Slaying of Self

Posted on May 5, 2019 by Reverend

I already referenced on the bava how much I loved the amazing Ama-Zine session at OER19 run by Amy Burvall and Bryan Mathers. Thankfully Bryan wrote it up recently provides links to all the resources they used/created for the session, and it really is something others should consider integrating into their conference because it was so good. I could go on about it ad nauseam, but I’ll spare you the pain. One pleasant surprise for me was Bryan used a video wherein I jokingly use my best “like and subscribe Youtuber octave” to narrate my Zine, which, in the end, I was very fond of. In fact, it was Amy’s cut-out prompts that were so evocative and compelling that what I first thought of as a throw-away exercise quickly became something I was truly excited about and oddly proud of. What better sign of an awesome workshop?

The zine was meant to be a play on a schtick Brian Lamb and I have been joyfully re-hashing since 2016 when we did our co-facilitated residency at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab. The gag was I was Brian’s therapist and he was in my constant care, I planned on doing my zine around that conceit but once I got hold of the prompts and images I went almost entirely cut-out and used a more impressionistic, abstract idea of my therapy so it could be more broadly applied beyond Brian 🙂

Anyway, that was the vibe for me at OER19, not only serious, critical, and probing (cause it was all that for sure), but also a lot of fun with some amazingly creative people. I want more!

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VHS Quality Streaming at Reclaim Video

Posted on May 4, 2019 by Reverend

So the experiments continue at Reclaim Video with making this a fully functional, web-based VHS store. It is non-sensical, but that is kind of the point. We heard that streaming might be all the rage i the future, so we wanted to get out ahead of the curve given our long-term existence may depend on it. As Tim already noted in his recent blog post our streaming love affair with Youtube for Reclaim Video did not last long because you can’t have a real cultural relationship with an ID Content bot. So, as Tim is wont to do, he setup a Stream of Our Own using Ant Media Server and now we can experiment in peace*:

….as luck would have it the great Tom Woodward blogged about a new (to me anyway) software called Ant Media Server. Completely open source (it’s a fork of Red5) and it was a very straightforward setup on an Ubuntu server which I had spun up on our DigitalOcean account. Within just a few minutes I had a new RTMP stream URL that I plugged into OBS and we were back in business, now on our own system.

So, we were back in action with the stream and Thursday and Friday of this week led to more experimentation. Namely, how could we remotely program and get videos to play on the TV in Reclaim Video given we can already control most of the store remotely (lights, signage, power, etc.). So, given we have a archived video versions of VHS tapes that are being pushed to the TV via a Raspberry Pi, during Tim’s experiments he realized we can actually have the livestream pull directly from the archived VHS tapes video and audio, which avoids some of the glare and scanning you get with the nest camera pointing directly to the camera. And as Tim’s Tweet below suggests, anything on the livestream at http://reclaimvideo.com/live will be exactly what is playing on the TV in Reclaim Video.

https://twitter.com/timmmmyboy/status/1124379351011741696

And what is even cooler is using Tunnelblick (free software for OpenVPN on macOS) I can actually login to the local network at Reclaim Video and if I am logged into Plex Media I can decide what films I want to play and they will appear on the television there. To be clear, if you go to the livestream from our Nest camera in Reclaim Video you can see whatever I have selected playing locally on the television:

https://twitter.com/timmmmyboy/status/1124493261534633985

It’s awesome!

So, to recap, I can essentially watch and program whatever is happening at Reclaim Video from thousands of miles away, which opens up the idea of guest curators to program and clerk Reclaim Video!

Reclaim Video Streaming

“Don’t worry, Mom, I know all about cannabilism…” Now playing at @reclaimvideo as seen from the home office.

I find myself in dangerously familiar territory on this blog threatening to wax poetic about all this, but the idea of re-thinking streaming video through the frame of an 80s VHS store in order to imagine how we might share the cultural artifacts that have come to shape us within and beyond the web-based marketplace that everywhere surrounds us is truly fascinating to me. There are various frames to the whole experiment, but for the moment I am more than thrilled with the simple fact it gives us the ability to remotely program and curate the Reclaim Video television to our heart’s content.

