ALT and Reclaim Edtech to provide a temporary server for folks interested in exploring the federated social networking platform Mastodon. It’s a sandbox space to experiment with signing-up, finding people you follow elsewhere, wrapping your head around content search, as well as re-programming ourselves to think beyond the large, monolithic sites that have come to dominate online social spaces.
Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse
Jon Udell’s recent post “Of course the attention economy is threatened by the Fediverse” discusses how a federated tool like Mastodon subverts the underlying attention economy driving the influencer culture most of the corporate social media giants have embraced. What if some of us aspire to something other than broadcast celebrity, what if we actually want to be social in the most generative sense of that word. To quote Udell:
I just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight me, and who might feel similarly about my words and pictures and ideas.
Hope springs eternal in this digital optimist, and those netizens like Udell who have worked hard for several decades to underline the myriad issues with networked culture while remaining focused on trying to build and promote a better, healthier web are my heroes. And I can even follow and talk to them on these miraculous networks. To misquote the Bard: “Sign me up for this brave new web, that has such people in it!”
But I digress, I just wanted to link to our first session, and thanks those who showed up in the chat and made it that much better. It was a lot of fun to talk about how Mastodon feels different (in many of the ways quoted above), but also to chat and share useful tips and tricks that might come in useful as you’re getting started.
You can watch the video here, as well as the future episodes in February and March. Also, be sure to check out the chat happening on Reclaim’s Discord, which you can access from the linked watch. I highly recommend the conversation given there some great resources shared by folks, including this list of annotated Mastodon resources Chris Aldrich has been collecting. Finally, if nothing else, watch the video above for Kerry Pinny’s 55 second intro that is absolutely brilliant! I love that my nickname is now “the Joker!”
Anyway, if you are at all intrigued by any of this, join us in this expendable Mastodon server that will explode in 90 89 days….
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