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For Slate, Stephen Lurie covers what’s known as Dawn to Dusk to Dawn, an ultramarathon in which participants run as many laps as they can around a 400 meter track in 24 hours. “D3,” as it’s known, takes place in Pennsylvania and is one of the oldest 24-hour races in the world. This past May, it attracted 36 participants aged 16-82.
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
Over the years, I have reviewed most of the popular TWSBI fountain pen models there are. For an overview:
I know I lack the “GO”-model with the spring in above list – but it is sitting here in the review stack, to be reviewed for you, soon.
Another model I haven’t yet tried was the “Eco-T”, which is basically similar (or the same as) the Eco, but with a triangular grip section similar to the one of the Lamy Safari.
I always wanted to review this pen, and see what it is all about. Finally I got around to it!
Before we hop into the review, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Nomadostore for supporting the review of this pen. You can also buy all kinds of TWSBI products in their webshop (no affiliate – just a friendly pointer).
The video is, as always, preceded by some quick facts. Again, I hope the review is helpful and that you enjoy watching it!
Click on the photos to enlarge.
The post Video-Review: TWSBI Eco-T Saffron appeared first on Scrively - note taking & writing.
This week we’re going to take a look at Troublemaker Petrichor. Troublemaker is an ink manufacturer from The Philippines. The word petrichor refers to the smell of the earth or soil after it rains. I’m not sure how a color can relate to a smell, but just like the smell, I’m a big fan of this color. Maybe it’s because ... A statement from philosophers in response to the knife attack on the professor and students in a philosophy of gender course at the University of Waterloo this week, in which they “affirm our commitment to academic freedom, and condemn all uses of violence, intimidation, or derogation that attempt to undermine philosophical examinations of gender and sexuality” has been published and is open for signatures by other members of the philosophical community.
The statement was authored by Robin Dembroff (Yale), Justin Khoo (MIT), and L.A. Paul (Yale). It states:
The statement is posted here. Those interested in adding their name to the list of signatories can do so via this form.
The post Statement from Philosophy Professors & Graduate Students on University of Waterloo Attack first appeared on Daily Nous.
The Rainforest Retro51 ($59) is an exclusive Retro51 design from Luxury Brands of America. Limited to just 500 units, the pen is a partnership with the Rainforest Trust, a leading rainforest and endangered species conservation organization. With each purchase of the Rainforest Retro51, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Trust to help protect and maintain the animals and habitat for the future.
The design is a multicolor screenprint in lush greens on a black background with animals hidden in the greenery including showy parrots, sloths, monkeys and wild cats (my animal identification might be incorrect so if you know more accurate descriptions, please leave them in the comments).
My favorite part is the frog end cap. He’s such a cute little guy who peers at you every time you open your pen case or sticks out of your pen cup.
The classic Retro51 Tornado design with its Schmidt rollerball refill is always a go-to at the Desk for on-the-go writing and especially for gateway gifts for loved ones. If you have a friend or family member who loves the tropics and rainforest conservation, grab one of these before they are gone.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by Luxury Brands of America for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Mini-Review: Retro51 Rainforest Trust appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
(Kimberly (she/her) took the express train down the fountain pen/stationery rabbit hole and doesn't want to be rescued. She can be found on Instagram @allthehobbies because there really are many, many hobbies!.)
I’m just got back from the 2023 St. Louis Pen Show (their second one since the pandemic) and have finally recovered enough to gather my thoughts. I spent a lot of time describing last year’s show so that would be a good place to start since I will be doing some comparisons in this recap.
The show was held at the same location as last year, the Sheraton Westport Chalet St. Louis hotel. I love walking down the hallway with all the large displays greeting you as you make your way to the registration desk!
Welcome to the St. Louis Pen Show!
Like last year, Michael and the Dromgoole’s spread were the first things you’d see at the show - lots of pens, stationery and an ink wall too!
The perfect rubber chicken for the one and only Ana Reinart, who was working the Dromgoole’s ink wall.
Opposite the Dromgoole’s tables were Steve and Diane Curnow of Curnow Bookbinding and Leather with their lovely array of notebooks, inserts and leather covers!
I like that there was a map on display so folks could look up where the different vendors were located.
This was a view of the main ballroom on Friday when it was fairly busy.
I don’t have attendance numbers from last year or this year but it felt significantly slower this year. Most of the vendors I spoke with felt the same way. Slow days are much harder on vendors than busy days because the hours just drag on and it just drains a lot of the energy. There were maybe a few more folks on Saturday but it wasn’t enough for some vendors, who decided to pack it up and not return on Sunday.
