 I know from the internet that is alternative documentary for the next three days it's going to be called Reclaim Documentary. Come and see me if you'd like to be in that. I have to say I'm a little intimidated to just be sitting across from such an awesome set of folks up here so I'll try to keep my nerves at bay while I'm asking you all questions but I think for those you know we've been throwing around this acronym DTLT you know getting the crew back together you know where it all started there's a lot of you know those those things that have been said recently and so I want to just start with just introducing you all giving you a chance to introduce yourself what your position was at DTLT and what your position is now and then we can kind of go into what DTLT was you know so Jim you've got the mic if you wanted to start and then we could just pass it down I'm going to actually give it to Chip I'm going to let Chip start it off because I think that some of it starts there my name is Chip German and I'm I was vice president for information technology at the University of Mary Washington during the early development phases of of DTLT so I came here in 2003 first the the first time they had a vice president for information technology I came here from UVA and I guess I was here until 2009 and what so that was my position then my position now is recline hosting because I'm retired but I did a bunch of things after I went to another school after Mary Washington I left during the period of presidential confusion here and went to which one well I participated in several of them but and then went to millersville university in Pennsylvania and came back to the University of Virginia where I had worked for 20 years before and I had a deeply unrelated job for the first two years that I was there and then worked for the University of Virginia library for a long time after that where I helped with the early development of another idea which was digital preservation the academic preservation trust a consortium of institutions working on figuring out how to keep keep what we what we produced and a lot of my thinking about that was based in these years of thinking about the products and how we could sustain them into the future since the microphone is down here probably in sequence yeah maybe Gardner is next yeah okay thanks Gardner Campbell my position was untenable and now it's unsustainable I was an English professor at the University of Mary Washington when Chip German plucked me from obscurity in the spring of 2003 to become a vice president for teaching and learning technologies that started a faculty grievance and was resolved thankfully by the fall at which time I assumed full duties sort of Damocles sheathed I was at Mary Washington through 2006 decided to head for what seemed to be pastures at another school quickly found out no no no green because of manure and so I came back but that time just as an English professor since then I've been at many schools can't hold a job or one step ahead of the law depending on your interpretation I told you I was an English professor went to Baylor University where I was head of their teaching and learning center and a professor and then went to Virginia Tech where I was part of their I guess their teaching and learning technology group and also an English professor and then left from there to come to Virginia Commonwealth University where I was a vice provost for learning innovation and student success and learning innovation is no longer a title anyone has at Virginia Commonwealth University I retired to that jersey since 2016 I guess that's right I've been an English professor which is what I'm doing now and I'm Gary Slayzak I currently still work here at BMW I'm the director of digital learning support I started at Mary Washington 1999 as an instructional technology liaison my first field job after grad school so and when we started here instructional technology liaison was basically we were each in an individual academic building and we were there to help faculty with our printers mostly so at least and then also you know in your free time and you know as you know they come knocking on your door help them with instructional technology so over over the time and under you know chips guidance we developed and came together with DTLT and we all kind of gathered together in an office not far from here over in DuPont Hall that way yeah okay thank you when I started there I was associate director Martha was the director and then I became the director and then I went to IT we ran the help desk for a while and then I came back here and back to digital learning support so I you know had a nice time managing a lot of these folks if you can imagine managing Jim Groom that that was my pinnacle of management so but I'm glad to be here and to see some really dear friends here for the first time in a long time thank you Jerry my name is Andy Rush I was part of the DTLT crew and I got here a year before Jerry in 1998 and but he also is older than me by like nine months so so there's all kinds of little dynamics there too so I always remind him of that and I was here for 17 years until what I'll call the Miami dream popped into existence and that was it's a it's a long story so I won't tell the whole story but it got me interested in moving further south and I'm a cyclist and so cycling year round was the appealing thing so I moved to Jacksonville Florida and I currently work at the University of North Florida which I dearly love and I already miss it and can't wait to can't wait to get back but I'm I'm just thrilled to be here with folks and my and my history I started out in the SUNY system in New York State so I went to college at SUNY Cortland worked for SUNY Cortland starting in 1993 so if you do the math you can see how many years I've been in instructional technology it's a big year for me and then moved to Onianta and and worked there for a couple of years also in the SUNY system met somebody moved to Virginia and we arrived here in 1998 so tons of memories and in avoiding if you know exit 126 on I-95 coming from the south you avoid that like the plague and so I took the back roads to get to the hotel and rode you know drove on some of the roads that I cycled on for 17 years and tears were literally streaming down my face driving on some of those roads and remembering hills which I don't have where I currently live I have bridges over the intercoastal is what I climb on these days but but seeing the actual hills and the rolling curving roads around around this area is just just a wonderful feeling and and brought brought back great memories so but yeah I'm just thrilled to be here my name is Martha Febertus and I think I don't know if I predate Gardner's