Playing Host to Higher Ed’s Long Overdue Web Party

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Reverend

My last post got me thinking about some pretty basic ideas when it comes to  some of the approaches for edtech I’ve been going on about recently.

Cheap commodity web hosting has been around for roughly fifteen years. There’s nothing radical about it other than higher ed’s inability to fathom a vision of the web that empowers faculty, staff, and students alike to become a node on the open web.

Nothing we are proposing in Domain of One’s Own is at all radical save, perhaps, the idea of including a domain with the web hosting. Schools like the University of Washington have been offering their community shared hosting for a while, they just place no real emphasis on a narrative of empowerment and potentiality. Seems to me they aren’t effectively communicating what their community has at its disposal.

The fact web hosting seems radical to so many reinforces just how all consuming the learning management system (LMS) has become in any and all discussions about educational technology.

After my recent talk at Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies Conference I was floored by how many of the questions were centered around the impossibility of teaching and learning outside the LMS. There was a quiet sense of desperation at the suggestion of a more reasonable and relevant approach to the web in higher ed that, by the way, doesn’t replace the LMS, but simply provides a more sophisticated environment for the teaching and learning online. Matt Crosslin covers all this far better than me in his “LMSification of the Educational Narrative” post, it comes strongly recommended.

So, I’m hoping the ice is starting crack a bit. Bluehost was a Platinum sponsor at Sloan-C, a company that can actually scale hosting for any size university in the country. What’s more,  if you don’t want to buy a domain for everyone at your university or college, then don’t. Get a single domain and run shared hosting for the community from there. Get something like umw.domains (.domains is a cool new extensions offered by ICANN, Tim Owens picked up this one) or stonybrook.domains or wsuv.domains or cuny.domains or tru.domains or oklahoma.domains or yale.domains, etc. and run hosting for the entire campus through Bluehost. You can have jgroom.umw.domains, etc.

What’s nice about this approach is faculty, staff and students who really see the need for their own domain can buy it themselves, and point it to their hosting space and create an addon or parked domain. At the very least we could start bringing back the basic, powerful possibilities of hosting for campus communities in order to start updating the original vision of tilde spaces (umw.edu/~jgroom) back in the day. This is fairly basic stuff, and there are companies like Bluehost that can easily scale this for educational institutions.

What I found strange at Sloan-C is that Bluehost couldn’t seem to sell this basic idea effectively. Their focus session was centered around creating “Faculty Assessment Portfolios.” An exploration into the territory of creating portfolios for faculty promotion, tenure and the like. I couldn’t think of a more fraught space for them to try and break into higher ed through. Seems to me their Spoke project is exactly what they need to focus on, selling hosting as the web-friendly platform higher ed has forsaken. A rally cry to bring back experimentation and innovation to campuses on the back of Bluehost’s servers. But, alas, they seem to want to fix faculty portfolios for promotion and tenure. Fail.

The problem there is that while Bluehost has the salespeople and the developers, they don’t seem to have faculty and educational technologists working closely with them on this. This is why Canvas was so smart hiring folks like Jared Stein; he knows how  university culture works, he’s developed courses for faculty and students. Jared is someone who can guide you to what’s needed from such an experience. From what I understand, Bluehost’s Spoke has a slick dashboard that shares all sorts of details of folks at your school. They even suggested they were working on a “Reclaim Your Domain” piece that will pull in your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. accounts—they were vague, but it piqued my interest. And while I’m sure all of this is proprietary, designed specifically for their customized control panel (none of it’s gonna be freely shared) I can live with that if they could actually sell the remarkable potential for universities they’re sitting on.

But they can’t articulate it. What a shame. It comes down to a failure of communication. This is what we all need to push on, I think this is an important project for higher ed more generally, not so much that it’s the cutting edge, but precisely because its not. It’s the open web and it returns us to a sense of the wonder at the heart of that model for teaching and learning. It also pushes us to redefine how we manage data, identities, and sharing. It’s still the key to  a fundamental shift in how we think about the university as a series of open and connected nodes that will start tearing us free from the broadcast infrastructure that everywhere imprisons us.

