ds106 is not a cult, it’s a ~club

Posted on July 22, 2015 by Reverend
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Image Credit: John Johnston

Back in March Tim and I went to the IndieWebCamp at MIT.  Part of the two-day event consists of proposing something to build and hoping others are interested in participating. During lunch on the first day Tim threw out the idea of building a Tilde Club based on the work Paul Ford did last year. I loved the idea, and a few other folks were mildly interested for the nostalgia of it all. Tim spent about an hour showing us how to spin up a server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to get a tilde club going. There’s an excellent tutorial for doing just this on the Tilde Club Github account. It’s a fairly low-bar project for experimenting with spinning up a server on AWS if you’re interested.

AWS Instance of ds106.club

AWS Instance of ds106.club

Once Tim took us through the process, I spent most of the rest of that afternoon creating ds106.club on my AWS account. I used the extension .club because I couldn’t get the top-level extension .cult 🙂 Once I setup the server and actually figured out how to create users and give them permissions, I made a call out on Twitter offering anyone interested an invite. And, as is often the case with ds106 folks, more than a few were keenly interested in experimenting. Tim got his web ring up and running quickly. Dr. Oblivion was game for the new flesh. Bertha Curtis came to terms with the fact she is living in Oblivion. Tom Woodward shared that odd sensation. Grant Potter offered some ASCI art to the cause. And what do you know, A is for Audrey and Anarchist. But that’s just a sampling, find more here.

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It was meant as something both fun and experimental in a retro sort of way. We had no real plan, and it was a fun project to try and wrap my had around some basic linux commands and dusting off my command line. Additionally, it was a trip back to some of the early processes that helped me wrap my head around the web: creating and editing HTML files, FTPing files and images, and navigating server directories and file structures.

Soon after I got ds106.club up and running John Johnston was all over it, adding some impressive elements. He built a site filled with resources, shared a video he created on tilde basics, collected all the GIFs, laid out all the thumbs, and listed all the sites. Unlike me, John actually knows what he’s doing. I have to say he’s really embodied the spirit of creative hacking for me over these last few years. His amazing supercuts for wire106, his brilliant GIF Fight entries, his dazzling ds106GIFtv, and the sheer volume and brilliance of his Prisoner106 work—and that’s just a sampling. Out of curiosity I just wanted to see how much John has contributed to this community. A quick search showed 248 syndicated posts on ds106.us dating back to June 5th, 2011. Thanks pretty freaking amazing! You call it a cult, I call it downright inspiring!

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And seems to me John might be up to something with the Village Web Club. Seems there has been some recent Prisoner106 sightings on the server.

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I just love his idea of introducing this space as one folks who are creating on the web and pushing to teach themselves new things within a focused community might explore together. It’s fun, it’s personable, it’s focused, and it’s educational! If that’s a cult, I don’t want to be a rugged web individualist! I am a number. Number #1064life.

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Abstractions: Running WordPress Multi-Site using AWS, Docker, and BTSync

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Reverend

Heads up: this is not a technical run through, but more of a conceptual overview. Apologies if you came here looking for a how-to. Hopefully we will have just that in the next few months.

But enough about the past, let’s talk about the future!

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This past week Tim Owens and I went down to VCU’s ALT Lab to meet with Tom Woodward, Jon Becker, and Mark Luetke about the work they’re doing with Ram Pages. I already blogged about a couple of plugins they created for making syndication-based course sites dead simple. We also got to talking about some of the ways we have been using Amazon Web Services (AWS)to scale UMW Blogs. At this point Tim took us to school on the whiteboard explaining a possible setup he has been imagining, which is still fairly experimental.

Don’t let Tim fool you, he is DevOps #4life now. He can be found in his spare time watching presentations about load balancing a site for a billion users or scaling infrastructure for small services like Netflix. I’m becoming more and more interested in infrastructure discussions because they highlight interesting trends in the shifting nature of tech that deeply effects edtech, such as virtualization, containers, and APIs.

