Domains 2017 will be Intergalactic

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Reverend

One of the joys of being on the East Coast of the U.S. right now is waking up to gems like the above video from Bryan Mathers. I already blogged about Bryan’s poster for the Domains 2017 conference, so seeing this 15 second spot Bryan created was heavenly. Between the Beastie Boys “Intergalactic” background music, the roving, pulsating bubble and the rising mechanical hand (reminiscent of the monster on the Queen’s News of the World album cover) I was in heaven. I’ve been criticized for my focus on marketing and promotion, but it’s hard to argue with when it looks this good! Domains 2017 is going to be intergalactic, indeed.

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Domains 2017 Headliner: Martha Burtis

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Reverend

As soon as we started talking seriously about running a conference about Domain of One’s Own, the question came up about who we would want to frame the experience. There are many awesome people to choose from, but we were all in agreement that the great Martha Burtis was a no-brainer. Her career at UMW has been pretty amazing. I mean think about it, she has been central to every phase of the great UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies development over the last 13 years. She has done everything from helping to define the early Bluehost experiment to directing the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies to building UMW Blogs to designing ds106 to working closely with Tim Owens to may Domain of One’s Own a reality at UMW. And that’s not even to mention her work at building a brand new approach to digital fluency with UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center.

But there’s really no need to do a tale of the tape here, Martha’s consistent, insightful work speaks for itself, and anyone who has been paying attention to the space of fast, cheap and out of control ed-tech over the last decade knows this. In fact, few people can both build innovative platforms like the ds106 assignment bank or DoOO as well as frame the intellectual and pedagogical work we do as as well as Martha. And that is exactly what she will do in Oklahoma City this June. In fact, here keynote this summer “Making and Breaking a Domain of One’s Own” at the Digital Pedagogy Lab was a masterwork of just that kind of thinking, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a transformational rationale for Domains.

On a personal level I am really looking forward to having Martha at Domains 2017. And if Andy Rush can make it as well it will kinda be like getting the old DTLT band back together for one more jam 🙂

And it’s worth noting here that being able to invite Martha to join us and actually get acknowledged for her work would not have been possible without the University of Oklahoma’s generous support (you rule Adam!). We’ll be following up with more conference details as well as specifics of Martha’s talk, but in the meantime you may want to consider submitting a proposal given the deadline is less than 3 weeks away!

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Domains 2017: The Poster

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Reverend

The Buffana has swept away the festivities here in Italy, so I guess it’s time to shake off the holiday sleep and get back in the swing of things on the bava. I’m heading back to America for the next few weeks, so that should wake me up a bit. It’s been a fairly busy break between setting up servers and entertaining my awesome nephew Liam from California. A kid who is full of pleasant surprises and happens to be a spitting image of his father.

It’s kind of surreal to spend time with your nephew and constantly see your older brother’s visage straight out of your childhood. It’s difficult because you realize how much of his life you missed, while at the same time there is a comforting sense of continuity and familiarity. I can faintly see my own childhood through him, as well as what which will come after for mine. And while nothing is clearer to me than it was 27 years ago when I was Liam’s age, it is nice to see it is all still there.

Anyway, that’s where my mind has been, but the first order of business I attended while attempting to get back into a work rhythm was chat with the great Bryan Mathers about the art for the upcoming Domains 2017 conference. Bryan had been sharing some versions of his work on twitter, and I dug the vision of a person in a bubble on top of a record.

That went through some discussion on Twitter, and the real life hand beneath it was kind of an interesting blurring of the cartoon with reality in Bryan’s work. But the idea of the sphere and the hand made me think of Sci-fi art from the 1970s. In particular, it made me think of one of my favorite Twitter/Tumblr accounts, you guessed it, 70s Sci-fi Art.