Posted in Domain of One's Own | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Considering Running Domain of One’s Own on Your Campus?

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Reverend

Well then, Martha Burtis, Tim Owens, and Ryan Brazell have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Below are a series of resources that we have shared with people who are inquiring about running UMW Domains on their own campus. The response from folks at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference about the possibilities of Domain of One’s Own has been really encouraging, and I think we’re both excited and relieved to find out not everyone thinks we’re crazy 😉

So, feeding off some of that excitement, I figured I would annotate a series of links to the various posts and documents about DoOO over the last two years that Martha Burtis sent me earlier this afternoon. Additionally, I am including an updated version of Ryan Brazell’s handout which provides an awesome overview of the broader trajectory of digital projects at UMW.

Domain of One’s Own: The Pilot

As Martha noted in the email she sent earlier:

Here is the original 5-part series Tim wrote about the pilot setup. The caveat to these is that some of this has changed since the project went live this fall (we’re not using Plesk, we have a different sign-up procedure, etc).

Building a Domain of One’s Own, Part 1

The first post is a 30,000 feet overview of our vision for bringing web hosting on campus. Getting a virtual private server, connecting with ENOM (the domain wholesaler), and taking stock of where we were six months into the pilot. It’s a broad look at what the hell we were getting into, as well as considering where we might go in terms of software, services, etc.  http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/01/building-a-domain-of-ones-own-hosting/

Building a Domain of One’s Own, Part 2

The second post is an examination of the actual space where users manage their own slice of the server: the control panel. In short, the graphic interface that allows you to manage your bit of the server without using command line and drinking Mountain Dew. Some confusion with terminology here might be that during the pilot we used Plesk (one brand of control panel software), but ultimately decided on cPanel (the industry standard brand) for the official launch. Tim is weighing the possibilities of both, but this post gives you a nice, detailed look at just what it is your community members can do with their own slice of hosting heaven 😉  http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/01/building-a-domain-of-ones-own-the-panel/

Building a Domain of One’s Own, Part 3

In part three of this series, Tim does an excellent job taking you through the thinking around how to handle sign-ups for the domain and web hosting service on campus. There are more than a few moving parts, so this post really takes you through the thinking for the pilot which we changed quite a bit for the offical launch in August.  http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/01/building-a-domain-of-ones-own-the-sign-up/

Building a Domain of One’s Own, Part 4

The fourth post finds Tim framing out our hosting environment, effectively bringing together all the various software pieces on the server level. One of the best choices we (royal WE) made was going with Installatron over Simple Scripts or Fantastico. Also, WHMCS is the client/reseller software we use to provision web hosting accounts and domains—it’s been crucial and Tim and Martha have done a lot of hacking around that plugin to make it not charge people 🙂 http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/01/building-a-domain-of-ones-own-plugins-add-ons-and-plans/

Building a Domain of One’s Own, Part 5

Finally, the early thoughts around syndication in Domain of One’s Own were laid down here. Tim and Martha had a major breakthrough with developing this approach out in some really powerful ways, but the adding specific data to sites at the point of installation of the application with Installatron was a game changer for us. Eight months later (see follow-up posts below on building out community site), Martha and Tim came as close to a seamless syndication hub as you’re gonna see in a distributed system like this.  http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/03/unified-syndication-of-a-domain-of-ones-own/ Also related, Tim blogged his first pass at building a community site in Spring 2013—this would be the basis of the brilliance that is community.umwdomains.com: http://archive.timmmmyboy.com/2013/03/building-a-syndication-framework-for-the-domain-of-ones-own/)

 Domain of One’s Own: It’s Official

Below are the posts from Tim and Martha that track the progress of Domain of One’s Own up and until are present moment.