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Anyway, the image above is a look at a potential setup for a large WordPress Multisite instance on AWS. It has a couple of elements worth discussing in some detail because I want to try and get my head around each of them. The first is a load balancer that runs in its own EC2 instance.

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What the load balancer does is direct traffic to the Ec2 instance running the WordPress core files with the least load. So if you have four EC2 instances each running WordPress’s core files, the one with the least usage get the next request. Additionally, if all the instances have too great a load another could, theoretically, be spun up to meet the demand. That’s one of the core ideas behind elastic computing. The load balancer Tim used for UMW Blogs was HAProxy.

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As mentioned above, you can setup a series of instances of EC2 on AWS with the core WordPress files save the wp-content directory, which is the only directory folks write to. But you will notice in the fourth instances Tim switched things up. He suggested here that we could have an EC2 instance running Docker that could then run several WordPress instances within it. What’s the difference? And this is where I am still struggling a bit, but from what I understand this allows you to spin up new instances quicker, isolate instances from each other for more security, and upgrade and switch out instances seamlessly. It effectively makes WordPress upgrades in a large environment trivial.

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We have yet another EC2 instance that is the Network File Storage, this holds the wp-content files. The uploads, plugins, themes, upgrades, etc.  And each of the above instances share this instance. The all write to this, but one of the issues here is that this can be a single point of failure, kinda like the load balancer. So, Tim suggested there is BitTorrent Sync (BTSync), which I still don’t totally understand but sounds awesome. It’s basically technology that synchs files from your computer to spot on the internet, or between spaces in the internet, etc. So, what if we had several bucket where the various instances of WordPress core files were writing the upload files, themes, plugins, etc, and those buckets used BTSync to share between them almost immediately. So then you wouldn’t have a single point of failure, you would have the various instances writing to various buckets of files that would be constantly synching using the technology behind BitTorrent. Far out, right?

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BTSync provide ability to immediately copy and synch files across several buckets of the same files that get written to regularly.

Another option, and I think this was before we started talking about BTSync, but not sure if this would be in possible in addition to BTync, is have the blogs.dir folder for a WordPress Multisite that handle all the individual site files uploaded be sent to S3, Amazon’s file storage service.

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You get the sense that part of what’s happening when you move an application like WordPress Multisite onto AWS, or some other cloud-based, virtualized server environment, is each element is abstracted out to it basic functions. Core files that are read-only are separate from anything that is written to, whether that be themes, plugins, or uploads. Additionally, the database is also abstracted out, and you can run an EC2 instance on AWS with Docker containers each running MySQL (with a sharDB or HyberDB to further break up load) that can also replicate various writes and calls using BTSync? No single point of failure, and you greatly reduce the load on a WPMS which is completely I’m out of my depth here, but if I I accomplished anything here it might be giving you an insight to my confusion, which is also my excitement about figuring out the possibilities.

imageI have no idea if this makes sense, and I would really love any feedback from anyone who knows what they are talking about because I’m admittedly writing this to try and understand it. Regardless, it was pretty awesome hearing Tim lay it out because it certainly provides a pretty impressive solution to running large, resource intensive WordPress Multisite instance.

Posted in AWS, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Docker Con Europe?

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Reverend

Seems the post I wrote a week or so ago about Duke University running their website through Docker got picked up on this week’s Docker newsletter, which is a lot less cultish than the OL Daily. It was then tweeted by the Docker folks yesterday.

Thing about this is it generally reinforces the fact for me that blogging is always about casting out ideas beacons and seeing which ones resonate back to you through time and space. It also reinforces some of the work Tim Owens is imagining when it comes to infrastructure for larger WordPress Multisite installs right now. I will blog about this shortly, because it points to some broader work we have been imagining for a while now.