I also don’t have vendor or table numbers, though this year’s website listed 93 vendors (compared to around 100 last year). I know that there were some new vendors this year but I had also heard that a number of folks did not return after they had a disappointing show last year.
The pandemic has seen a lot of new folks entering this hobby, which is great for making new pen friends, but also essential for a hobby’s growth and continued existence. It feels like I’ve encountered a lot more newer folks at this show than any other show in the past two years. More than once (and at different tables), I heard “I don’t have any fountain pens” or “how do I get ink in the pen?” It’s not a bad thing to have a lot of newbies, but it often means that vendors spend a lot more time and energy explaining their products (or just pens in general). Budgets are often lower since they are still discovering this rabbit hole. So you end up with a lot of vendors competing for fewer dollars (on average) from fewer attendees.
The vendors that did the best were the ones who catered more to this newer crowd. Paper, inks and pens $50-100 were the items that seemed to sell the most. Though I did hear that at least one customer bought a Namiki Emperor from Jimmy Dolive (Jimmy strikes again!), that was definitely not the norm.
Last year the show had two nib workers, which was about right. This year, there were 5. Richard Binder, the Kennedys of Indy-Pen-Dance and Gena Salorino of Custom Nib Studio came this year, in addition to returning nib folks Kirk Speer and Josh Lax. I think 2 nib workers is more than enough for this show, not only because of its lower attendance, but the relative newness of its audience also means that they often aren’t aware of what a nib worker does, let alone want to spend the money on getting a pen tuned or ground.
Gena Salorino working their magic.
What the show continues to have is variety - plenty of modern and vintage vendors in all price brackets.
Love seeing Greg Hardy’s smiling face alongside (literally) the “Crawdaddy” pen he made just for this pen show!
Danny Fudge of The Write Pen is a well-known and well-respected fixer/restorer of pens!
If you need supplies for restoring/fixing or just cleaning/maintaining your pens, Indy-Pen-Dance can help!
Akhila and Nirmal Sheth of Smruti Pens came to the STL show for the first time!
I love that they have vendors who sell other things besides “pens & inks” and some vendors that don’t sell anything at all (like the calligraphy guild or the STL meetup group)!
This father-daughter duo of Lincoln’s Leathers makes notebooks and other items out of Michigan!
Keith McCleary and his family brought all their 3D-printed goods, as well as stickers and other fun stuff to the show!
Look at these cool creations from War Pony Forge!
Slapme? No,Slap U! The St Louis Area Pen Users (SLAPU) has regular meetups named St Louis Area Pen Meet & Eat (SLAPME)! I’m pretty sure no actual slapping happens, but don’t quote me on that, lol! Just follow the St. Louis Pen Show IG to find out about the next meetup.
There were two of these ink testing stations in the middle of the ballroom - perfect for ink play while taking a rest break.
Members of the St. Louis Guild of Calligraphers were present to write your name in calligraphy for free and to talk about all things calligraphy!
If we’re going to talk calligraphy, then you have to mention the master penman, Michael Sull, who was busy making and embellishing his gorgeous calligraphy prints!
Sitting next to Mr. Sull was a tray full of old letterpress “stamps”. For free. These were used to print handwriting exemplars for cursive books. You neve know what treasures you’ll find at a pen show!
There were a good number of classes/seminars this year, but not quite as many as last year, which was fine given the lighter crowds at the show this weekend. Still, the variety of classes was great - “Your Name - Your Signature”, Back to Basics Bullet Journaling, Celtic Knots, as well as American Cursive Handwriting, Vintage Pen Buying for Beginners, and more – there really was a wide range of classes/seminars to choose from.
I barely made it in time for the Journaling Social on Friday afternoon and there were still plenty of people gathering, chatting and working on their journals!
Look at these gorgeous Namikis at the Pilot USA table!
On the other end of the spectrum, look at this “bargain” of a pen! I love it when vendors have a sense of humor!
I love this Nahvalur Voyage: Pride 2023 Pen, with a portion of proceeds being donated to It Gets Better Project!
This is the blackest black ink ever made by Platinum - Chou-Kuro. Apparently, it is 43% darker than Platinum Carbon black!
Luxury Brands of America’s exclusive Retro 51 is not only a good looking pen, but proceeds also benefit the Rainforest Trust!
