 Lauren, Jim, the recording is set. Welcome to OER20. Take it away. Great. Thank you very much. I'm going to introduce myself. My name is Jim Groom. I am co-founder of Reclaim Hosting and a big fan of OER20. Lauren? Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Hayward. I am an Innovation and Community Producer at the Distructive Media and Lab at Compton University. So I work alongside Daniel and Jonathan. We're two of the co-chairs of the conference. And I'm going to start our presentation. Our presentation is titled At the Scale of Care. And what Lauren and I will do today is we're going to kind of play a kind of presentation tennis where it will go between us from slide to slide, hopefully to diversify the perspective and the voices. And we hope you really enjoy it and we want to thank you all for coming. So I'm going to start the presentation with kind of an introduction and a context. So in 2012, the University of Mary Washington started an experiment, which was to give faculty, students, and staff their own, as we will say, a plot of land on the web, right? And the impulse being that it was high time that universities start taking a proactive role in providing opportunities for the community to imagine and create alternatives online. Spaces that move beyond the limits of the fluorescent-lighted space of the virtual learning environment or VLE for short and something that's also known as the learning management system in North America and other places. So the project was called Domain of One's Own and it was inspired by the idea of a room of one's own by Virginia Woolf and the organizing metaphor, for better or worse, was the house, right? And we had a lot of jokes at UMW's Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies early on because the best and only metaphor I could really come up with was this idea of a house and the idea of how do educated citizens need to understand how to put their virtual home in order, if you will. And with that comes a necessity for a deeper understanding of the various factors that make it livable, that is understanding basics on web-based plumbing, electric, interior design, etc. So as you can see, the metaphor gets unwieldy quick. But in effect, the new world we inhabit, the new homes we occupy demand a new way of understanding the structures within which we live, namely the World Wide Web. It was by Lauren Switching that we are using a website to present this and it's called the SPLOT, which you've already heard about. Yeah, so I've already posted in the chat the link to the website so you can follow along if you want. And there's information about how we've created this site on the website. So understanding the technologies that make up the web. At Coimbatore University, through use of the Coimbatore Domain Service, students and staff are given a sub-domain and access to free web hosting to build web-based works. The Learn Resource frames the Coimbatore Domain Initiative as an opportunity to understand what the World Wide Web is, issues related to different experiences of the web and the expanded role of the web in contemporary life. Through a set of open guides, the Learn Resource aims to support students and staff to critically engage with how websites and online services are made and operate and how they might imagine their own space and activity on the open web. The resource moves beyond a linear progression of literacies to make one-off works for assessment purposes and instead aims to build the confidence of both staff and students using digital technologies and making on the web. This includes onboarding walk-throughs to guides on how the web works, what it means to self-host a website and ways to imagine and plan your own web space. By exposing the technologies that make up the web and providing materials that outline strategies for working on the web, Learners can go beyond developing the literacy to complete a task for a defined purpose towards building the procedural knowledge to work and live in a hyper-connected world. As we move to the next slide, I just want to take a quick moment and acknowledge that the image in the next slide is from Mary Loftus, who was at OER 19 last year in Galway. I just like that her image was the one that came up when we were looking at it. Another little bellow element of open. What's crucial to understanding the technologies is coming up within a frame that enables and empowers educators and students alike to think like the web, which inspired technologists and the patron saint of trailing-edge technologies, John Udell, had come up with a list in 2011 called Seven Ways to Think Like the Web. And in this, he talks about the idea of users being owners of their own data, understanding how to pass by reference, understanding how feeds and RSS works, understanding how to archive one's work, in effect understanding how the plumbing of the web works in order to be a kind of informed, educated digital citizen. 2014, Doug Belshaw updated and kind of distilled this list into what he calls a broader manifesto for digital literacies. And the three points he comes up with have a corner of the web you control, work openly by default, and ensure your data is readable by both humans and machines. The need for thinking like the web or a broader vision of digital literacy was finally starting to gain some traction for some of our domain of one's own became an ideal platform for doing justice kind of work. In fact, John Udell just the other day was talking in response to Kim Jackson who wrote, 10 years ago we should have taught faculty how to be better at the internet, to design for privacy, security, accessibility, even how to use keyboard shortcuts, anything else but lecture capital, online quizzes, and boilerplate feedback. And to that, Udell said, among other reasons, so faculty could not only use those skills, but teach them. Next slide. Okay, so here I wanted to explain how the Learn Resource frames free institutional web hosting as a possible space. So obviously we've got a nice picture here of a possible space, a big green space. So Leverve said in the production, let's think of the idea of social space in relation to virtual space. Leverve said in the production of space, social space is a social product. The space that's produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action. In addition to being a means of production is also a means of control and hence a domination of power. In the essay, the potentials of space commoning by Staffordies sets out the idea of space commoning as a means of providing possible space. Notice Staffordies use of the term commoning rather than evoking the notion of a commons. Within Art Theory and other disciplines, the term commons refers to activity rather than a specific resource. Staffordies says to think about space's potentiality is to connect