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Finally, it’s also pushed me a bit closer to attending (and possibly presenting at) Docker Con Europe in Barcelona this November—although tickets are steep! I may even have some projects to talk about by then, and I imagine it would be a great place to start tapping into the conversations folks are having around this infrastructure from a wide range of approaches. I’m still wrapping my head around it all, so all the more reason to go. As for presenting—assuming that’s even possible—still on the fence with that one given I’m a bit out of my depth. Although, what better incentive to get my act together? Could be a place to really dig in on what the Personal API could look like as an abstracted infrastructure à la Docker 🙂

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Domains and the Cost of Innovation

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Reverend

Audrey Watters brilliant article “The Web We Need to Give Students” delineates a host of excellent reasons for why students should be provided a space of their own on the web as part of their formal education.  She argues this is just important for K12 as it is for higher education, featuring Clarence Fisher and Bryan Jackson (those damn innovative Canadians!) to underscore the work already being done in this regard. A domain and web hosting provides a platform that’s on and of the web, as Watters notes, providing a portal to an entire world of intellectual opportunities:

Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others. It allows them to demonstrate their learning to others beyond the classroom walls. To own one’s domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.

Given Audrey’s remarkable pen and tremendous reach, I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn former schools minister in the UK, Jim Knight, picked up on the idea of a Domain of One’s Own as a compelling approach to teaching digital skills. What’s more, the post in which he frames his thinking has the following as its sub-header “Jim Knight considers stealing an innovative idea from the US.” I’m sure more than a few of the UK folks in my network are cringing at this idea given they have been a part of this conversation for years. Nonetheless, this is a major coup for UMW and it’s domain program, right?

Absolutely! University of Mary Washington deserves a lot of credit when it comes to getting behind a domains project, funding it, and trying to build it into the fabric of the university. Ironically, however, at the same time UMW’s role as an international force for innovation in edtech is being widely recognized, the group that made it happen is disbanding. There are a lot of  reasons for this, and I can’t speak for anyone else. But for me, it became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to run a group filled with some of the best talent in the field and still offer less than $50,000— sadly the starting salary I got back in 2005. UMW got lucky for a long time in this regard, we all worked for far less than we were worth (I think that’s a institution-wide nationwide reality), but we had freedom, with little to no oversight for most of that time.

But with a project like Domain of One’s Own that’s changed over the past year. It’s a high profile project and a lot of folks have taken an interest, in a Barton Fink sorta way.

And that could be a very good thing, but as we have been suggesting for years, our success was premised on an investment in people. It was our group’s collective belief that if we continued to do great things year-after-year and prove our value (which I think we have) the resources would follow. As it turns out they didn’t, and I think that was the hardest part of my role (and my biggest failure) as director over the last couple of years—realizing that no matter what we did and how successful we were, the resources necessary to sustain our group—no less build on our successes—would never materialize. I really wanted to believe. It’s been a hard pill to swallow.

All this said, I know this is a broader reality playing out across higher education right now. The late logic of capital has come home to roost in academia: do more with less, lucky to have a job, tenuous tenure, the mission, austerity, budget cuts, everyone’s expendable, etc. But the fact is I firmly believe none of us at UMW are expendable. It really was, is, and will continue to be about the people. So if anyone out there is considering a Domain of One’s Own project, know this, the tech can be very, very cheap. It’s the right people that will be expensive, and for good reason—they determine its success. And success means integrating a digital-based curriculum across a university culture—this takes support, resources, and a concerted effort of talent. If you’re thinking about doing something like this I highly recommend you invest in some excellent people, pay them what they deserve, and trust them to do great things. Major kudos to VCU’s ALT Lab in this regard, they have been creating positions at really competitive salaries. Not sure how Gardner Campbell is doing it, but it lifts us all up.

In fact, this is what I have seen at various schools who have taken up this project. The University of Oklahoma has invested heavily in Adam Croom, Mark Morvant and many others to carry out various digital projects, including the important work of OU Create. Channel Islands has invested in folks like Michael McGarry, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, Jill Leafstedt, and Jamie Hoffman to integrate CI Keys into their culture. Davidson has done the same with Mark Sample and Kristen Eshleman for their Domains project. All these projects revolve around a cadre of folks who are doing great things, and pushing experimentation and freedom forward.