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155667759282

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155624960610

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155553758158/virgil-finlay

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155500139296/elcilantroo-gray-morrow

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155195589021/the-year-in-review

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/154996027474

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/154965472446

I pointed Bryan to the site, and we discussed some of the colors and designs, as well as the exploration of scale and landscapes. Soon after that he came back with a quite brilliant poster for Domains 2017. Feast your eyes on this masterpiece:

For me it captures the spirit of the conference beautifully. An homage to pop scifi art from the 70s that imagined a future equal parts fantastic, technological, and dystopian—although there is even room for a couple of visions of future Utopias 🙂

https://www.tumblr.com/70sscifiart/155062456248/martinlkennedy-future-cities-from-top-to

I’m loving this poster, and it is getting me fired up for more. And luckily we have more to share about the conference this week, including our super special keynote!

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Cat Video

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Reverend

Tommaso took this slo-mo video of our cat 12 taking a quick break from her nap to languidly lick her paw. 2017 will be her 19th year. I had my doubts whether she would survive the trip over to Italy last year, folks thought I was crazy for bringing an 18 year-old cat on such a long journey. But when I picked her up off the mean streets of Kensington, Brooklyn in 1998, it was for life. And not only did she make the transition smoothly, but she found a second wind. It’s almost two decades with this cat, that’s what I think about at the end of another year. I hope 12 and all of you hippies make it cleanly to the other side, happy New Year!

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Stickers

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Reverend

Bryan Mathers siphoned off some booty to Italy from the Reclaim Hosting motherload. We secured a bunch of stickers by backing Visual Thinkery’s Indiegogo campaign, and I’m glad we did. I really love the stickers visually, and they are also quite functional because many of them, like the USA Eagle stamp and EDUPUNK head, are fairly transparent which creates a gorgeous layering effect. After adding them I realized the only thing missing is a ds106 sticker. I believe I have one of Jason Toal‘s #ds106radio skull stickers left, but I am loath to use it given it will be a collector’s item one day. I like how the collage on my laptop speaks to influences and experiences past and present, and the fact that the EDUPUNK character is kissing the Reclaim Hosting logo thrills me to no end. You can also see Jessica Reingold’s DTLT TV, which I dig, some WordPress love, and a lot of Audrey Watters cause she is the ed-tech internet now. I still have a little ways to go, but I am quite happy with this deck. Bryan has been churning out amazing designs all year long, which reminds me I have a post in the queue about his artwork for Domains 17.  But until then, enjoy savor the laptop art.

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Portraits

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Reverend

I’ve blogged a fair amount this year, if I hit the 165 posts mark—which I should—that would be an average of a post every 2.2 days. And that’s with a month away in between October and November. We’re nothing if not regular, and despite what both the British and Americans would have you think, 2016 has been an incredible year. What is it that the Clash said, something like I’m so bored with the USA-that sentiment is doubly true 40 years later.

Most of my experiences this year did not necessarily happen on the bava blog, but through my phone and Twitter. Being new to a smartphone/camera made for some distractions; I was like a kid in a candy store. That was compounded by the fact I’m still in Italy and have been lucky enough to travel to some awesome places around Europe (and even America). Posting to Twitter is something I’ve done since 2007, so it’s very much ingrained into my online habits. But as for many others, this year’s shrill political atmosphere has made it rough to sustain for long periods of time. And while I still enjoy many of the people and posts there, it’s become increasingly humorless.

I’m hoping to post and narrate my photos more regularly on Flickr. In fact, I have posted many of the 4500+ videos and images I’ve taken to Flickr, but they’re almost all private. That’s simply because they automatically upload from my phone and I have done an awful job at titling, tagging, and generally attending to them. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be rectifying that by trying to get much of what I captured this year organized on Flickr and posted to my blog with some context. I can’t claim 2016’s greatness without some evidence 🙂

Anyway, this post is just a baby-step to that end. I recently upgraded my phone to the iPhone 7+ (I’m soulless, I know) almost exclusively for the camera. You see, I am a long-time fan of Tom Woodward’s photography. In particular, I think his Stranger Portraits may have been the closest a ds106 assignment project ever came to a gallery-ready concept piece, just gorgeous stuff. His project was about overcoming his own aversion to people and actually asking total strangers if he could take a picture, and the resulting discomfort and tension is captured beautifully in the artifacts of the encounter. 