Lessons Learned Week 1: Not even a week into the project Martha shares out what we learned so far, the great promotion, inevitable gotchas of email blacklists, the dreams vs the reality of getting students onboard, and the fact that this is gonna be a learning experience, so start learning from ours. http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2013/08/28/75-weeks-into-a-domain-of-ones-own/

Custom Installation Packages: As we started settling in during the Fall, Martha started building on Tim’s work in the Spring with Installatron, and started created custom packages that students could install. For example, custom WordPress setups with particular themes, plugins, and pre-defined pages/posts that a course or department could use to create portfolios. The full power of Domains is starting to sink in. http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2013/09/11/packaging-a-domain-of-ones-own/ 

The Six Month Report: Our Provost, Jonathan levin, has been a huge supporter of Domain of one’s own, as has President Hurley, so when we were asked to create a report for UMW’s Board of Visitors, Martha start doing the deep and rigorous examination of where we are and where we should go. This Burtis at her best, refusing to blindly champion the project (that’s my job 🙂 ), she wants to know what’s working, what’s not, and how to make it better. This initiative will be successful because of Martha’s unbelievably adroit leadership in refusing to accept the blanket assumptions that it is “the next thing” or “truly innovative.” There is no doubt she believes in its power—she not only dreamed it up with the rest of us almost a decade ago,  she also helped build it!—-but she is an exacting mind that is going make sure it remains true to its vision and we continue to push hard on making it authentic. http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2014/02/24/six-months-into-domain-of-ones-own/

Details about Infrastructure/Custom Code: Not to be outdone, Tim goes on a tear as we were preparing for the first cancelled Domain Incubator conference in Atlanta(there was to be another, and may be another yet 😉 ) at blogs a recap of all the work we have done in terms of documentation Domain of One’s Own for our community, a close look at our server setup down to the specs, a recap of the software, and custom Installatron code available on GitHub. It’s a move towards starting to share as much as we can in some coherent space, something we’re continually working towards.

Teaching Models for UMW Domains: It’s like a tennis match at this point, Tim then Martha then TIm and now martha again 🙂 This posts lays out how students and faculty are actually using it in the community. Portfolios, blogging, course sites, digital projects, etc. It’s a great read to start getting a sense of how all the technical infrastructure starts feeding a culture of empowered creators on the web. http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2014/03/05/a-few-models-of-teaching-in-domain-of-ones-own/

Building a Community-base Syndication Hub: The final two posts get at what I think is what might be the most amazing think DTLT has done yet as a group. if building and installing our own pacemaker wasn’t enough, TIm and Martha nailed the community side of things and built a syndicated community hub that aggregates every post from every installed application on the server to one site: community.umwdomains.com. Tim takes you through their process in this post: http://timmmmyboy.com/posts/putting-the-community-in-commodity-web-hosting. Martha adds to that the fact that the work they have done allows us to not only assign data to various sites, posts, and processes that was impossible within a single WordPress multisite, but also enables us to expose the broader activity through aggregate data through such a community hub.  http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2014/03/05/visualizing-exposing-domain-of-ones-own-activity/

A Handy Dandy Hand-Out

FInally, Ryan Brazell has put together a handout that Martha and Tim have tweaked for their presentation to the Board of Visitors last week. This document provides a far more coherent and targeted overview of all this work and more. It comes highly recommended as a piece that will give someone a sense of what’s at work here without so much of the overly technical, insider language when it comes to administering a server, edtech, and the web more generally. It was a stroke of genius on Ryan’s part to frame this out for a broader audience so that the work we are doing can appeal to as many folks as possible. View it here.

I have to believe the only reason people aren’t more blown away by what we’ve been up to is because a) they don’t yet fully grok it; or b) they haven’t been paying attention. But I am working on making sure all that changes very soon! Cole Camplese asked me how UMW Domains different from UMW Blogs? I will write a far more detailed response soon, but let me say very briefly here that Domains is the apotheosis of UMW Blogs. It takes the vision of the web as learning platform to the next level, and by virtue of that provides a student-centric technical ecosystem that can then become part and parcel of a broader, cross-discipline curriculum for digital literacy. It is the future….GET ON THE BUS!!!

Ok, but now I have to get to this other post I have to write so I can then write another post before I dialogue in another post with Mike Caulfield. TIme to make the donuts!

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

Goofed by the Internet Course

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Reverend

giphy

Paul and I taught the Internet Course remotely last Tuesday and Thursday given that he’s in Pennsylvania and I was in Dallas, Texas for the Sloan-C Conference. After racing from the airport to the conference hotel in Dallas, I locked into the class via a Google Hangout alongside Paul to experience a truly impressive group presentation on Cyberbullying I already blogged about. It was a great class, and I was walking on cloud 9 as most faculty do after a great class, especially one the students take full ownership of.