Reclaim Video Streaming

Witnessing the many frames within frames of Reclaim Video while watching The Night of the Living Dead .

*The upside of eschewing overly corporatized social media hubs like Youtube is not only relative anonymity, but opting out of their platforms creates a bit of a buffer from their algorithmic surveillance. Sites of b-cultural resistance 🙂

Posted in Reclaim Video, television | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Katie Martell on “Why Domains”

Posted on May 3, 2019 by Reverend

I got a note last week from Katie Martell, an Instructional Technologist at Plymouth State University (PSU), letting us know she would be leaving PSU. That’s a huge loss for PSU given Katie has been the engine behind running their Domain of One’s Own instance. She blew us away when she presented about their work at the Reclaim Roadshow in November at Skidmore. So much so that Lauren and I immediately followed up with a Reclaim Today episode to have Katie discuss the Why of Domain of One’s Own. It’s well worth a watch to listen to Katie’s passion and enthusiasm about Domains if this is something you are interested in.

https://labrumfield.com/reclaim-today-why-domains-at-plymouth-state/

From what I understand Katie is heading down under soon, I know this because we were so impressed with her that we wanted to invite her as a featured speaker at Domains19, but the stars did not align given she will most likely be out of the country starting her new life adventures. Thanks Katie for all you have done with Domains at Plymouth, here’s to the open road that is life and all that it brings you! 

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Origin Stories and Making the Myths at Reclaim

Posted on May 3, 2019 by Reverend

Lauren ran an awesome episode of Reclaim Today yesterday (I’m not biased!) wherein Tim, Lauren, and I did a live, streaming discussion about the “History of Reclaim Hosting.” It may a bit early for the Reclaim biopic to be picked up by Hollywood, so we’re getting out in front of that tidal wave now 🙂 Major kudos to Lauren and Judith for thinking of this as a way to give new, remote employees a sense of the history of Reclaim, and while we will not only be interacting with new employees through the new flesh of video like Dr. Oblivion, I enjoyed capturing this moment of our growth and tracking how our own little mythos of Reclaim is getting built. “The planet is screaming for change, Morrison, we gotta make the myths!”

https://youtu.be/bl_kkiP7oTw?t=115

We all have our origin stories and they’re all more complicated then we let on and often elide various realities, but they also remain essential for defining who we are and where we are going, and I luckily remain quite proud of the stories we tell at Reclaim and who we are!

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The Art of Surveillance

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Reverend

Yesterday Lauren and I spoke with Chris Gilliard and sava saheli singh in preparation for their keynote at Domains19 next month, and while we were discussing the various details I was searching for the link to sava’s Surveillance Studies films to share in the chat when I noticed these films were featured on Boing Boing back on April 9th!  That is pretty awesome, and I remember talking with sava in a coffee shop in Brooklyn before her imminent move to Canada explaining she would be a post-doc at the Surveillance Studies Center at Queen’s University, and damn did she make the most of it! The three short films she directed for the Center themed around surveillance (all of which you can find here) are starting to gain the attention they deserve, and the way in which they frames the human impact of this ubiquitous invasion on not only privacy, but the very essence of what it means to be human, is timely and laudable.  

After some discussion, we decided during the check-in that Frames,  the dialogue-free exploration of the human implications of a smart-city will be added to the art installations for folks to watch as they will, with the other two films screening at pre-defined times over the two days. I am partial to Frames because it is a perfect blend of Black Mirror narrative set against the background aesthetic of a Michelangelo Antonioni film.

I also love the way the way the dialogue is unnecessary as you find yourself reading the data of the image to draw conclusions, however wrong, that place you within the system that is consuming us all. It’s art, and it will be on display at Domains19 next month, what’s more you can hear the artist herself talk about these films, which is just another reason to register by May 15th, and help support the art of surveillance 🙂

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Art and TropicĂ lia at Domains19

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Reverend

Lauren and I recently spoke with Amy Collier about her Domains19 keynote, and we could not be more thrilled with her updated frame. Her talk “Ambitious futures for (digital) education: Perspectives from TropicĂ lia” explores the questions of resistance, authoritarianism, and nationalism through the lens of Brazalian art, music, and educational theorists, what could be cooler? Read the entire talk description on the Domains19 site here.