Stranger #1

Tom always likes to push himself to bizarre challenges like confronting strangers and staying physically fit. Me, not so much.  I like easy. So I doubled up on it this year. I got a phone that takes pretty impressive portraits (including artistic blurred backgrounds) and recruited the opposite of strangers (namely my family) to be my subjects. I’m kind of like the anti-Tom Woodward, and the better for it 🙂 Anyway, I organized my recent portraits of my family on Flickr last night as a push to start getting my photo collection from 2016 underway. So, here it is:

Nonna & Miles

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Reclaim the Office

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Reverend

Lindley Estes caught up with Tim Owens yesterday to talk about the new Reclaim Hosting offices in Fredericksburg. Tim and Lauren have already written about the space, and just today Lauren posted an update with pictures of the demo work going on as well as some insights to our thinking about the redesign.

On top of that, Lindley published an article for the Freelance Star today based on her conversation with Tim. What was cool about the article is how she connected the new offices with our earlier collaborations at UMW. Tim’s first day on the job at UMW in 2011 was being thrown into a nutty office space with a makeshift TV studio and a missing Dr. Oblivion, as well as hysterical teaching assistant-once-removed Martha Burtis. The fabled Summer of Oblivion!

When Tim and I were still at UMW one of the things we talked about was having a space like the DTLT offices for Reclaim. Three years later that is becoming a reality, and that’s truly awesome. As noted in the article and Lauren’s post, we’re opening the space up, exposing the ceilings. adding a glass-enclosed conference room, laptop bar, collaborative table, private desks, booths, as well as a recording studio, green screen, and 3D printing. We even have awesome sonic professionals folks like Mark Snyder who have already offered to help out.

That said, I’ve seen enough to know posh offices don’t necessarily make the magic, that’s about the people, the vibe, and the freedom. And after our trip to Portland, it was clear we have those three right now—in fact it was being together for that week that made us think about doing this. We are all locked-in, and very much taking care of business as I suggested in a recent braggy post about just this topic. In fact, Brian Lamb commented on that post asking how we managed our distributed workflow, which brought me to the post I wrote over a year ago about settling into distributed work from Italy. All of which seems ironic given I am writing a post about our new collaborative office space in Fredericksburg, right? 

Maybe, but it all seems related to me. We know we can effectively run Reclaim Hosting in a distributed manner around the globe—and I’ll remain distributed for the foreseeable future. But the idea of creating a dynamic space that can become a headquarters for Reclaim as well as a communal hub for distributed workers in and around Fredericksburg is a new challenge. And if it has any of the energy and goodness of ds106, as Lindley suggested in her Tweet above, then I can’t help but think it will be a most fun and creative one at that.

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Reclaiming Domain Privacy

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Reverend

One of the issues that’s gotten increasingly troublesome recently has been the increasingly more aggressive domain registration spam and scams. As I wrote earlier this year, it’s gotten to the point where companies are calling our clients soon after sign-up pretending to work for Reclaim and asking for credit card information. This is unconscionable, and we knew then and there we could no longer make identity protection for domains optional. So, as of January 1, 2017 we will be including ID protect for all new domains, whether registered individually or as part of a hosting account.

There is a cost involved in doing this, so we will be increasing the price of domains to $15 /year, and Student and Faculty shared hosting accounts will be raised to $30 and $50 /year respectively. We understand increasing prices may not be ideal for many, but being able to guarantee Reclaimers’ online identity helps justify the costs while reinforcing an ethos of openness and vigilance when it comes to one’s digital lifebits.

Let us know in the comments below if you have questions or concerns.

Nota bene: Any existing coupon codes that entail bulk account purchases will be honored at previous pricing structure.