As always, I had a good time after hours at the show. The bar staff was painfully slow on Thursday afternoon/evening, and didn’t pick up until Brian the bartender showed up with his amazing energy and great service on Friday. I heard that the show organizers asked the hotel to keep the bar open late, which they did on Friday and Saturday nights (yay!). Security did come by around 10pm on Sunday to (very nicely) ask us to vacate the lobby because it was past their quiet hours.
Discovered that the Schnickelfritz Bavarian style Weissbier is really tasty - I may have had a few this weekend!!
A few of the die-hards at 1:45am Sunday morning!
Last year I said “it is a well-run show that might need to scale back on the vendors/tables. There is such a thing as “too big” when it comes to pen shows, especially if you don’t have the attendee numbers (and resulting sales dollars) to support it” and sadly, that is even more true this year. This is already a very well-run show, so there isn’t much to improve on from that perspective. There are great shows that are much smaller than STL (Colorado comes to mind, but I’ve also heard great things about Orlando and Arkansas), so I hope that they consider pulling back the number of vendors they ask to come to this show. This way, the vendors can have a successful show, which in turn, brings more attendees to the show.
Clockwise from the left: matte blue Platinum Curidas (Luxury Brands), Colorverse Indigo Blue (Smruti Pens), 2023 St. Louis Pen Show ink Missourah Crawdad by KWZ, Rainforest Retro 51 and Endless notebook clip (LBA), washi tape and New Pen Day stamp from InkyConverters, and STL notebook inserts (Curnow Bookbinding), all atop the Col-o-ring Folio (Well-Appointed Desk). Not pictured: a pen tuned by Gena Salorino and two of the letterpress stamps (which need to be thoroughly cleaned before I handle them again).
I was fairly restrained at this show since DC and SF are right around the corner. I spent most of the time at the show spending time with pen friends, old and new, which is the best part of any pen show. Until DC, stay safe and stay inky!
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.
(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)
The concept of a pen case that can double as a stand is one that many manufacturers have tried out. It's a product that always intrigues me because it offers a lot of convenience for anyone that wants to quickly deploy a fistful of writing instruments on any work surface. In some cases, the two main functions of the case can detract from each other. The perfect balance of making a great case and a great stand can be hard to achieve.
The Sonic Sma Sta standing case is a two-in-one case and stand that endeavors to fit both uses. On the outside, it's a clean nylon package with a crescent-shaped zipper over the top of the case, while the back of the case is flat. When unzipped, the back of the case folds back and attaches to itself with a couple of magnets hidden under the nylon fabric. When the case is open like this, the bottom is a nice round shape that provides great stability for everything inside. There's a large opening in the back for storing long writing instruments, and then a smaller opening in the front for stashing smaller tools and accessories. The marketing copy says you can pop your phone into the front pocket so that it holds your phone up, but this only works on smaller phones. For example, a Pixel 7 and iPhone 13 Pro are both two wide to easily fit.
When the case is in stand mode, I've really enjoyed using it. It provides a nice level of organization and great stability for whatever I keep in in. It holds about 10-15 writing instruments when fully loaded, but the sweet spot for this case is between 6 and 12 items. If it's too loaded down, it can be difficult to pull things out of the case because there's too much friction with other nearby things. You can also splay things out a bit so they're easier to grab while the case is in stand mode. The front pocket is handy for keeping small items at bay, but I've found that I don't really use it much (more on why a little later). There's also a small pouch in the front area that has a small Velcro fastener to keep it shut, but the edges of the pouch are still open so you can store objects that are little taller than the height of the pouch. Overall, it's a great stand.
When it's time to pack up, just flip the top back up and zip it up. Easy, right? Maybe. In order to close this case, one of the sides ends up being positioned upside down, and gravity can really cause problems here. For me, I gave up on trying to store anything in the smaller compartment when packing it up as a case. I only use the larger compartment so that I don't have to worry about things falling out of the smaller compartment when I flip it and close the zipper. Even though the small pouch has a Velcro closure, it doesn't cover the entire opening and things tend to fall out with just a little movement. When you factor in the fact that the smaller compartment becomes the same area where the writing instruments are stored once the case is zipped up, I really think that Sonic didn't intend for anything to be stored in the smaller compartment.