So, I was more than excited for Thursday’s group presentation. I even got on Google Hangout five minutes early to see what was up, and perhaps talk some smack on the students. Lo and behold the group that was presenting were the only ones there. They were pretty concerned that the rest of the class didn’t show up, and they were wondering if the fact I was in Texas had anything to do with it. My worst nightmare came true while sitting in a hotel room 2000 miles away in Dallas, Texas: an empty classroom.

classroom-of-empty-chairs1

The students were freaking out a bit because the final four weeks of the class are focused on presentations wherein each group shares their research thus far. It depends on presenting to a group of people, getting feedback, and starting dialogues around what could be better, how, and why. All of which was not going to happen with two disembodied figures on a screen in an empty classroom. As this was unfolding I went into rant mode as the camera was facing the group at the front of the class. “What’s wrong with them?” “They’re dead to me!” “They will pay for this!” “I know where they live!!” And on and on and on.

After spewing my vitriol, Paul and I started to try and figure out if we can reschedule the presentations so the students could get some much needed feedback. In the mean time, the group turns the camera back on the classroom to show everyone in the class streaming into their seats from the hallway outside. They were messing with us! Those bastards!!

Now that’s my kinda class, the members of the inaugural #tic104 course just moved several notches higher in my estimation. Goofing on your professors and making us (well, really just me cause Paul is always locked in) pay for trapsing all over creation while they were locked in at home getting it done is a beautiful thing. Bully for them, I’m a very, very BIG FAN!

Posted in fun, The Internet Course | Tagged | 1 Comment

Analyzing Chinese Film GIFs

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Reverend

The students in Sue Fernsebner‘s Chinese History through Film course have been hard at work creating GIFs as part of their film analyses. There are a bunch of excellent GIFs that try and capture a particularly significant moment within the film they’re analyzing. For example, the GIF analysis for the film Not One Less (1999) effectively focuses on the film’s recurring use of chalk to frame the underfunding of rural elementary schools in China. I really love how the student uses the GIFs to capture the chalk moments, the only thing is they are far too big and need to be optimized so they’ll load in the browser.

Another analysis I really loved is a sequence taken from the 1994 film Ermo. This film follows one woman’s obsession with purchasing a television, and the following multi-shot GIF sequence, alongside the student’s analysis, really captures the emergence of consumerism and the rols of capitalism in 1990s China—somethign we’ve witnessed the apotheosis of in the 21st century.

12
3
There is also this four-part giffing of the highly politicized sex scene with Gong Li in Ju Dou (1990). Brilliant stuff, it is similar to the GIFs I experiemnted with from Red Surghum last year for this class, and how cool to see the students this year going well beyond that!

JuDou1JuDou2Judou3 JuDou4

Finally, another GIF I really enjoyed but is too heavy to link to in this post is this sweeping shot from the 1950s propanganda film The Red Detachment of Women. I love how the GIF captures the way in which masculine and feminine roles in the revolution are framed, as well as the sexual innuendo of the scene.

And that’s just a few of the nineteen examples of students playing with GIFs to analyze Chinese history through films.  Now that’s EDUCATIONAL!

Posted in UMW Blogs, YouTube | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Sixth Floor

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Reverend
Image Credit; Michael Berman

“A View from the Grassy Knoll” Dealey Plaza, Dallas, texas
Image Credit; Michael Berman

Friday afternoon I did something I rarely do when traveling for a conference: sightseeing. While I was driving into Dallas Wednesday the great Matt Crosslin (he is a total mensch) pointed out Dealey Plaza, the infamous spot where JFK was assassinated. I was immediately struck. I’m familiar with the details of JFK’s assassination—I read both Don DeLillo’s Libra and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid—but it never occurred to me that you could actually visit the site of the assassination.

I forgot about Dealey Plaza soon after arriving at the conference hotel because there was work to be done on my presentation. The following day Laura Pasquini (who totally rules) mentioned that there’s a museum on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. Trippy, right?