arrival on this campus what year did you arrive at Mary Washington Gardner you do and I came in 1994 in the fall I think you were probably a junior that year but I'm not sure so I arrived on this campus before any of these yahoo's I was a student here in the early 90s I came here fall 1992 graduated moved away got a graduate degree came back to work supporting printers with sherry and Andy on pre DTLT then went away came back like a there's like a force came back here in 2002 and worked in DTLT as an instructional technology specialist and then as a director for two years and then I worked on special projects for a few years but the best job I ever had here came around when this building opened I was the founding director of the digital knowledge center which is our digital tutoring center here not ours there's now a digital tutoring center here at Mary Washington a place that holds a special spot in my heart I left Mary Washington in 2019 to move to Plymouth New Hampshire where I work at Plymouth State University in the open learning and teaching collaborative which is the teaching center essentially at PSU so I don't really work on the tech side of things anymore I do a lot of faculty development faculty to support instructional design and I love it and it's surreal to be back here again so I'm Jim Groom and I came here in 2005 and I came here from the City University of New York and one of the things that drew me here is Gardner Campbell's ad basically said we want people who understand and work with c-panel media wiki wordpress and other things that were unfathomable and instructional technology kind of position and I think in some ways that was the beginning of a of a brave new world of stepping into this group with them and what they were doing I had some taste of that with a Zach Davis and Luke Walter who's here today at the City University of New York with their instructional technology fellows but I do think Mary Washington right what had Whitman said I was simmering simmering simmering and Emerson brought me to a boil that was kind of like what happened here when I realized what they were doing with something as simple as c-panel for instructional technology and that's an interesting transition from fixing printers to actually showing people media wiki or wordpress and I think there's something there but we'll get to that. Hello I'm Shannon Hauser and I was a student aid in DTLT an alum yeah so I attended 2006 to 2010 and I not only worked there but I was kind of a hanger on a lot of times Jim would be like are you on the clock or not why are you here so I spent those years listening and learning a lot of things from the the crew you see up here and I did some things in the library a bit and I feel I've often described it to my colleague Carlin over there I got my monkey's pawish where I was like it'd be really great to work in the DKC with Martha and so the money you know it's like I now work in the DKC but it's because Martha bird has had to leave so I could work there so it's worked out I'm like yes I get to be the DKC oh bye so um yeah that's what I I do you know carrying on the legacy of you know working with students along with my colleague Carlin who's back there so. Hi my name's Tim Owens I was working at Longwood University and I followed I was friends friends or acquaintances I don't know what Tom Woodward and he had blogged about this I can't remember if like we had actually met but yeah this was okay to be clear this was the like pre-busk era where Twitter wasn't full of Nazis so everybody I felt like I was friends with online so and Tom was blogging about this guy named Jim Groom that was going to be doing this online course called DS 106 that was going to be all about like doing art online and I watched a video he had these Mickey ears on and I was like what a psycho um just like this is weird and interesting and so I'm like repairing laptops and doing boring stuff at Longwood but I started making art online and meeting all these people that like even like Brian Lam, Grant Potter, Grant created this radio station I tried to do something with like TV and video and like it was a thrilling time of my life and meanwhile I was trying to do more with faculty at Longwood but there wasn't a position for that there was a director of instructional technology I was told that I couldn't even apply because I didn't have a master's degree and so they wouldn't even ever consider me for anything related to instructional technology because I couldn't talk to faculty because I wasn't on the same level as them so that was devastating but I was doing that and Jim was working with the library at Longwood and had come down and so we we had lunch and he was like you need to come work for me like you need to come work at DTLT with me um and I was like I mean that would be awesome and so I applied got the job and you know DS 106 was like like the main thing I to be clear like they had just gone through one semester and then that was the summer of oblivion um that I was my first introduction literally was like day one sit down with Marta we're live streaming and you all are at a summer camp where the kids have been stolen maybe murdered and it was amazing I mean we were over in a theater building highly recommend you put your instructional technology group in a theater building like it's it's the right vibe for sure um and you know had had an amazing time with these people I do remember when I was applying for the job Jim said do you know anything about running servers because we have this blogging platform called UMW blogs and we're really struggling to manage it and I said I don't do that I know I know nothing about running servers is that a deal breaker and he said well no no like we'll figure it out I was just curious and I said oh good I was like I was really concerned because I'd like I I don't know anything about running servers um I learned a thing or two while I was there about running servers and so um you know we we started reclaimed mostly while I was there and the rest is kind of history from that what I'm doing now is running a retro arcade and for expert well thank you that was what yeah I know it's like we're gonna have to keep you know um some of the other answers maybe a little more um you know time sensitive but I did yes I'll try to keep but no it is really interesting just to hear you all you know because I hear you all talk about how you came to be um so for those who don't know me and my background I guess uh so I'm Lauren Hanks director of operations at Reclaim but I knew you all as a student when I was at Mary Washington and I was a student aid um my senior year when this building first opened and I helped you move to this building that's how I met Jim and Tim