But let me be clear, I am more than proud of the work we have done with UMW Domains on the back of Tim Owens 🙂 It’s been part of a longer tradition, and I think Mary Washington should certainly be excited about being touted internationally as the home of an innovative project the UK should import. At the same time, there must also be the recognition that the very conditions that made this possible have been eroding steadily over the last several years. Continued wage stagnation (we got two or three raises in the ten years I was at UMW) and an attempt to institutionalize that innovation without the requisite resources. But the good news is that none of this is a foregone conclusion, UMW still has the ability to consider investing in this group, and actually bringing in the caliber of people needed to continue what’s become a pretty special tradition—one I’d be heartbroken to see “disrupted.” Anyone who has worked at an institution knows that the powers that be have the ability to invest in those things that are important to them, I still want to believe, regardless of all evidence, that UMW’s DTLT is one of those things.

Posted in Domain of One's Own, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

List Remote Comments

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Reverend

I already blogged about Mark Luetke‘s awesome Motherblogs Made Easy plugin, and I promised there was more. Well, here’s more. Martha Burtis already experimented with Mark’s List Remote Comments plugin on the aggregator blog she is working on for Freshman Seminar she will be teaching (along with several other UMW faculty) titled Beyond the Selfie. It’s very slick, it basically takes the comment author, post title, time and day, and links that right beneath a post excerpt.

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In fact, Mark is building on top of the Remote Comments plugin that Martha wrote a while back which shows the number of comments on a syndicated post. Mark took that code and actually pulled some meta data and a link to those comments right into the post. All of which makes the syndication hub that much slicker.

I wanted to try this out for myself, and Martha was kind enough to share the bit of code she used as part of a custom WordPress function for Beyond the Selfie, which I added to functions.php of the theme for the gorgeous Prisoner 106 site designed by Andrew Forgrave. This is a syndicated motherblog using FeedWordPress, so having the remote comments show up on the aggregator of the various syndicated posts is most useful for folks who want to see what’s happening at a glance. I failed to mention that both Mark’s and Martha’s plugins depend on FeedWordPress to work.

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For Prisoner 106, I tried using both Martha’s and Marks’s plugin to show the number of comments on a remote post as well as providing a list of links to those comments beneath the posts. Pretty cool mashup of the two.

For Martha’s plugin you don’t need to change anything, it works seamlessly if FeedWordPress is installed and pulling in remote posts with comments. For Mark’s plugin you need to add the following bit of code list_remote_comments() to the theme template file to make the comments show up within the blogs flow of posts. You can also use the shortcode [list-remote-comments] in conjunction with the Display Posts Shortcode,but that was too much work for my internet ADD

Posted in digital storytelling, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Syndication Made Easy for WordPress MultiSite

Posted on July 16, 2015 by Reverend

Nostromo’s boot sequence of “Mother” computer in Alien

Tim Owens and I went down to Virginia Commonwealth University’s ALT Lab to catch up with Tom Woodward, Jon Becker, and a recent, most impressive addition Mark Luetke. They have been doing some great work with their WordPress Multisite (WPMS) instance Rampages. They have brought on more than 7,000 users in just over a year, which is pretty astonishing. One of the things we talked about is the cool work Mark has been doing over the last couple of months for their blogging platform, namely writing awesome plugins. One that hit close to my own heart is the “Mother Blogs Made Easier” plugin that works in conjunction with FeedWordPress and allows faculty to specify a category that will syndicate into their course site.

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The shortcode for the plugin with a category you specify

This is a bit of shortcode that a faculty can add to a page or post. Once they do it becomes a straightforward form that a student fills out and then the category a faculty member added is seamlessly created on the student’s site as well as added to FeedWordPress on the Mother Blog (the course site that aggregates in all the students posts).

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Above is the post or page with the shortcode, as you can see it is a simple yes or no to whether you have a blog on the system. After that you choose the site for this course, you’ll notice it slickly includes all the sites one has on a given WPMS instance. After that you are all set.

If you don’t have a site, the form branches and asks you if you want one, and then sends you to create a site.