This learning process was a bit frustrating, but fairly easy to overcome once I realized the limitations. What I haven't overcome yet is the problem of opening the case when I'm ready to use it as a stand. Let's start with the correct way to always open this case: lay it flat on its back and unzip the pouch before picking it up and transforming it into a stand. What I find myself doing without even realizing it is unzipping the pouch while I'm still holding it in my hands, intending to flip it back and set it down on a desk in stand mode. Every time I do this, I manage to spill most or all of the contents of the case onto the table or floor. Yikes!
Aside from the usage problems I've had with opening this case, I still really like using it as a stand that I can easily pack up and move occasionally. I wouldn't use this is a heavy commuting case that I potentially pack and unpack multiple times a day. The process of opening the case and setting it up as a stand is just a little too chaotic for my taste, and there are other options out there that offer the same basic functionality without the uncertainty of spilling everything out when opening it.
At $20.50, it's a fair price for what you get. The materials aren't the best on the market, but it feels well-made and robust. The zipper is smooth and sure, and the stitching is tight and clean. The light blue color is fun and I appreciate the minimal branding — plus, there are several other colors to choose from. The case also looks unique due to the crescent-shaped zipper and half-pipe shape when it's closed. At this price, I'm more than happy to use this on my desk as a pen holder that I can quickly pack up every few days/weeks if needed. If you want something that you can use on the go, look for other options that are more secure when opening/closing the case!
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
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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!
inkophile
When is a Platinum Preppy not a Platinum Preppy? When its a Muji Fountain Pen (price not available online). In the past, I’ve acquired other pens from Muji that were “white-labelled” but none more perfectly fits this description than this Preppy.
The exterior is entirely opaque white plastic with a clear ring at the cap band. The clip is integrated into the cap and is smooth straight line with no embellishment.
The only branding is the classic “p” and the nib width indication of “03” which is the fine nib.
The pen performs just as well as a regular Preppy but with a simple, clean exterior. The Platinum nib, as always, is smooth and the snap cap makes it a great on-the-go pen. If you have access to a Muji store, I would recommend looking for this gem.
This pen was sent to me by a dear friend.
The post Mini-Review: Muji Fountain Pen appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
When I’m looking for a great multi pen, I know any Uni-ball Jetstream setup is going to get the job done. One of their latest releases, the Uni Jetstream 4&1 Bamboo Multi Pen not only gets the job done with four ballpoint refills and an 0.5 mm pencil component, but looks amazing while doing it. I have one to give away this week, so read the rules below and enter away!
Uni Jetstream 4&1 Bamboo Multi Pen Giveaway
Ana at The Well-Apponited Desk started the #21PenQuestions party, and while I may be late, I’m still bringing a cooler full of fun! I’ve been excited to tackle these questions, and tried not to spoil myself by reading too many other responses before coming up with my own. Let’s see how it goes!
1: What is the pen they’ll have to pry out of your cold dead hands?
The Pilot Murex. I think this is one of the great pen designs, and the one I own was a gift. I try to use it as much as possible because it fits me perfectly, and deserves to be used.
2: What’s your guilty pleasure pen?
It has to be the Namiki Yuraki Milky Way Galaxy. It is easily the most I’ve ever paid for a pen, and looks like it with all of the beautiful craftsmanship involved. No real guilt, only pleasure.
3: What’s the pen you wish existed?
What if you combined the retractable nature of the Pilot Vanishing Point into the size of the Kaweco Liliput, and in the style of a Kasama Una Ultem, but in Orange. Yeah, how about that?
4: What pen would you give to a new enthusiast?
I think I’d go with the Pilot Prera, which is a step or two above the normal basic beginner choices - primarily due to the price. I think it is worth it, but it may be a bridge too far for someone to buy on their own when the $5 Platinum Preppy, or $18 Pilot Metropolitan are on the market. Since its a gift, I’d go for it with the Prera.
5: What pen do you want to get along with but it just never clicked?
Any Conid. By all rights, their pens should be a perfect match for me, but for some reason I never get all the way there with them. I’ve owned two, and sold two. I keep trying them, too, but I don’t see another in my future. Awesome pens though.
6: What pen do you keep only because its pretty?
I have a Fagionatto Petrarque in an orange celluloid that is one of the most beautiful pens I own, but I don’t love the nib in it. I can correct that, and should if I plan on keeping this pen. It has made the cut any time I try to thin out my collection, yet I keep not using it. I need to work on that.
7: What pen (or stationery product) did you buy because everyone else did?
Musubi notebooks, and I’m glad I did. It took be a couple of years to get there, and spending over $100 on a notebook is not something I had done before. But seeing them in action, learning the story of the brand, and becoming friends with the owner finally pushed me over the edge. I love them so much I have bought several more to give away. My personal one is filled, so maybe its’ time for my next.