We now have a full list of art installations at Domains19 for you to peruse, and if such kick ass presentations and art installations don’t convince you to register then you are truly an edtech zombie 🙂

Posted in Domains 2019 | Tagged | 2 Comments

WordPress Multisite: Multi-Network versus Multiple Independent Networks

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Reverend

One of the things we find ourselves doing more and more of at Reclaim Hosting is managed hosting, in particular for WordPress Multisite (WPMS). In the end was the beginning for this blog. So, I was on a call last week were the discussion around running multiple, independent WPMS instances versus one WPMS instance with multiple networks, i.e. sites.stateu.org and courses.stateu.org represent two functioning WPMS instances using subdomains (or subdirectories) such as mysite.sites.stateu.org or mycourse.courses.stateu.org that both point and share one set of core WordPress files. I experimented with this over 10 years ago by running a WPMS (then called WPMU) service for Longwood University off the core WordPress files of UMW Blogs. I thought it would be revolutionary for the ability to share infrastructure across Virginia public institutions of higher ed, but not so much. That said, I was glad to see Curtiss Grymala to take the whole idea of multi-networks to the next level for UMW’s main website.

Anyway, enough about the past, that was then, this is now …. for now. The question is why would you run several independent WPMS instances with distinct core files versus running multiple instances of WPMS off of one shared set of files, plugins, themes, etc.? For me the value of running everything off one shared set of files was shared themes, plugins, and updates that make management easier than across numerous separate installs.*  Another benefit was a single space for site/user administration between networks. Additionally, managing single sign-on through one instance should prove a bit easier for setup, but will need to double-check on this one. I also know you can have various portals for each WPMS network mapped on a single set of files, so it will not be confusing for the users, for them the fact they share core files will be invisible. So, in this regard the choice comes down to whether or not consolidation makes sense for the WPMS admin, which is often a question of convenience.

But there may be some practical reasons not to use a multi-network setup. Like, for example, if you are planing on running thousands of sites on each of these WPMS instances you may want to keep them separate given scaling issue with the WPMS database.** Having three WPMS instances share core files means if one goes down, they all go down, which can be an issue. Also, if you have an existing WPMS site you want to incorporate into an existing multi-network setup it may get tricky depending on whether there are shared users across the various instances of WPMS that you’re combining. I will have to do more research here, and would love to know about anyone’s experience in this regard, but I imagine users across a multi-network instance would need to be able to access the various networks with the same email/username across networks for the sake of both convenience and single sign-on (which are often one in the same).

Which raises another question that I’m unsure of,  if users sign-in through one network of a multi-network setup can they cleanly move between sites on different networks? I’m wondering if keeping single sign-on and users separate in this instance may prove less problematic in the long run. I’ll be working through these scenarios this week, but wanted to post this here cause I know a few folks have experience with running multi-networks on bit sites and wanted to be sure I was not overlooking any major red flags before making some recommendations.

*It also allows you to share any premium themes or plugins across one instance.

**Although if this is the case you will have to shard databases anyway, so one could argue it would be easier to do that for one instance rather than many. 

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Pi Video Looper at OER19

Posted on April 22, 2019 by Reverend

Another thing worth mentioning about Reclaim’s sojourn to OER19 was our trial run of the Pi Video Looper setup that we’ll be rolling out for Ryan Seslow‘s artwork at Domains19. Luckily Meredith got a primer from Tim before making the trip to Galway because I was a bit rusty. The basic idea is you install the Pi Video Looper on a Raspberry Pi and the Pi boots up and automatically loops any video (or videos) loaded within a specific directory. So, you could have a video version of a GIF that loops eternally, which effectively gives you a hi-quality GIF looper, which is what we did for the Be Kind, Reclaim poster Meredith animated in anticipation of OER19. We also included an animation of VHS Tape art as well as a Ryan Seslow’s Vaporwave visual as a teaser. Here’s a look:

There are two tricks to Pi Video Looper after installing the software (see links below for more on this), one is actually finding the Raspberry Pi on the network, to accomplish this Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi Finder is crucial. You need to do this so you can eventually access the Pi via FTP and add files given there is no GUI for the PI when using Pi Video Looper software. The other trick is actually getting the Pi on the network, which gets doubly complicated when you are using a guest wifi network that requires additional steps. Luckily tethering to the iPhone worked cleanly, and to connect the Pi Video Looper with a specific network you need to add the wpa_supplicant-conf file and reboot so that the network settings are loaded.

Here is what my supplicant file looked like:

country=us
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
 scan_ssid=1
 ssid="my iPhone name"
 psk="my tethering password"
}

You can see the full installation for the Pi Video Looper here, here are the install commands, here is the latest release of the software on Github, and finally if you need to change read-only permissions of mount drive for Raspberry Pi. [Leaving these links here predominantly for my own future reference, but let me know if you need more explanation.] And, finally, special thanks to Kate Molloy for capturing Reclaim’s video looping presence in all its glory!

 

Posted in Domains 2019, OER19, reclaim | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

OER19 Therapy

Posted on April 20, 2019 by Reverend

You can also watch it on Podbeam here, I will switch to the Youtube link when it is uploaded there given their embed feature is cleaner.

As I mentioned in my last post, Lauren Brumfield, Meredith Fierro, and I sat down to reflect on the OER19 experience in Galway last week while things were still relatively fresh. We did this for the 14th episode of Reclaim Today, which we are trying to resuscitate, and given everything we’re doing with Reclaim Video, Reclaim Arcade, and Domains19 (not to mention Reclaim Hosting!) we certainly have the raw material these days. This video took some inspiration from Martin Hawksey’s video work at OER19, and Tim busted out the Open Broadcaster Software, which enabled us to include the intro, and we may even explore additional camera shots in the future. 

As an exercise to get us ready for the conversation, each of us blogged our thoughts to act as notes for the discussion, and you can read Meredith’s here, Lauren’s double-blog-dose here and here, and mine here for reference.  I won’t babble on too much in this post given the video has me doing more than enough of that, but I will say that OER19 was definitely occasion for all of us to not only connect in person with a community we care for, but it helped us reflect on our holistic growth as a team which enables us to put names and faces to ideas and futures for the field. In this regard the conference was amazing for both professional and personal development, and I think that is what came through most for me during this discussion, and that makes me very happy. #Reclaim4life!

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Notes from OER19

Posted on April 19, 2019 by Reverend

Meredith, Lauren, and I will be talking about OER19 on Reclaim Today this afternoon, so I am going to jot down a few quick points I hope to touch on during the discussion. This list will double as a quick blog post so I can throw my hat into the lively stream of awesome posts about a truly generative conference.

Point 1: This was the #femedtech conference. What do I mean by this? The women in international ed-tech were very much driving every element of the conference and the conversations and it was unlike any other conference I have been to in that regard. The sense of highlighting the work of the women in the field was definitely a big part of the re-centering of open, at least in my mind, and that was intentional and very important. So kudos to Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz for shaping something unique and spectacular.

Point 2: Art rules!

I love Amy Burvall and Bryan Mathers‘s ama-zine session. One of the best I’ve been to at any conference ever. It helps that the two are creative machines of the highest order, but they really did make this perfect, just enough guidance, just enough prompts, and bam the room was abuzz with creating for at least 40 minutes. And I finally got to meet Amy!

Point 3: I am a sucker for open edtech architecture discussions. I loved hearing Tannis Morgan, Brian Lamb, and Grant Potter talk about the amazing work they are doing with OpenETC, or as they frame it: Free Range Edtech. What are they doing? Basically providing infrastructure for all kinds of open source web apps in return for building community and support across campuses in British Columbia.I dreamed of something like this in Virginia, but to no avail. If I was still at an institution, this would definitely be a huge part of my day job (in fact, it already is at Reclaim, but love to see institutions owning and pooling the resources). Unfortunately, I missed the discussion around Edinburgh’s WordPress Multisite and and their Jupyter Notebooks service Noteable, which is very much inline with Open ETC.

Point 4: CUNY in the House! CUNY made me, I started as an Instructional Technology Fellow (ITF) as a wee lad in 2004, and the rest is internet history. So, to reconnect with the good folks from CUNY in Galway was a definite highlight for me. I will save you all the stories, but Matt Gold is the guy who said to me in 1999, “you ever heard of Google?” I hadn’t, but then I did. No shit, it goes that deep between us. But, the work they have been doing with open source is legendary. Matt has been working with Boone Gorges since 2008 or 2009 and Boone went on to be a core contributor to WordPress. The work they have done around Academic Commons and OpenLab is amazing, and I love that they have even dared to dream beyond WordPress with Manifold, a very slick open source tool developed by the great Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding (who got me that first job as an ITF, it’s a small world) that is all about ease of use and design. It’s first and foremost a book publishing tool, and I find it much more elegant than PressBooks. Reclaim Hosting needs to double down on an installer through Cloudron for Manifold, it is too good not to.

Point 5: The keynotes, the keynotes, the keynotes: all awesome, all women, and all challenging, thoughtful, and built on hope. I’ve been a Kate Bowles fan for a long while, and while we briefly crossed paths a couple of years ago in California, I finally got to steal 10 minutes of her time (she was very much in demand) to just chat. The result was I got all fired up again 🙂 Her discussion of the expanding university was desperately needed, asking the simple question is it still a university when the basis of measurement is capital not people.And despite the deterministic language of data, analytics, and massive, she reminded us these are all choices and we have the power to say no. We should more often.  The final keynote on day 2 was amazing, and the discussion of the “Broken Faces of Capitalist Modernity” was riveting:

And the quote of the conference, at least for me in light of the Online Program Management discussion as of late, was Su-Ming Khoo’s note that “Unbundling is a form of extraction” —truer words were never spoken about edtech.

Point 6: PALs with tapes and discs

Reclaim Video made a killing at OER19 with a full blown haul of PAL-region VHS tapes thanks to the great Laura Ritchie, and a prized and I imagine fairly rare PAL-region Selectavision disc of 2001 thanks to Lawrie, who delivered it in a Coventry bag—which was a nice touch! Pure gold.

Point 7: Harry the Media Kid

I love Brian Lamb for too many reasons to list in any million posts, but the fact he has, for the second year in a row, brought along his son Harry to assist Martin Hawksey in running the media is awesome and enviable. A few of us joked about brining our kids next year, but the point remains that it is awesome experience for a kid who digs media—and OER19 supported the idea and the conference was better for it. Also, how sick that Harry got Downesed already? Brian must be a proud papa!

Point 8: Melanie Meyers

Probably the second best quote of OER19 for me was from Melanie Meyers, whose work with WordPress at the Justice Instititute in British Columbia is legion!

It was during Melanie’s session that I had the epiphany that the OER conference is not so much about textbooks and content as it is about practice and people. Listening to the work she did making WordPress not so much stand-in for the LMS, but rather serve to highlight the intrinsic weakness of the later system. And you do that by creating an open site that has become an resource educating people around the world about the Opioid crisis:

That’s a “drop the mic” moment, and it’s pure edtech gold for this geezer!

And that will have to do for now because I have to jump back on support, get ready for a meeting or two, and then do the Reclaim Today discussion about OER19, which this post will serve as the notes for. OER19 has retained its mantle as must-attend conference for me, and while it almost doubled in size this year, it still felt intimate and personal. I remain a big fan, and look forward to what Daniel Villar-Onrubio, Mia Zamora, and Jonathan Shaw dream up for OER20. Could be a Domains/Netnarr themed extravaganza!

Posted in OER19 | Tagged , | 6 Comments