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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!
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?
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….
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?
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.
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
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