and got started uh and then ended up going to Reclaim after I graduated um you know but worked closely with Martha and you know most of these folks here and so it's you know it's kind of cool to I know some of what you all did just from that student perspective but um there's so much that I don't know I took DS 106 as a student you know it was a part of it in some ways but I would love to hear from you all you know what is a project over those 10 plus years that you worked on that still resonates with you today um and I know that that's maybe a big question but I'd love to hear your answer can I start because I'm holding the mic sure cool all right so for me it would be detail tea today um pretty soon after I got there I was fiddling around with uh cameras and stuff and I got to talking to Jim and I was like what if we did a podcast what if we just got in front of the camera and started talking and Jim was like cool I said what if we did it every day it was like okay and you know in hindsight that was maybe a little ambitious but we did and so we got in front of the camera and just started talking about what we were doing um most times there was no script I tried to bring in other people all those videos still exist with me and Jim and Martha and Andy sitting there talking about things like Aaron Schwartz dying um talking about an earthquake that we had here in Fred expert trying the soda stream are you getting busy with the busy right that was our first branded um our our first paid promotion um on DTLT today so but it's really cool and was amazing to just be able to archive the work that we were doing and and to me is like an amazing way of for us to reflect and to even go back on those videos because we talked to faculty we talked to other people at UMW and beyond in the community um about work that they were doing and so it was really cool not just to highlight what we were doing but what they were doing too and what we were all involved in and you know that's to me something cool that we did while we're there um so I I had an idea and then I had another and I'm going to talk about the meet quickly the first one though uh goes back to the very very early days of DTLT when we first got our um our blue host accounts and we were all working in different buildings still at that point we hadn't been put together in the theater building that didn't happen until 2006 and um because we were distributed it was hard to really stay in touch it was hard to really know what everybody was doing and I discovered I just really loved to install stuff on cPanel and figure out what I could do with it and hack it and play with it and um so I built this community website that um that was it was just like it was just this side project I did and I kind of like sent everybody a link and I was like hey log into this and see what you think and it was I think it kind of helped for me understand the potential when you give people that kind of open space to play in and to imagine in one of like somebody somebody who's worked in and around education and technology for so long I really bristle at the very common statement that we like to say which is it's not about the technology it's about the teaching and I it's working in a teaching center now I hear that a lot but I used to hear it a lot working in um in DTLT as well and I understand where that sentiment comes from because I don't think we should ever you know just use the technology with no intentionality but I also know from experience that sometimes you don't know what's possible until you see what's out there that can be done and so what I love about this work is that it's always bridging that gap it's always dancing back and forth between the teaching and the technology and helping people realize that there is no right choice there is just developing iteratively a better understanding of what's possible and and always working with intention and the second project I'll just mention really quickly but it's after most of these people were here was we made a movie and it was really fun it was called the convergence and it was a way to introduce this building to the community and it was a horror movie and I got to act at work and it was really delightful so I knew coming here would would trigger a flood of memories and as we talk about these projects that's that's what's full in my head right now and smooth elephant was one of the ones that I that I remember Martha started on as one of and your chat application that just and it was it was a constant barrage if you want to call it that of of these types of projects I mean the and Gardner knows I hope he knows how life changing getting your own domain was and and having that be the the the presentation vector for all the stuff that we were working on and so the project that I think of the most and it's informed a lot of my stuff that a lot of the stuff that I'm doing right to this day was the media blog and it's this idea of you know I've been working a little bit with with this idea about putting video on the web but you know how do you really do that and present it in a way that people can have access to it and so back in the day it was the flash player that that allowed video to go on the web and these little 320 by 200 clips and web pages and things like that but just to be able to experiment with that stuff and then having somebody like Tim come along and actually almost in many ways being competition for you know and I think at one time there was a there was a Tim versus Andy kind of dynamic that was going on which is which is great and and all in fun yeah exactly and then we got to put on wigs for DTLT today at one point so it was stuff like that that there's a whole bunch of projects really that you kind of amalgamate into one that describes what we're doing it was just a constant like synapse rush and and bouncing off ideas off of each other and sitting in not even cubicles but like directly across from each other and having that dynamic play out it was it was I mean it sounds it sounds cliche it sounds a little bit too much or hyperbolic but it was a it was a just a magical time I'm going to go really short here because my main role in this was I think a term that maybe Jim got me familiar with in the earliest days and that was fanboy that was my job fanboy I had a great deal of fun watching these people do wonderful things things of which I understood a small percentage immediately but they taught me a lot all the way through that time and then the other thing that I'll add again as Andy said it's a kind of whole picture recollection for me but the other thing I will say about my particular role is in that position you have the capacity to to focus on some definable resume building tasks as you