It’s called The Sixth Floor Museum and it opened its doors in 1989. And, as it turns out, it’s quite a compelling experience. You are guided through the sixth floor of the museum by way of an audio tour narrated, I believe,  by Pierce Allman—who came face to face with Oswald when running into the Depository to call-in the news. The museum sets up the Kennedy presidency by framing the times (Cold War, Space Race, Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.), his family (Jackie O, the kids, the youthful promise for the future), and a broader civil unrest in the nation around the question of racial equality. All done at the beginning of the audio tour. It then moves towards Kennedy’s re-election campaign tour in Texas that was to visit several cities, Dallas being the one most of his advisors urged him to avoid.

Screen Shot 2014-04-14 at 10.56.39 AM

The museum moves from the general to the specific events of November 22nd, 1963 quite seamlessly, and focuses into the moment by moment narrative of their arrival at Love Airfield and the proceeding motorcade around Dallas. It also does a pretty remarkable job of taking you through the details of the assassination using three big photos as well as frame by frame breakdown of the Zapruder film. It was chilling without seeming exploitative, and once you pass through this walkway you finally see the dreaded corner window where the shots were fired. It was framed by plexiglass and re-created exactly as it was on the day of the assassination. The trees are taller so you don’t have a totally unobstructed view, but there are two “X”s  on the road where the president was hit. And, having been on the site it does seem very strange that Oswald could have gotten three shots off so quickly.

Installation at the Sixth Floor Museum of the recreated corner window from which Oswald fired.

What was so compelling about this museum? The idea that spaces and places matter. I found it interesting that the museum was so adamant about prohibiting cameras and the like. Pictures, videos, and text can’t fully capture being there in the space and walking up to the window and looking down on the street adjacent to the grassy knoll. It was a moment that forced you to think deeply and contextualize more broadly how that moment in 1963 sent shockwaves around the world that we are still very much in the gravitational orbit of to this day. It was a sobering and profound exploration of not only the moment, but the cultural confusion that emerged from it and still very much resonates fifty years later.

If you ever find yourself in Dallas with an afternoon to spare, I highly recommend take a trip up to The Sixth Floor.

Posted in fun, travel | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Trojan Horses in the Afterglow at Sloan-C

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Reverend
Trojan Horse

Detail from “The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy” by Domenico Tiepolo (1773), inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid

I had a pretty intense day at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference on Thursday. (It actually took me two days to recover mentally). I presented a workshop first thing in the morning on how to “Reclaim Your Domain.” There were about 15-20 folks in the room for that, and I am guessing roughly the same number online. I had a really fun time with this session because it was a pretty focused overview of how web hosting works. Particpants created their own subdomains on reclaimdemo.com, and from there we all navigated cPanel, created subdomains, installed applications with Installatron, and explored File Manager.  We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time, and it further reinforced people can get up running with their own web hosting in very little time. What’s more, there was some great discussion along the way. This was a thoroughly enoyable session for me, and it hits close to home because this is how I got started in edtech over ten year ago thanks to Zach Davis.

After the workshop I went back to my room and fine-tuned my keynote presentation before taking part in a carreer forum organized by Rolin Moe about what it means to be an “EdTech Practitioner.” I was joined by Michael Berman and Chris Mattia of CSU Channel Islands, two of the many great folks I had the pleasure of meeting at this conference (I’ll be writing a separate post to list all of them!). It was a full room, and I’m afraid I might have ruffled some feathers while admonishing folks to stay away from edtech degrees. There were two bits of advice that Michael Berman gave that I thought were spot on:

  1. if you are working in edtech and haven’t taught at the college level, you should fix that;
  2. if you’re looking for a job in edtech don’t wait to be hired, start doing edtech—the web is your oyster.

Words of wisdom, Lloyd, Words. Of. Wisdom.