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If you don’t want a site, it will ask you if you have your own and let you provide the feed:

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If you answer no again, well then what the hell are you doing here 🙂

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Once you select a site on the WPMS instance (which will be 99% of the cases for VCU students) the plugin automatically creates the appropriate category on your blogAfter that, you just need to use that category to syndicate to the motherblog, and the plugin tells you as much once you finish the form:

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On the other side, this plugin not only creates the category on the student’s blog, but also adds it to FeedWordpress with the proper category feed. So, when I added testds106.umwblogs.org to the form, this plugin automatically added testds106.umwblogs.org/category/ds106/feed -how awesome is that?

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And that’s just one of the several cool plugins Mark Luetke has created in his short career at ALT Lab, but I’ll let this magic sink in a bit before I blog the next one 🙂 Where has he been for the past 7 or 8 years again? 🙂

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Big in Japan or, Our Course Could be Your Cult #4life

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Reverend

This just  in from the “I love Me” department.

Last month I spent five days in beautiful Barcelona presenting at the Annual EDEN Conference and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey in glorious 70MM at the phenomenal Phenomena theater. It was a blast, and an excellent European primer for my family’s fast approaching move to Italy. While there I was interviewed by Lluís Amiguet of La Vanguard about a range of topics from blogging to networks to online communities to EDUPUNK to digital higher ed. Now I would love to talk in some depth about the article/interview, but I can’t get my hands on a decent translation, and my Spanish is non-existent. So, if anyone out there is interested in a free domain and web hosting for the foreseeable future in exchange for a translation, let me know—Reclaim Hosting has got you covered 🙂 Hell, you might even be able to find the article in Spanish by clicking the link below.

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I have to say it doesn’t suck to see an article like this where your work/ideas are featured.* That said, it’s important to recognize how it can help promote the myth of the pioneering innovator/fearless leader rhetoric that’s often predicated on erasing the conditions that made it so. It doesn’t take much for me to start questioning how much anything I’ve done is really mine. Luckily, I had the good fortune of working at UMW the last ten years, and my colleagues at DTLT provided a much needed grounding when things like EDUPUNK, ds106, Domains, etc. came along. I may have drawn some attention through my blogging and online antics, but the work was always the thing—and that’s where we always focused our energy. You can’t make great things happen without a host of committed people building together to create something bigger than each of them individually. When you are part of something like that concerns around ego, credit, and ownership disappear, if even for a moment. That’s how much of the beginnings of ds106 felt for me.

The raw collaborative energy of folks like Martha Burtis, Grant Potter, Tim Owens, Lisa M. Lane, Brian Lamb, GNA, Mikhail Gershovich, Scottlo, Alan Levine, NoiseProfessor, Giulia Forsythe, and Tom Woodward, to name just a few‡, over the course of that four or five months in spring 2011 is hard to capture or quantify. In fact, I don’t remember a lot of it—too many drugs and not nearly enough sleep 🙂  And this has been the case for so many of the cool things I have been a part of over the last 8 or 9 years. I can contribute much of EDUPUNK’s inspiration and widespread attention to Brian Lamb and Stephen Downes (the latter got the word out on a massive scale). The issue of credit gets even trickier when thinking about how many folks continue to drive the collaborative creative engine that is ds106. Just look at all the different things happening at this moment: Jennifer Polack’s students at UMW‘s work, the amazing #cudenver posts from Remi Holden’s students at UC Denver, the #prisoner106 madness, and the Burgeron Family…WTF!  It’s not one thing, it couldn’t have been after we opened and networked the course. I understand it’s easy to reduce ds106 to the lowest common denominator of my personality—which is very low but certainly in there. But at this point four years later it has been amalgamated with so many other personalities as to be just a part of a larger whole. Linking me so closely with ds106 makes more sense as a metonymic association than any kind of reality at this point—just ask anyone experiencing the course now.