anticipate your move to your next job and that kind of stuff for you have the capacity to help something major happen and I didn't always understand it but I understood that something major was happening and in the role that I had you have a kind of an endless supply of water and gasoline pardon me it's going to be dated really soon I can't figure out how to do this with electricity but water and gasoline and a lot of folks in the role that I had tend first toward the water side let's put that fire out and with Gardner's inspiration and the whole picture here my impulse was to go tap the gasoline and throw it on the fire that was that was already started here and that required no skill it just required a little bit of daring and and and that's what I remember about that and for was I rewarded it was it was wonderful to watch these people work Gardner do you want to jump in here since you were just mentioned I think it's okay thanks Jerry can everybody hear me okay yeah yes okay great it was magical I had never imagined that that breadth and depth of magic would be possible it it was kind of tough it was a little like the citizen cane phenomenon where afterwards you never get the same team again you get some amazing people but the circumstances are never quite with all the planets and alignment and and all of that so it's you know it's real bittersweet for me to think about those days because it was apparently at the time it seemed to be a non-stop set of discoveries you know you'd think wow we've gotten to Jupiter and somebody's like yeah you know this is a solar system and there's a whole galaxy so you get to the edge of the galaxy it's like oh there were billions of those oh and you keep going and then there's the dark matter which you can't even see oh and then you keep going but I would I would say in addition to my very fond memory of the day when Martha said I'm doing something with our community space but I'm not going to tell you what it is and it and we were all because at that point we were like sure of course that's what you do somebody is curating a space for your community and they're going to surprise you of course you would do that nobody said oh will you move the buttons around what are we gonna do so it turned out that Martha was a Halloween aficionado and on the day up it goes and all of the decor was Halloween and at that moment it something struck me so hard that it was almost like being invited into each other's novels that we were writing with the purpose of sharing them with each other it was it was while virtual reality doesn't begin to describe it just because of the sense of possibility and a weird sense of almost intimacy that came from all of that so at any rate there's so many magical things that happened that I was really privileged and all the rest of that to be a part of but I will also say that magic is costly chip won't tell you this because chip doesn't talk about this and it's probably best that he doesn't because that's how we'll know who he is here's how you know who I am it's costly it's really costly to go in front of people over and over who say oh that's an automobile where do you put the hey I'm really confused and then they kind of get hostile about it it's really costly when some of the planets start to go out of alignment it's really costly when in my own case I would screw up and I would see that things were put back not just for me but for a lot of other people as well the team faculty who had invested in what we were doing you know my boss you know you you begin to understand that the the reason it feels so magical is not just the sense of possibilities it's a growing awareness of what it could be which means a growing awareness of what's at stake and that's really been what when I think about those really it was just three years that I was leading DTLT and really only two of them with a solid solid team and only one year of what Jerry proposed we call the dream team I think back on all those days and they were absolutely extraordinary and I could and have gone on and on about it but they're costly too not just because they they're not permanent but because you have to spend political capital in ways that you you you didn't even know were possible and you know that's another reason why it's difficult to get things to last but you know I hear nothing gold can stay and okay I'm 65 I guess I can see where that's going to be and it and and yet if I had it all to do over again it would be the first to sign up it it it truly was magical I think I would say in many ways I was the beneficiary of working with some really creative and smart people my role was never to invent I would say my role in this was maybe what we came to know is the bullpen right when we were when we were all told yeah you're all going to get to come together in one space and I was like you know I had this internship at you know where it was in a news room and we all just push our desk together what do you think about and everybody was like oh that sounds interesting because at the beginning we were like drawn little floor plans oh here's what it looks like if we all get a cubicle and here's what it looks like if we all get this like what about this and they all jumped in and we all had the advantages and the disadvantages that went with that and you know it was it was you know the the synergy that you get from overhearing a conversation because we all knew that we could overhear our conversations and it was okay to talk about them right so um you know I think that uh that that to me was amazing you know when you say it's not about the technology it's about the teaching it's also not about the technology it's about the people right and and their ability to work together and be together and throw crazy ideas and get mad at each other and storm out but come back right um and I think that's that's of course you know I'm very stole mine because that was I think an instrumental thing for me as a student to sit in the space where people were being incredibly smart and thoughtful and hilarious in front of me uh like probably radically changed my life that like I got to sit there and kind of watch that happen but I will quickly throw out I'll say UMW blogs as a whole um it was something that launched like my I think maybe it was all my sophomore year or something like that very early and it was a space a WordPress multi-site and I you know I followed the Jim crew method of like just read people's stuff and comment to you know he inspired me in that way um that you could see community people I had really glommed on to the idea of like blogging is important that is you know watching people especially early on people like Gardner people you know everybody here who would write