Posted in digital identity, privacy, reclaim | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Reclaim in One Word: Support

Posted on December 16, 2016 by Reverend

Much of my time since being on the road for almost all of October has been locked into Reclaim Hosting support (oh yeah, there’s also been conference planning and a new office as well). It’s been a fairly intense Fall, and Lauren, Tim and I are not letting up as the next few months will surely attest to. That said, it’s worth taking a moment to point out the reason we have been fairly successful thus far: stellar support. 

Reclaimers ratings of their support over last 30 days

I like to remind myself of this because it’s grounding. From the very beginning Reclaim Hosting benefitted greatly from the work we did at UMW, an awesome community (hi ds106!), and a broader need in higher ed for web hosting. But at the end of the day, no matter how much people want to help—and believe me they do—when you’re hosting their personal, course, or institutional sites they just want them online. They also appreciate a heads up when they’re not, because at some point they won’t be. But more than anything they want someone to finally say yes and offer to help them when they’re trying to teach online. I think this last part is where Reclaim has nailed it. While we’re only 3 full-time employees (smaller than most ed-tech groups), I would be so bold to suggest we provide better support than hosts with 10x as many people working for them. The proof is in the pudding, check out the stats from the last 30 days in Zendesk:

Almost 90% of all tickets were answered within 45 minutes as opposed to the industry average of 16 hours! Additionally, we have almost 5x as many tickets as the industry average. Earlier this year we got rid of chat support which became onerous, even for a company that responds as quickly as we do. We moved from Intercom back to Zendesk in the Spring. On top of cutting our monthly support software nut in half, we lost nothing in the way of response time after entirely to email. We have discussed possibly offering phone support in the future once we settle into the Reclaim office, but that remains a question mark. And while there are few folks who missed chat, and a few who would appreciate phone support, by and large folks are happy after dealing with us because email doesn’t seem so bad when responses are lightening fast and they solve your issues. Additionally, a move to email-only support forces people to spell-out their issues in more depth which cuts down significantly on the one word requests like “HELP!!!” we would often get in chat.  

Now that we’ve been doing this for a few years we also have a sense of the flow of the work. Things slow down significantly around Thanksgiving, but steadily pick up over the last few weeks of the semester. In fact, in the chart above you can see the spike over the last week which tells the story of a semester wrapping up. We will fall off a cliff here pretty soon as classes end and schools break for the holidays. Late December and early January is our window to turn to infrastructure and add new servers, retire old ones, as well as for getting new schools up and running.

I’ve really enjoyed doing support fairly intensely the last 6 weeks, there’s no question Tim is still the master, but I think I’ve become pretty competent in most support issues and migrations—and I’m also studying and employing his method closely. Tim always goes the extra mile for folks, and that has made all the difference. I am also doing a lot of the lower-level server maintenance and support. I’m nothing to behold just yet, but I am building a fairly solid base-level competence as server admin. It’s gotten to the point where I work as much from terminal as I do in the cPanel web interface. Also, StackExchange has become my best friend.

But all of our jobs right now consists predominantly in supporting Reclaimers, and we do it a lot and we are  getting even better. A year or two ago it was all Tim, but Lauren and I have been working hard this past year, and I think the load is beginning to be a bit more evenly distributed—which allows us all to do more. We are being deliberate about our growth, and part of that is to make sure we don’t forget why people are excited about hosting with us. We help them do cool things for their day job. We point them to useful WordPress plugins. We’ve been known to recommend a theme or two. We help them setup beta versions of Omeka-S. We experiment with self-hosted instances of Mastodon (nightmare!). We point them elsewhere if they need something beyond a shared hosting environment (their own VPS, a Docker container, Sandstorm.io, etc.). And on and on. 

I’m proud of the work we do at Reclaim, and 99% of it is supporting students, faculty, and ed-techs-not that much has changed 🙂 Tim hates my braggy support posts because I think he believes it’s bad form, but this is the internet and Donald Trump is soon to be the President of the USA—bad form is all the rage!