After that session I presented about the work happening at UMW with Domains of One’s Own in a very big room. The presentation was a further exploration of the “Domains in the Afterglow” talk I did at Baruch two weeks ago. It was tighter than the Baruch talk, and I integrated a five-slide skreed against the learning management system I lifted directly from Brian Lamb’s brilliant writing on the topic in an article we’ll be publishing in EDUCAUSE Review‘s next issue. I also worked in a cartoon and two concepts from Tim Klapdor’s brilliant post on “Literacy and the Digital Self”:

  • “digital literacy” is a poorly defined concept and there’s a significant gap between the idea and the reality;
  • How do we create a “student-centric technology ecosystem”?

These worked as beautiful transitions to the work we are doing with Domain of One’s Own at UMW, so special thanks to Tim and Brian for making my presentation tighter.

In terms of the approach I took with this presentation, in hinsight I realized it worked a bit like a trojan horse on two counts. First, by starting off talking about the afterglow of 1990s personal web publishing through the lens of Geocities and tilde spaces on university servers that most folks in the room could relate. In fact, I’m sure they appreciated a bit of light-hearted nostalgia and history-based superiority while taking in the seemingly simple, rather rudimentary design sensibility of the early web. That bit helped them open up their hearts and minds to the ideas immediatly before I dropped the bomb. I moved from Geocities and tilde space to an aggressive dismantling of our field’s addiction to the learning management systems to solve all of our technology-based teaching and learning problems.

The second trojan horse was openly named as such when I suggested approaching Domain of One’s Own as an eportfolio at one’s institution to get it in the door. This is something I’ve talked about a bit already, but I think it bears repeating. If the idea that something like UMW Domains is an eportfolio solution gets your foot in the door, run with it. Not only because it can defintiely be that, but because that’s just the beginning. The secret is that it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how much more than “just a tool” web hosting is; it quickly becomes a user innovation toolkit! So, I am fine with folks calling it an eportfolio solution if they undestand that’s just the gateway pitch to get the Greeks in the door 🙂

As I realized soon after my talk, the back channel discussion on Twitter was raging. More than a few folks were resistant to my critique of the LMS, and I appreciate that. My talk comes from many of my biases and freedoms as a result of the work I am doing at UMW, and I welcome more discussion around what’s possible, or not, with the LMS and why. The thing that kills me is there seems to have been a general, tacit agreement in this field that the LMS is THE one system we all need for teaching and learning. And I don’t’ necessarily agree. In fact, I think it’s just that mindset that has stifled this field when it comes to broader innovations with networked learning.

Anyway, that’s the skinny on #et4online. I had a great time, and it was kinda fun to get back to a really big edtech conference like this. The faces of relatively new vendors to the field like Bluehost’s Spoke and CampusPress made me feel a bit old (more on this in another post), but also suggests this space is moving in some interesting directions we’ve all been pushing on for a long while. Having someone host and manage some of the infrastruture in that regard is fine, but the complex design for teaching and learning on the web remains something we all must grapple with as an existential condition, not a product that can solve everything.

Below is a video of the talk, forgive my constant movement but I have to admit I was a bit nervous for this one.

Sloan-C Keynote Talk

 

 

Posted in Domain of One's Own, Instructional Technology, presentations | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Egypt Calling or, Why Open Rules

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Reverend

Maha Bali BlogI had been procrastinating a bit on the “Reclaim Your Domain” workshop I’ll be running in just about an hour’s time at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference.  This is the first time I’ve workshopped what we’re doing at UMW with Domain of One’s Own, and thanks to the service Tim Owens and I started, appropriately named Reclaim Hosting, it’s been pretty cool. I already talked about the setup of the workshop here.

You see the workshop will also include virtual participants, In fact, there will be folks joining in as far away as Egypt as I learned on Twitter.

So I wanted to be sure I had documentation and a platform that would enable the virtual folks to particpate seamlessly.

As a result I learned how awesome Maha Bali is (I was originally referring to her as Bali because of her domain, I suck). Two days ago Tim and I got the reclaimdemo.com site up and running (admittedly later than promised) and thanks to Maha, who was kind enough to offer testing rom afar, I think it might actually work.