remember when we all blogged and there was like that period of time and somebody I as an 18-year-old how important that was to me to see like people be thoughtful about things and share and then comment on my stuff which is like when you're 18 and like somebody who you respect and think it's very smart says this is a really thoughtful idea like it just it pushes you forward um in a way um and so that was always my goal when I commented on other students things like be in that space you know respond that way you're not just speaking out into the other like somebody is paying attention to what you're doing that that people aspect like you're you're putting your voice out there and I want to acknowledge it and I know I'll say I have special love for it because I'm like right now in the process of sunsetting UMW blogs for so it's like it feels like a weird full circle I was there at the beginning and here I am putting it putting it down um you know like my dog I go down you know it's like uh you know uh so yeah that would be my problem yeah and I think to that point the thing that changed the project and the idea that changed things for me was when I came here the first directive was you need to blog you need to get a domain you need to blog and that project became as John Udell said this constant documenting of the work we did whether it's UMW blogs whether it's playing with WordPress whether it's DS 106 which was a digital storytelling class taught here or even what became domain of one's own it was all a process and the funniest story there is I got a a call from a friend of mine or an email I don't know what it was Mikhail Gershovich who was in New York at the time I had just came here from CUNY as I mentioned and he's like hey dude do you know that Brian Lamb has you as a link on his sidebar of his blog I'm like what who's Brian Lamb like what are you talking about and like that was a moment where I realized that the work we were doing together was actually a much broader community and that whole idea of the web came into focus which was web 2.0 or the social web in a way that it hadn't before in my life and the web wasn't that old yet it was still only about 10 or 11 years old and that was a transition just the idea of being getting a domain being asked as part of my job to think creatively about the work we're doing I just wonder how much that's still happening and I I think that's a really special takeaway that I'm still doing like that 20 years later or most that is a constant regular in my life is reflecting on the work I do with sharing my process and I comes from you know instructional technology which for me is like I said miles away from fixing printers but in some ways not because I'm probably blog fixing my printer too yeah I was gonna just kind of adding on that I feel like so much of what you all are saying sounds so familiar in the way that we work at reclaim you know it's narrating the work that we're doing working in highly collaborative spaces feeling like we can think about things openly and connect with folks online and just experiment and feel safe doing it so that's what I feel even just hearing you all talk is that has now led into reclaim hosting in the community that we support today you know the narration of the work turns into documentation and support and supporting a community of folks just trying to work and think and learn online so I love hearing that I'm curious knowing what you know now is there anything that you would have done differently the short answer is no I wouldn't do anything differently the longer answer is you you think about when you get into a career and you start seeing that it is a career you think about directions and and you know I graduated and got my bachelor's degree at courtland and worked at courtland you know state and it was av technology kind of but it's it was the start of what I consider my ed tech career and all the times that you go through that you think all right graduate school is the next obvious choice when I arrived at maryl washington and we started doing the things that we were doing I went to george mason and and and did online stuff with virginia tech it was nowhere close to what we were just simply doing in the office dtlt was my graduate school because I learned so much from the people that I worked with and and the ability to bounce the ideas off of some really smart folks that are thinking in the same space it was it was an instructional technology graduate program power excellence and it's it was all I needed so the answer is no nothing different I've got a quick thought that sort of it's not that something that we would have done I would have chosen to do differently except in that I would have liked to have been more aware of what we were doing in one particular from one particular perspective and that is the notion and this is a little less true but because of the work here and in other places that it's a little less true now but then we didn't really have a sense of how much we were blurring would be a charitable term burning down the fences around the institution and the really important thing there is that some of the some of the risks that we took had to do with things like institutional security of of the student experience you know that the institution was very concerned to make sure that all student experience would remain private unless the student acknowledged in in advance and you know all the those kinds of laws and regulations and we fought that a lot because what we were trying to do was connect the student experience with the world in so many ways and so I think if I had understood it a little bit better I might have tried to ensure that we were articulating that clearly enough that the other institutions could catch up really quickly along those lines as well so that's just a quick comment with that. Anyone else? Sure I know my first reaction was similar to Andy's to say that I don't know that I would do anything differently because all of this the good and the bad is part of the story that I treasure and taken with me and I can't really imagine how doing anything differently would have improved improved that I don't think that's what I I can imagine but but then when you were talking Chip I also started to think about something that if I have regret about I remember when in in fall of so I taught I think I taught my first first year seminar here at Mary Washington in what year what fall did you leave 15? Yeah so fall of 15 and then I taught it again and I to be clear I taught one on digital identity and and I taught it again the following fall and I remember being in a classroom with students in the fall of 15 this is a really specific regret but it'll make sense I promise and asking students about sharing on social media and I asked them do you when you share something and at that point students were still on Facebook when you share something on Facebook do you verify it do you you know do you care about that and they said no and I asked why and they said because it's it's not about truth it's about telling a good story like that's basically what they said is that they didn't see this as as fact sharing as news sharing as information sharing they saw it as storytelling and getting reactions to those stories and I was like huh that's interesting so like thank you fast forward a year later fall of 16 and suddenly it was so funny for I think for a lot of us who for like years have been like you know there's kind of some stuff going on here that's a little concerning and then suddenly the New York Times was like there's stuff going on and it's really concerning did you know people lie on the web um and I remember thinking gosh I mean I think we all knew that and we were aware of it and we talked about it and I remember trying to get people to to acknowledge it I remember being in a meeting once and saying I think we need to be teaching students about these fundamentals about the way the web works and the reaction being like well you know that's like teaching kids how to balance a checkbook why would we teach them that that's life skills that's not knowledge that's not the academy and then you get to you get to 2016 and beyond and you realize oh actually understanding the way all of this works may be the most important thing that we need to know right now because if we don't understand it we are being shaped and controlled and manipulated without even realizing it and our students are as well so if we're not talking about that here where is anybody talking about it like how does anybody learn that so if I have any regret it's that I from my small you know podium here didn't push harder on that didn't and didn't when my students said to me no it's just storytelling that I didn't in that moment say um let's dig a little deeper into that let's let's talk more about that well we've got about 15 minutes left so I want to make sure that other folks can oh yes garden sorry yeah that's that's fine can you hear me yes thank you uh I have some specific uh regrets that this is a good time to articulate uh one just to piggyback on what Martha has said so eloquently is that like all of us in the heady days of web 2.0 uh we we had seen the light it was no longer about buying this box it was no longer about doing this thing with this piece of equipment it was about wikis it was about blogs it was about control panel it was about all these things which is true but it took me several years to understand that there was this layer underneath all of that which was really where we needed to stand and that was again just to piggyback on what Martha said there's a conceptual framework about this that that that goes right back to some of the earliest dreams of the digital innovators now later I got to do more with that at other jobs including uh vcu that was where I did the most with it I wish I'd gotten there earlier I was experiencing it but there were so many new things coming to and new people coming down the pipeline so many connections were being made that that I couldn't see no we need to go back we need to make this academic in the best sense we need to have some way to study this not just to narrate it curate it and share it but to study it and that would mean going back and reading some stuff so that's one regret another regret is I should not have left the University of Mary Washington in the fall of 2006 I knew it was a mistake almost immediately and spent a very very dark fall trying to clamber my way back and with a lot of help from friends in the faculty and elsewhere I was able to come back as a tenured professor of English but it was a close thing and there was a you know it seemed logical at the time as many mistakes do my number one regret though is even bigger than that and that was when I and again this is to the cost of things I didn't understand that if a potentially influential person in the environment had a light bulb that had gone off in the projector in the room where she taught biology I should freaking well get that light bulb fixed if I had to go down and do it myself at eight o'clock at night why because it's real easy to make an enemy and the enemy you make may hold a grudge and honestly I think it is kind of a crappy thing to leave a faculty member without a bulb in a projector so that even if it's just PowerPoint slides on a screen they can't do that the next time they go in the room now to be fair that was not my direct responsibility but the person whose responsibility it was was my responsibility and I was a little too kind or skittish or some combination of the two to do the thing I needed to do which is to say yes I hear you now I want you to go do that I want you to do it right this moment I don't care what else you're doing you need to do that a colleague is floundering and later I heard then when it came time for me to come back one of the principal objections to me doing anything in teaching and learning technologies and any formal capacity was that I had not seen to it that that bulb got replaced and you know I get that now I'm still angry about it but I don't know that that was unfair so in the midst of all of this we it's not just about keeping the trains running on time it really is about meeting basic needs and all of the rest of this and that was a hard lesson to learn I'm not sure I ever learned it completely but a big regret probably my biggest one really great answer I we have a few minutes for other questions yes here let me bring in Mike my question's already been asked but I was just really curious about Shannon's answer to what you would have done differently as one of the people that's still working there and is dealing with the aftermath of this like very innovative period of time oh gosh great now um I wish Jeff was still here um I wouldn't guess he was my advisor um yeah I was going to make a jokey response like one year one semester I was an academic probation and I could not work for the DTLT and that was the worst semester of my life I also ate Martha's Triscuits once she was pregnant that was a big mistake don't finish a pregnant woman's bond to Triscuits um yeah it's uh I would say it's really hard for me to like say that I have any um regrets about things I guess it's my biggest thing is like in order for me to have moved into the space I am now so many people had to leave right the institution was not going to make that unit any bigger than it you know those kinds of things so for me right now it's uh you know trying to continue and carry on the legacy with like Jerry and Cartland and and do those kinds of things forward and do that next step where are we going next with all these things so you know I don't have so many regrets for us I have regrets for all of our institutions because the reality is we're institutionally so so bad at recognizing the value of humans and what happens when you put the right humans together and I'm sure everyone in this room can talk about a time when they thought god if I could just work with that person if we could just get more time together more resources if we could get one more position if we could reorganize a little bit but because of bureaucracy because of hierarchy because of org charts because of light bulbs that kind of stuff doesn't happen and it's you know some of that is just the nature of what institutions are but some of it is also because we have a failure of imagination of what institutions could be and we're really really bad at at recognizing that the people are what matter here like the people are who we are loyal to um and and that's a regret that I feel like I wish we could figure out at a higher level quick martha's points exactly right I think in so many ways the other thing that I will add into that equation is something that gardener talked about and we all have talked about to to a degree and that is uh and when gardener and I talk about this we often talk about why do the best bands break up and the answer is people evolve and sometimes the chemistry that works at a particular time can't happen as easily over can't be sustained easily that in our case here I think there were many things that contributed to changing you know life circumstances a variety of other things that meant that what we had built in terms of the team was limited in time span but to get to martha's point it has to be resilient it has to be able to survive those kinds of evolutions and that's another uh a bad grade for the institution if the institution doesn't understand number one how to keep the team and number two when you can't keep the team how you preserve the team momentum through change I would also add to that like to bring a full circle back again too as though um I don't have regrets in the same sense that when it comes to design constraints are a good thing so there's this fine balance between hoping you get those massive teams you get those massive budgets you get an amazing building and you're out of the theater building and now you're in this cool convergence center with all this technology and things just don't hit the same right like suddenly without those constraints you can't make the good stuff right and so I think there's sometimes a danger of putting a lens today on something that happened in the passing going well if I had just had this or if I had had that and sometimes you're given all of that and it makes things worse and so I actually and obviously again there's a balance sometimes it's like bad things are just bad right like you know when positions are cut things are worse right you know and stuff like that but at the same time I think to some extent we did work within the constraints we had and you know instead of having a massive tv studio we had a laptop with a computer you know in a book bag and that was enough and we did amazing things with it and so I do treasure those moments to be able to have done that you know with what we had I'll just build a joke on that one of the things that came when we moved into this room and I was talking I think it was with Brian Lam I'm not sure and he was pulling his best part in Fink and pressure he's like they're gonna notice Fink you don't want them to notice and it's funny because for years we talked about the presidential problems here we had three or four presidents in five years it was it was a complete chaos and it was the greatest moment for us because no one could think at all about what we were doing and cared they just wanted to make sure that the president wasn't drunk driving off the street so like we were in like we were in heaven and I think once they took a notice think it was an interesting shift because we had a ton of money in terms of a building not in terms of resources and there is that really interesting dynamic that's hard to understand but back to another point I think I was talking about with Kathleen yesterday is you know we're also in a very different mode of structure of higher ed in terms of corporate structure and that idea of a lot of what we're talking about post pandemic and a lot of what many people I'm sure in this room felt as a result of what we went through as higher ed organizations and even as reclaim looking from the outside in now it was a particular moment where that took on a kind of new tenor of intensity in terms of resources and keeping people together and building a group and then maintaining a group throughout all of the demands now on top of like you know presidential issues but also just working from home or not or like very simple things that have kind of come home to roost for us as institutions and where are we putting our priorities and the people in the buildings because buildings in some ways have taken more priority than people and there may be a little bit of a of a proverb or an allegory or something there that I'm not smart enough to articulate but that's interesting to me anyway we have time for maybe one more question I'm not sure who's best to direct this to might be Gardner and might be some of the people that were at DTLT really early like when I first came here which was I realized was 18 years ago um what were the first meetings where I presumed it was Gardner said I want you to get domains and I want you to do everything out of c-panel and how did the people feel when you heard that yeah it happened and I would love to know how people feel about it before we go completely off the air I hope you all know that I loved working with you you get that yep yep every day so Chip and I had gone to see a man about Blackboard at William and Mary and that was Gene Roach and it was all about how can we combine courses in Blackboard you know the really sophisticated stuff you want to do with the internet and but hey you know people combine courses so I saw Gene blogging and Gene's a really interesting person anyway he really is kind of a Pete Seeger you know Johnny Appleseed kind of a guy and on the way back I said to Chip what what if because this was always my thing if this happens with this person here what if we had six people do it here and then what if each of those people got six more people to do it first thing you know you have a worldwide web uh-oh um so I came back and I said so first of all I got Chip to actually agree without running it by