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Erin go bava

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Reverend

You can see the Irish, right?

This April I’ll be heading to Ireland for the first time in my 45 years. It is kind of a big deal to me on a personal level because both my parents’ ancestors hail from the Emerald Isle, and from what I understand I still have family in both Galway and Kilkenny. I’ll have to do some genealogical research and talk to my brother who has travelled there and tracked down some of our relations. All that said, the family ties are anywhere from 3 generations to 5 generations removed, so my Irishness is as much a construction as a bloodline. In fact, identifying as Irish was refracted through the Long Island community I grew up in, namely “Beautiful Baldwin,” where you were pretty much identified as part of one of four groups: Jewish, Black, Italian, or Irish.ÂŞ Most of the families from this South Shore hamlet came there from Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx during the 50s and 60s. So being Irish on Long Island was an identity defined as much by the culture of NYC as Ireland. I associate it with the typical tropes: deep-rooted Catholicism, huge families,†  lyrical depression, and a fair bit of  alcoholic indulgence. I’m not sure how all that translates across the Atlantic though, and I’m sure it’s further complicated by the American appropriation of Irish culture.‡ 

All that said, it will be pretty wild to go to Ireland after so many years of identifying as Irish, yet also knowing I’m not Irish, but an American with Irish pretensions. All of which is further complicated by the idea that I will soon be Italian 🙂 So going will be a bit of a mental trip, and probably nothing like I thought it would be. But luckily I am heading there on a mission! Thanks to Catherine Cronin and Simon Warren, and through the aegis of the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, on April 3 at the National University of Ireland, Galway I’ll be part of a full-day workshop titled “Student as Partner, Producer & Assessor: Exploring Domain of One’s Own.” Here’s a bit from the description:

The Student as Producer model advocates a pedagogic approach foregrounding student voice, choice and creativity so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design and take responsibility for their own learning. This has broad ramifications across the institution with respect to digital technology, learning spaces, and assessment (Healy et al., 2014; Neary et al., 2015). The Domain of One’s Own initiative emphasises a partnership approach to teaching and learning, and reworks the relationships between research and teaching; producing and consuming; and educators and students (Groom & Lamb, 2014). Partnership with students, not only as learners but as teachers and assessors, can contribute to developing graduate attributes and personal learning networks that can sustain students/graduates well beyond their time in higher education.

I really love the pairing of Domain of One’s Own with the work Joss Winn and Mike Neary have been doing for so long with Student as Producer. It’s also fortuitous that we have had numerous cohorts of students from the Digital Arts and Humanities program at University College Cork using Reclaim to explore the Domain of One’s Own approach for their digital work, and Mike Cosgrave seems to have something to do with this. UCC is one of those schools—like Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and St. Joseph’s in Philly— that is running a Domain of One’s Own program under the radar through shared hosting. I will be reaching out to those fine folks for some examples and testimonials, and I’m also hoping to make my way to Cork after (or before) my time in Galway to meet the fine folks in Cork. In particular, I’m a huge fan of the Cork’s LGBT Archive, a project by UCC Ph.D student Orla Egan. 

So while I may be far, far away from my Irish heritage, I do feel quite close to some awesome digital work happening in Ireland, and I am thrilled to make my way there in just a few short months to preach the domains gospel and drive all the serpentine LMSs (VLEs) from the land!

ÂŞ The public elementary school I went to (Milburn) was nicknamed St. Milburn because it was predominantly Irish Catholic. 

† My mom came from a family of 11, her mom from a family of 13.  I have 6 brothers and sisters, all of whom I am pretty tight with, and somewhere around 40 cousins—none of whom I am close to 🙂 

‡ Although, I always thought the endless morbid conversations at the dining room table over cigarettes and coffee about who died, was dying, or will die soon to be an Iris trait, but maybe that’s just NY, or even universal? 

Posted in Domain of One's Own, presentations | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments