Hosting Advice feature on Reclaim Hosting
A month or so ago Alexandra Leslie of Hosting Advice reached out to us to find out a bit about who we are (i.e. Reclaim Hosting) and how we got started. Turns out they got wind of this small, niche hosting company that predominantly serves educators and students, and they were intrigued. While I was traveling in the UK they published a feature blog post about Reclaim Hosting that recounts our story—and I have to say it was pretty cool to read it. I think we’ve been so deep in the day-to-day of running Reclaim that it’s easy to forget there is a pretty cool story arc developing around this work, and it includes a broad community of folks that want to take ed-tech back from the venture capitalists, data fascists, and boring ass learning management systems
Image credit: Phil Windley’s “edupunk” taken at Domains/PAPI event during the great Audrey Watters brilliant keynote
One of the things I love about the narrative that comes out in this article is the centrality of ds106 to the development of Reclaim Hosting. Let there be no doubt that from the very beginning Tim has been the driving force behind our seamless infrastructure, unparalleled service, and relentless push to constantly make things better. Those three things have made the case for any modicum of broad attention we may receive. But I think the ds106 community is a big reason why any this worked at all. Despite the misguided allegations about imaginary socks, the open, online community of ds106 pointed to a few things for me: 1) we can build our own ed-tech infrastructures that make teaching and learning collaborative and fun; 2) such an infrastructure can make it easy for distributed folks to share both their skills and passion regularly; 3) such creativity is a powerful tool for galvanizing a resilient community. I continue to feel deeply indebted to this committed community for support and encouragement at every turn. #4life not #4socks.
Image credit: Motionless Voyage blog’s awesome Lebowski watercolors
This isn’t Nam Jim, there are rules!!
I have one in my head about Larry, “This is what happens, Larry, when you sock a stranger….”