But more than testing out the site, and test it out she did, she also wrote a post on her sandbox domain at bali.reclaimdemo.com calling out some key questions I need to address more broadly as part of the Reclaim push:

I feel there is an assumption here that people taking this workshop already buy into the idea of “owning” or “reclaiming” one’s own domain. I am not clear on all the arguments for that yet (need to read and discuss some more) but I definitely do feel like my online presence is distributed and I would like to have it all in one place under my control. I just don’t know if that will complicate my life more than I need

This is the real question I need to get at whether or not the platofrm works. I assume folks see the value, and I forget that I have to try and make this whole thing relevant to someone who isn’t necessarily an edtech fanatic like me. I need to step back a bit and start thinking about what a domain and web hosting has offered me on personal, professional and practical levels as an educator, edtech, father, and more generally a person online in the 21st century.

This was truly invaluable feedback, but I am not surpised because Maha seems ot be a truly cool person who embodies the spirit of open collaboration and is a welcome reminder that these networks lead us to real people. This is what happens when you openly and actively engage people online. Openness is like the force in Star Wars: “a river from which many can drink.” But Maha says all this much better on her blog, which may even be hosted on her own domaina nd web hosting with a shiny new domain sometime soon 🙂

Posted in reclaimopen | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Don’t Cyberbully the Internet Course!

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Reverend

HaHaA quick note on The Internet Course Paul Bond and I are teaching: it’s ruling! Paul blogged last week about how many chances we took with this course, and how much that has paid off. It’s really been an eye-opening experience. I have to admit it’s hard to come off a class like ds106 and not be tempted to try and reproduce that magic. I think we have smart to avoid making #TIC104 in the image of ds106 too early on. This course has to find t’s own identity, and we did that by really giving the reins over to the students.

Tonight was an excellent example of that. Since week three students have been running ever single class session. Through week ten every class featured panels of five to six students discussing various topics like the history of the internet, the infrastructure, copyright, digital identity, openness, etc. Since last week, students are working in groups of three and presenting on their final projects. Tonight, while Paul was in Pennsylvania and I was in Texas, Elizabeth, Melissa, and Kimberley did an amazing job bringing us in via Google Hangout and running the entire class for an hour and fifteen minutes.

What’s more, they live tweeted all the tweets, and even playacted bullying on Twitter in the background during the presentation using the hashtag: #ticfakecyberbully

They presented on their research on the emerging definition of cyberbullying, and how that is being framed legally in different states. What’s particularly interesting is how so many of these laws are mediated through schools. They did a nice job framing a working definition, exploring the popular media reaction, and looking at the actual legislation. The used another Twitter hashtag (#ticcyberbullying) to capture the cyberbullying resources they were discussing during the presentation:

The class discussion around this topic was intense. The differing viewpoints around legislating cyberbullying, the difficulties of context online, media exploitation, and the question of schools as the catch-all for today’s social problems, including cyberbullying, all came up. During the last few minutes there was a ground swell of what can people actually do to stem this kind of behavior. Some real raw emotion about pushing beyond the talking—love that.

Interestingly enough, we had at least four visitors who weren’t in the class come to tonight’s presentation because they were interested in the topic, and they they were an active part of the conversation. It was awesome.

Posted in The Internet Course | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Humans in the Afterglow

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Reverend

Almost two weeks ago I presented at Baruch College about the history of the web in edtech. I focus in particular on web publishing in higher ed, and I explore the early tilde spaces for HTML authoring as well as Geocities, the mid-90s solution for websites made easy. The presentation is called “Domains in the Afterglow Or, What We Can Learn from Geocities about Digital Identity,” I got a ton of great feedback from the CUNY folks who attended that talk. I’ll be fine-tuning that presentation tonight for my keynote address tomorrow at the Sloan-C Emerging Technologies Conference here in Dallas, Texas.

One of the gems I came away with as a result of the Baruch conference came electronically almost a week later. Courtney Walsh, Reference & Instruction Librarian at Brooklyn College, emailed me about a remarkable connection she made between my talk and one of the many stories shared on Brandon Stanton’s brilliant storytelling site Humans of New York:

…during your talk, when you started talking about Geocities, I flashed on a memory of a somewhat recent HONY post…so I googled HONY Geocities and found this amazing post from August 10, 2013.