Maybe that’s why Martin Weller’s recent post and resulting conversation around the role of personality in education has been of so much interest to me, and many other folks. I blame Martin for what started as a fairly straightforward post celebrating “my work” resulting in a broader examination of  “our work on the web.” It reminds me of a poem by Muhammed Ali, one which George Plimpton asserts is the shortest in the English language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFDk_T8bOGM

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The way I think about something like ds106, UMW Domains, and now Reclaim Hosting is always a balance between me/we.  I want to do cool stuff and it feels awesome when folks recognize me for something I’ve done, but its even cooler when this happens alongside others that help balance your own assumptions and enable you to transcend the limits of your own subjectivities to create something more nuanced, complicated, and beautiful. Isn’t that the great promise of a network like the web?

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Image credit Martha Burtis

But even if you begin to pull it off like we did in ds106, it’s not long before our course could be your cult 🙂 Martha Burtis created the above mock Time cover back in February 2012 after Stephen Downes suggested the self-referential assignments and #4life chants in ds106 were over-branding the course and suggestive of that group feeling. The discussions that ensued were interesting, as the comment thread on Alan’s blog can attest. Hell, the claims of ds106 as a cult even pre-date that. Two weeks into the first open, online ds106 course in January 2011 the idea of course purely driven by a cult of personality was thrown out there—even if in jest. So, I guess the idea of personality as a trap for building an engaged community is always a danger. And I must admit I can tend to have a knee-jerk reaction because it tends to reduce all the work many of us did to my personal character traits, which then creates a tension (spoken or not) that is borne by a general tendency to put the me (rather than the we) at the center of things.

The whole raison d’etre of ds106 was that this course could be your life, á la the lyric from The Minutemen‘s History Lesson Part 2. Anyone could start a band (or create a course) and make music.† I tend to think ds106 was about the convergence of a network of people that I wanted to “build dreams with and stuff.” Personalities were a part of that, but it is also very clear it didn’t end with them.

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* Although, let it be said  I may feel differently post-transcription.
‡ I know I am missing so many more folks here, see how this credit thing sucks.
† I am stealing all of this from Grant Potter cause he jams econo.

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Thinking about how we work at Reclaim

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Reverend

The Transformation has Begun!

What the hell is that thing? Image Credit: GIF Movie

The last two weeks I’ve been spending just about all my time balancing two jobs. My day job at UMW—which is now slowing fading into the horizon—and my amorphous role at Reclaim Hosting as support specialist, burgeoning sysadmin, evangelist, co-founder, and GIFmaker is starting to take center stage. I’ve been working pretty much night and day the last two weeks because my partner, Tim Owens, was on a well-deserved and long-overdue vacation. I won’t lie, I missed him a lot. I have been spoiled. He has single-handedly been running Reclaim like a boss for the last six months. And I got a first-hand glimpse into just how amazingly talented he is while he was at the beach. From support to development to the next idea to bringing more schools onboard, Tim’s the whole package. In fact, it was really intimidating to step in as he was checking out for a while.

Luckily we made the extremely smart move of hiring Lauren Brumfield. What’s cool is over the last two weeks Lauren and I having been working together to get a sense of how everything works together. This will help us tighten some things up, and prepare for the onslaught that will be this fall. We have over twenty institutions working with us this coming semester (ten times the number we had last year at this time), not to mention the countless departments, faculty, and students that Reclaim serves each and every semester. Bringing Lauren on now not only allows her time and space to learn how things work, but also gives us fresh eyes on how we work and what we can improve. We crave constant, focused feedback on how we can streamline some of our service interfaces and operational processes (which we get regularly thanks to many great folks like Christina Hendricks)—so don’t be shy, let us know! Lauren will be working with us to make sure this all happens. We need someone to help us organize, prioritize, and get done many of the things we have outstanding. And given Lauren has taken on the self-appointed title of Operations Manager, and thanks that means we might be getting a bit more orgaminized.