8: What pen (or stationery product) is over your head or just baffles you?
The Col-O-Ring. I’m just seeing if Ana is paying attention here.
9: What pen (or stationery product) surprised you?
The basic plastic-barrel Kaweco Sport. A pen this small and this light should not be a good pen. And it’s not. It’s a great pen. I remember the first time I held one and I thought there was no way this is a good product. 10+ Kaweco Sports later, I am happy to have been wrong.
10: What pen doesn’t really work for you but you keep it because it’s a collectible?
The Uni-ball Kuru Toga Dive! It is all the rage, but it just doesn’t fit my needs as a mechanical pencil. It’s cool, but I don’t think it lives up to the hype.
11: What is your favorite sparkly pen (or ink)?
Jacques Herbin Shogun is the shimmer ink I didn’t know I needed in my life. It’s a moody ink, but has a ton of color and character. And shimmer.
12: Which nib do you love – but hate the pen?
I think this is the most difficult question on the list. I’m having trouble answering it because I rarely keep pens that I hate.
13: What pen (or stationery product) gives you the willies?
That “Papaya” pen I tried at the San Francisco Pen Show that one time. OMFG.
14: What’s your favorite pen for long form writing?
It’s easy to say the Pilot Custom 823, so let’s not make this difficult, shall we? Despite being a larger pen, it fits my hand well, has massive ink capacity, and sports one of the best nibs on the market. They could change the name of this pen to the Pilot Workhorse if they wanted to be more accurate.
15: What pen (or stationery product) do you love in theory but not in practice?
Pelikan gold nibs. They are AWESOME! They simply don’t work for my writing style. Stock nibs, even Extra Fine ones, are too wet and wide. I’ve tried to modify them, too, and the visuals end up not working for me. I’ve ended up swearing them off, despite being loved by most.
16: What pen (or stationery product) would you never let someone else use?
It doesn’t exist. Every pen I own has been in other peoples hands. It’s part of the deal when buying things to use. Other people get to use them as well. A prime example: the Murex from question number one was recently mailed to a friend to test out.
17: What pen (or stationery product) would you never use for yourself?
I understand the reason why the Montblanc Writer’s Edition pens exist, but they are not my jam. Too big and bulky for my regular use, but are favorites for many.
18: What pen (or stationery product) could you NOT bring yourself to buy?
The Visconti Iopenna. I want to buy it for the memes, but I couldn’t justify $200 for a sideshow. It’s kind of amazing though.
19: What’s your favorite vintage pen?
The Sheaffer Tuckaway. I was fortunate to run across this pen at the Arkansas Pen Show years ago, and it became an instant favorite due to its size and crazy fine nib.
20: What is your favorite EDC/pocket pen?
The Spoke Roady. Biased, as I am part of the manufacturer that makes them, but they are so damn good I want one with me at all times.
21: What’s the pen (or stationery product) that got away?
One of the first fountain pens I reviewed was a Sailor Pro Gear Standard in translucent Orange. It was a loaner, and I sent it back, thinking I could just buy one later if I wanted. Oops.
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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?
Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota.
Like all Open Humanities Press books, Ecological Rewriting is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/
Book description
Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series. Supported by the COPIM project, it is the creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by the philosopher Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the original.
In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It is important, then, that in creating Ecological Rewriting the collective led by Méndez Cota are inspired by locally influential Cristina Rivera Garza’s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation, rather than appropriation of another’s work. Alongside philosophical concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘literary communism’, Rivera Garza’s ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or reappropriation of ‘knowledge’. Instead, it can be conceived as a creative exercise in ‘unworking’ or ‘disappropriating’ academic authorship which responds to The Chernobyl Herbarium’s invitation to think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary accounts of Mexico’s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico – which they intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing.
Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium exists as an online version (https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82) and as a print version (forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with links to the original sections of The Chernobyl Herbarium that the writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail between the two publications.
Authors
Gabriela Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes, Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López, Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra
Editor Bio
Gabriela Méndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books include Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in Contemporary Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places, her work has appeared in New Formations, Media Theory, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identities (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine (culturemachine.net). Between 2019 and 2021 she led a practice-based educational initiative on critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a collective rewriting of The Chernobyl Herbarium (Open Humanities Press, 2015).
Series
Ecological Re-writing is published as part of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie, Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/
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