The post Courtney is referring to follows in its entirety:

I made my first website with a friend when I was in 7th grade. It was called Gaming Galaxy Online. It was extremely cheesy— with a giant animated GIF as the title graphic, and pretty much all content harvested straight from other sources. The page never got any traffic, but I remember how exciting it was to build the site. The internet seemed like a place where a 7th grader could participate in the adult world on a level playing field. My friend and I tried one website idea after another. None of them really worked, but we felt very empowered. On the internet, it felt like we were one good idea away from a very adultlike level of success. And like pretty much everyone else in 1996, our free websites were hosted on Geocities.com.

Fast forward almost 20 years—- in my late twenties, after countless attempts, I’ve finally managed to create a popular website. And last night I was out gathering content. I was walking past the Apple Store on 59th and 5th when I spotted a man sitting alone in the plaza. I asked for his photo, he agreed. “What was the happiest moment of your life?” I asked him.

“Probably when my company had its IPO,” he answered. “I founded a company called Geocities.com.”

So crazy! Stanton meets and photographs ,who I am assuming is, David Bohnett by happenstance on the streets of NYC. As a result a time-space portal in the internet opens up! The promise of Geocities was not necessarily the IPO (arguably that killed it) or that Bohnett somehow “made” Stanton the storyteller he is today. Rather, as Courtney notes so eloquently, is that the platform got “kids creating web sites, dreaming, afterglow, Geocities, happiness, you name it!” Geocities was a space Brandon felt an “adultlike level of success” was possible. A place where the playing field was leveled, and he was both excited and empowered. That’s what Domain of One’s Own can and should be!

I don’t think any of those emotions are afterglow. Rather, that’s the soul of the web. It lives on well after all the abandoned sites and dead links have gone dark. That’s the magic of this story, it’s not about Geocities per se, but about the wonderment embodied within the immense potentiality at the heart of the internet that Geocities actuated. How is higher ed doing this?

I can’t thank Courtney enough for taking the time to share this with me. It’s going into my talk tomorrow, and I have a feeling it is just the frame I needed to connect a whole series of ideas. And all credit will go to you!

Posted in Domain of One's Own | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Reclaim Your Workshop

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Reverend

logoOn Wednesday morning I’m facilitating a workshop at the Sloan-C conference titled “Reclaiming your Domain.” Here’s the abstract:

This workshop will provide attendees a focused session to get up and running with a domain name and web hosting account. By the end of this session you will have gotten the following:

  • a domain name
  • a web hosting account (with instruction of how to manage it)
  • Instructions for installing at least one open source application on your web server (such as WordPress, Omeka, etc.)
  • Instructions for publishing original content to your space.

Sounds crazy, right? But it’s not, taking control of your online presence and managing your own web space has never been easier. The goal of this workshop is to provide faculty, technologists, and administrators a hands-on overview of how the web works from the inside-out. In a moment when everyone is talking about controlling your data, learning to code, and web literacy—a sandbox space like this is invaluable for taking the first steps in truly interrogating how the web works.

This workshop is what UMW’s DTLT has been laying down to faculty, students, and staff for the last year and a half. It’s becoming second nature. What’s more, we have created the documentation to support it. Think of it as a practical roadmap for Tim Klapdor’s beautiful articulation of the literacy involved in creating the digital self.

social-media-propaganda-posters-01

[Couldn’t resist these awesome social media propaganda posters. Found here: http://rollingout.com/politics/obama-vs-romney-the-social-media-war-to-the-white-house/]

I setup a site for the workshop using DokuWiki, and it’s populated with various tutorials DTLT has been creating over the last year. I also got the domain reclaimdemo.com so that all the particpants (if there are any) can login to that cPanel and setup their own subdomain and start navigating the control panel, installing applications, explore file manager, etc. After they do all this they can decide if they want to get a domain and web hosting.

I’ll be sharing a common username and password for all attendees and they can hack around in the cPanel during the workshop. They’ll each create a subdomain based on some variation of their name so we can keep it all straight and don’t have issues with ten people creating the subdomain “blog.”  I’ll just have to make sure they don’t install over my top-level domain DokuWiki install by mistake! Here’s to experimenting!

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