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Intercom.io

One of the things I worked on over the last two weeks was setting up our payroll. I was in contact with someone from ADP, the payroll behemoth, but Tim and I have been intrigued, and served quite well, by the latest breed of service-based applications coming out to help run a small business. For example, we use the tool Intercom.io for all of our support tickets, and that has been really successful. So after Tim mentioned ZenPayroll, Lauren and I spent some time looking into it over the last two weeks, and the whole design of the tool and the ease and elegance of the on-boarding process for a complete newbie was insanely elegant, helpful, and intuitive. The application not only helps you get your payroll up and running with everything from direct deposits to federal and state tax withholdings to contractor W9s, etc., but it also teaches you how it all works like the best kind of video game. There is a lot to be learned from the design of an app like this.

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ZenPayroll

Tim, Lauren, and I are starting to develop a distributed work routine. A tool that has become central to that routine is Slack. That’s where I talk real-time with Tim and Lauren throughout the week, share issues, ideas, and generally communicate. It allows you to build your own organic channel-based structure, which I love. It doesn’t feel like a system, just a quick, group  communication tool with options.

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Slack

In conjunction with Slack we have another tool call Asana that we use as a project management/to-do list for everything we need to get done. Lauren turned us on to this last week, and we’ve been organizing our various accounts, adding structured to-do lists, and setting up a calendar there. It’s the anti-Slack, and I think the two complement each other well in that regard. So that’s four tools we use to communicate with each other, the innumerable reclaimers, get paid and structure projects.

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Asana

And none of these deal with a whole other suite of tools that we use to actually manage the various servers, shared web hosting, domains, etc. That list might have to be saved for another post. But what’s been interesting as I witness the distributed architecture of Reclaim emerge, is that it reminds me a lot of the distributed architecture of early Web 2.0 course sites that integrated blogs, wikis, delicious, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc. That radical idea of an ecosystem of course/individual tools is proving just as successful here, but one of the key elements to that success will be making sure the people we help don’t have to struggle between and amongst them—that’s one of the great promises of APIs.

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The GIFs that Keep on Giffing

Posted on July 12, 2015 by Reverend

A thumbs up for Burtis Furiosa

A couple of weeks ago the inimitable Martha Burtis both conceived and engineered a brilliant workshop for the freshman orientation. The session was titled “The GIFs that Keep on Giffing” and the mission was pretty straightforward, show 16 incoming freshman how to make two GIFs in less than 25 minutes. Martha and Digital Knowledge Center tutor Callie Liberty had it running like well oiled machine by week two of orientation when I finally joined in.

The well oiled machine GIF

Martha starts the workshop with a quick overview of what will be accomplished and then turns the floor over to a captivating 3 minute video made by the great Andy Rush about the history of GIFs and more. It comes highly recommended!

After that, Martha is all business taking the students through a 15 minute crash course in making two GIFs using MPEG Streamclip and Photoshop. Callie download and made available scores of trailers, music videos, and memes for the students to choose from for their GIFs because downloading a video of their choice would have been prohibitive time wise. The pacing and effectiveness of this process was most impressive, and you can see the details thanks to a step-by-step tutorial they shared here on the amazing workshop website (http://giffing.net). If you look more closely at that site you’ll notice a few other things: it also features a gallery of the over 380 GIFs created by the incoming freshman:

Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 6.37.21 AM

All of which were captured thanks to the GIF submission form Martha created with some of her WP Toolset kungfu!

Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 6.41.29 AM

Now I mentioned each student creates two GIFs during the workshop, let me be more specific. They actually create two versions of the same GIF. One version is a straight up GIF, and with a downloaded video, MPEG Streamclip and photoshop you can literally do that in 5 minutes. The other ten minutes are spent adding a mask to their GIF and uploading it they can then play on the ITCC’s two story video wall at UMW!

ITCC Media Wall

Some much needed original student content for the media wall! Like, for example, this gem of a GIF by Spencer Scott captured on the wall by Andy Rush.

GIF created by Spenser Scott and captured on the ITCC media wall by Andy Rush

This workshop is remarkable on so many levels and highlights the genius of Martha Burtis. It’s fun, every single student who came through it was locked in. It’s useful, we now have over 380 masked GIFs (thanks to Michael Branson Smith for creating the mask) that fit perfectly on our media wall and provide a student generated content of the best kind: GIFS! This was made possible by the SPLOT like design of the workshop site. With tutorials, a gallery, and submission of work it becomes a hub as much as a resource site, and it can very easily become a space to project these GIFs directly to the media wall. A very powerful convergence of virtual and physical spaces in the….wait for it….Convergence Center.

