Intentional Learning at Reclaim Hosting: Back to the bava Basics or, Blogging about WordPress

A blog title so long it might as well be a tweet….but it’s not, it’s a god-damned BLOG! I’M BLOGGING, HOLD ALL MY CALLS!!!

Feel the burn, THE BLOG BURN! 

So, I got that out of the way, but it is a reflection of how fired up I am these days. Let me start by saying that Reclaim Hosting has been pretty awesome. Meredith has stepped into the role of Support Manager brilliantly, and Lauren continues to rule as Director of Operations, add to that our part-time support hire last Spring, Chris Blankenship, who has become the systems administrator Tim and I have been dreaming of! And just a few short months ago we got lucky enough to bring on Gordon Hawley has come to us with decades of support experience in the field and has fit-in seamlessly and proved to be an immediate win. What’s more, we recently hired soon-to-be UMW alum Kathryn Hartraft on a part-time basis, and she is proving why UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center is ground zero for recruiting fresh Reclaim talent. I am not gonna lie, the gritty and grounded UMW students have been an absolute boon to Reclaim Hosting since the beginning, and I am feeling ever more confident that they can run the ship without Tim and I—they are that good! 

It’s been rewarding to see the team congeal so well over the past two months, and I think that has given all of us room to start becoming more pro-active about filling in gaps we have in our collective knowledge. Out of which the idea of a more intentional learning program at Reclaim has emerged. The idea is simple: we take a topic for an entire month and recommend various readings and tasks around that theme, and folks are then expected to explore it and then narrate their learning on their blog. For example, in January we focused on migrations (a chore I have become all too familiar with these days) and this month has been dedicated to file and directory structures in cPanel. In fact, last night we had our first meeting with the entire team in a long while in order to reflect upon and wrap-up February’s learning, while at the same time introducing the next month’s topic. Meredith brilliantly wrapped up the month on file structures with a discussion around what we learned in the first hour, and I introduced the coming topic for March: all things WordPress! 

As usual I was ill-prepared for anything formal, so I basically tried to reinforce the fact that despite the haterz, WordPress still rulez! And while it only powers 35% of all sites on the web, that figure is closer to 90% of Reclaim Hosting’s users. So being familiar with the ins-and-outs of WordPress is a must for our team. It doesn’t hurt that I cut my teeth on WordPress and it has been very, very good to me over the years. I often think beyond marrying Antonella or teaming up with Tim as a business partner, choosing WordPress over Drupal was the best decision I ever made 🙂 What’s more, I spent many, many years on this blog trying to get folks in higher ed to take it seriously as a viable alternative to the LMS. In fact, bavatuesdays was one of WordPress’s earliest and most passionate promoters, and as is often the case I wasn’t wrong 🙂

So, I am fired up because the month of March on bavatuesdays will be a kind of homecoming for some WordPress blogging that I’ve not done in earnest for near on 7 or 8 years. In many ways WordPress has become invisible for me; it is the air I breath. That said, I do recognize I’m becoming a bit rusty when it come to seemingly endless possibilities of hacking it to do your will, but that’s why I still read bionicteaching and the cogdog religiously. So, the Reclaim Hosting team will be blogging about WordPress throughout the month of March, and if you are so inclined blog along with us and share it at the tag on Twitter and/or drop your feed in the comments below and use that tag so I can pull them into our main site aggregator.

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5 Responses to Intentional Learning at Reclaim Hosting: Back to the bava Basics or, Blogging about WordPress

  1. Hi Jim – I was chatting with that loveable scamp Lockley this morning and it struck me that the timing for PressEd might also be a cool showcase for some of this WordPress learning love?

    • Reverend says:

      Great minds … I was thinking the same thing. Might be fun to try and explain how we want to re-think docs in 15 well-placed tweets 🙂

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