university council I don't think he did that uh you know uh there there was no attempt to make sure there were no hold harmless clauses all the stuff I know how to do now but thank god I didn't know about that then and I'm sure Chip knew but Chip Chip um Chip's an artist people you need to know that about Chip so and I got to talk with an artist every Friday afternoon for three hours who was my boss and that's wow I thought wow that's pretty interesting so I came back and I said okay everybody here's what I want you to do we're all going to blog we're all going to have our own domains we're going to buy you these domains from a company that then went out of business six months later but who knew um see see the naive today uh but we did it and and some people were like what and some people were like oh that sounds good and then they never did and some people were like no I don't think that's a good idea at all what is it you want us to do and what will I blog about uh I don't even know I don't have ideas I don't have anything to talk about etc it was the full you know gamut as you can imagine but some people took to it right away and other people said oh I see somebody's taking to it maybe I'll take to it too um and then it accelerated again because Chip kept introducing me to environments where I would find these other people so that's how I met Brian Lam that's how I met Brian Alexander that's how I went to MIT for the first time and had my eyes opened wide and also we had a provost who had helped to bring a high speed network to Mary Washington and so there were a number of people invested and I had to find the lucky people who would be shareholders and enough people did it a critical mass assembled and then it really got started when Martha came uh that was the the time when suddenly a lot of it had to do with that environment we started to go uh oh and then certain other faculty started getting that experience to then it was that job description where I wanted to make sure that anybody who came in knew this is what we were doing it's the best job description I've ever written a lot of input from the team it was pretty crazy I think the word zany was in there I believe that was the crowning touch uh and Jim gets off the train and says yeah I was watching the new war of the worlds on the way in well it was actually something that downloaded somewhere I probably I shouldn't tell you that I was like oh okay come on in this is interesting uh and it went from there but it you know it was a it was a range of responses but uh it was absolutely the right thing to do and the the big moment for me was in the spring of 2006 when John Udell was at Faculty Academy and uh the whole team with me sitting out just watching just getting out of the way the whole team articulated what we call the Bluehost experiment which was the early days of of what uh we're describing now and uh not only did they describe it accurately they described it in such a compelling fashion that John Udell's jaw was on the floor that doesn't happen a lot and um then I was like yep that works I will say maybe you know to your question Brian what it felt like when this was presented to us for me I I think I can speak for Andy and Jerry because this echoes something Andy already said it's it felt like school it didn't feel like work it felt like learning it felt like school it felt like you know and that's why I work in higher education I mean it's why I've chosen to do this with my life it's because I want to be learning I want to be in school um and that's what that's what being given that felt like one more thing on that it was like a school coming out of a grad school program that I never got my PhD and it was like a school without the jargon because you were actually online working with people kind of really care if you had a degree or not and like that was the most liberating element of that school it was a school with a completely new context and not that everything that I had learned that grad school was relevant but also was in a completely new frame you know and that that was that was amazing to walk into a job where that was the expectation that was like wow like I don't have to go back to that PhD program I mean it wasn't part of my job although you did encourage me to blog but to what you just said to like to be as a student to be considered somebody who had something to say was uh you know like invaluable that I could be part of that conversation because you know it's having that those spaces means anybody can enter into them not just people who are experts uh was I intimate yes probably because I you know uh you know Jim Groom had a reputation so I had a good friend who was a year older than me that was also a student aid so I was very excited but very nervous about because I knew these people were smart because Martha and Jerry showed up with my class uh the introduced blogging my freshman year uh and so I was yeah I thought there was speculation in their class they were either married or brother and sister because of the banter but I mean that speaks to right that level and I immediately but though can feel the camaraderie in the room right like having the bullpen being able to sit there um yeah I think I was often intimidated but also I wanted to be there I felt I was comfortable I wanted to be around smart that's why I came to Mary Washington I was like I wanted to be around smart people even if I didn't understand what they were saying half the time uh I remember like gardeners some of those posts I would be like I don't know what this means there's so many illusions of metaphors I gotta like google when I read his stuff um but I got there right you know that that putting that ball just right in front of you like I gotta keep reaching I want to understand what they're talking about like that that reaching that I was looking for that I got which is probably why I didn't do great in classes but I that's what I wouldn't regret not going to all those classes because I was sitting in detail t learning from really smart people yeah oh my gosh yes yeah yeah I mean I think putting my I think what matters is that like people the commenting really like you know it's not just the putting yourself out there which is I'm busy you know overwhelming but then having people kind of come into that space and then like say this is great that's like that eased all those those kinds of things well I think I can speak on behalf of everyone thank you all so much for joining us uh giving us your time yeah part one of the indulgence of the next three days so as we transition there's going to be you know grab a cup of coffee stretch your legs we're going to move some furniture around for a minute and then we'll get started on brain