I think the workshop and related site highlight some of the best design work being in done in edtech, in my humble opinion. This site can (and will!) easily be added to the ecosystem of ds106, much of which Martha helped build. It’s an excellent example of just how much a framework for creating and sharing is at the center of the very best educational design. And I can think of very few better at this than Martha, so major kudos are in order!

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Computer Critters

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Reverend

One of the things I’ll miss most about UMW is the UMW Console, it looks like it may even become a more permanent attraction that will highlight random years across the decades. For example, we recently secured a Nintendo Virtual Boy for when we choose to time warp to 1995 or 96.

Virtual Boy

I’ll have to enjoy most of that remotely, but something Zach Whalen is working on right now has me pretty fired up. But before I go there, let me say that collaborating with Zach on this whole thing has been the single best collaboration I’ve been a part of at UMW. He is freaking awesome. I’ll really miss the way he just locks into a project like a pitbull, and quietly makes it all happen. He’s a real source of energy and inspiration for all things digital at UMW, and that may be no where more apparent in the project he is working on currently. Michael Branson Smith (MBS) came to UMW in April and he demonstrated how you could use a Raspberry Pi and a short-range TV broadcaster to create a list of videos and broadcast them over a local frequency that the old school tube televisions in the UMW Console could pickup and play on a designated channel. It was/is/and forever will be extremely cool.

MBS created that day of programming by editing together shows and commercials into a seamless set of 10-12 files that represented the shows for the day. For the last month or two Zach has been taking what MBS has done and started writing what is basically a TV scheduling program for the Raspberry Pi that will automatically add commercials from a pool of potentially hundreds whenever there is a break in a show. It will also be able to synch the time you turn the Pi on so that it automatically knows what the closest part of a show would be given the time of day. And the space in between when you turn on the Pi and the next time appropriate part of a given show is filled in with commercials. This program could enable us to effectively add commercials and shows to a Pi and have the machine do most of the more detail orientated scheduling with an element of randomness. There will still be the work of editing commercials and commercial breaks into shows, but after that you have a pretty granular scheduling system for any given network on any given day. It’s not all done, but the concept is there, and Zach has been getting closer and closer every day.

But none of that is what I was intending on posting about, what I wanted to share are these four 1-minute episodes from the 1985 series Computer Critters (not sure it had any more than 4 episodes). One of the interesting things about these short pieces is the way they they build on each other.

The first episode reminds everyone that computers are everywhere: elevators, airplanes, etc.
#1 Computers are Everywhere

The second episode explains what input devices are, such as keyboards, the n=mouse, etc.

#2 Input Devices

The third episode tries to establish how these machines are actually useful. For instance, how they can help you organize your comic collection or recipes. The power of databases!

#3 Database Management Systems

Finally, the fourth episode introduces the most practical use case for a computer yet: word processing. [Although I imagine the lost 5th episode was about games 🙂 ] How computers can help change the way we imagine writing. And interesting idea given how much that new way of writing is completely dominant now, there doesn’t even seem to be an old way although as recently as 1985 computers were still being evangelized as a thing to be taken seriously.

#4 Word Processing

I love these short series on educating an entire generation about the coming shift in how we will experience the world. there is a moment in one of these videos where two of the younger critters exclaim “we are the computer generation.” This is a far less compelling series, not to mention foreshortened, than Canada’s Bits and Bytes educational TV series about computers, it comes highly recommended, but it certainly suggests the 1980s was fairly self-aware of a coming computer generation that would be effectively transformed by this technology, and say what we will about their limits and possibilities, by 2015 it has more than come to pass. This is one of the things I live about the UMW Console, it can highlight this through the culture of 1985 in some strangely popular and subtle ways at once.

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