experiences of space to possibilities of expanding them and transcending them. Performing space, performing through space is always open to discovering space through performance, much like a dancer discovers possible movements by dancing and an actor possible gestures by acting or by rehearsing. By performing space actually means performing social relations. It means experiencing them as concrete unfolding realities rather than abstract definitions of social identities and this is a way to live potentiality by creating it. In this way, possible space is not a site of a specific resource but space as potentiality for performing new ways of working. Through exposing the technologies that make up the web, providing technical guidance to work like the web and framing access to web hosting as means to test and expand upon ways of working on the web, the learn resource encourages students and staff to imagine and create web-based sites and activities that work for them and their communities. I think as we go to the next slide. The long way to scroll. Nothing really highlights the idea of the need for possible third spaces than our current situation. And so one of the things that came up as a question and a very interesting discussion around these spaces is this notion of ownership. Who really owns the spaces? And I think that's a broader question we can all ask about technology in this day and age. But the idea of ownership and the prevailing metaphor of the house at the center of domains definitely has its limits and people like Ann Marie Scott hate it and she has a very good reason as to why. Actually, Mahabali pointed out does anyone truly own their own domain or is it simply being leased from the registrars? And this is a very good point. I'm going to quote from her post where she writes about this. My understanding of ownership is that something belongs to me that I have already acquired it or been gifted it. And I own it until I die. No additional payment required. If I own it and I die, it passes to my heirs. That isn't at all the case with domains. And I don't disagree with Mahabali and I don't think either did Audrey Waters who all bear reading her response from a post she did about this as well. She says, but what do you own? Your degree, your ideas, your work, are you sure? Have you read the fine print of the terms of service? What data and or content can you take with you when you finish a class or when you graduate? And what can you as Mahabali frames it pass along to your heirs when you die? And that was a quote from Audrey Waters. And in the end the question around ownership breaks down in the digital economy we find ourselves in. For Waters, the idea of resistance to the subscription-based future of our online identities remains strongly rooted in education. In part, and this is a quote, I think we resist through education. We help students and scholars understand how new digital technologies work, how these technologies shape and reshape and are shaped by culture, politics, money, and law. Next slide. So again, all of these references and everything that we're saying here is available on the website and the link that I shared before. So I'm going to go to the next slide. Okay, so emancipatory practice and testing new forms. So the image that's shown here, this is an illustration from the Morant Rebellion in 1865 where Jamaican rebels challenged the limited notion of freedom offered by capitalism. Being emancipated from slavery only to work on sugar plantations as wage slaves. They fought for an idea of freedom that meant having your own land to farm and work and organise social life in whatever way an individual or community wished. I'm going to quote Staffordies again. If emancipation has to do with envisaging and testing of specific forms of social organisation, possible spaces understood as imagined arrangements of a specific possible sites may become the means of both envisaging and testing those forms. In the context of the web and virtual space, possible space provides the means to break from behaviours related to the current socio-technical system and third party services and imagine and test new forms of working online. Cometry Domains and Microsite Learn were imagined to propose that all should have access to web production as well as the agency to learn on the web in such a way that does not necessitate working under surveillance capitalism. The initiative also aims to advance the argument that educators and students have the means to envision and test new forms of working on and collaborating online. The Learn resource includes guides on accessibility, privacy and copyright to build understanding of how other spaces on the web potentially operate and encourage reflection and active decision making on how an individual might govern a web space and have the freedom to make use of the space for both of themselves and others. Yeah, and as we move to the next slide, one of the things that I think has been so inspirational about the work Noah and Lauren have done with Coventry Domains Learn, which is really what this presentation is about, is that they've inspired us to rethink our documentation for all schools we work with. The ways in which Coventry Domain Learn faces outwards towards a broader community and foregrounds web literacy as its raison d'etre, I apologize to all the French people out there, helped us reimagine how our support documentation was solving specific pain points such as how to log in the WordPress, how to use an add-on domain, et cetera, et cetera. But it was not at the experience holistically as a pedagogical endeavor first and foremost. Part of this was a result of getting the trains to run on time as Reclaim's tiny team was in a position of supporting thousands of faculty, students, and staff, a reality we are just recently coming up from there from. But the beauty of this is that the role of educational technologist, instructional designers, whatever other not entirely adequate title tried us to encapsulate what it is we do is foregrounded through the design of a thoughtful, curated learning experience that helps provide a structured path of understanding how creating a domain and working through the conceptual foundations of how we work on the web becomes a literacy that can transcend the class or faculty-specific limits of learning environments and merge them back onto the richest, most diverse, and beautifully complex educational network known to humanity, the web. Coventry has been awesome enough to openly license all their work and Reclaim wants to integrate the learning pathways defined and learned into other schools' domain projects as seamlessly as possible. Next slide. Okay, so community domains learn as a living, open resource. The breadth of guides made available through the Learn Resource aims to meet the needs and curiosity of a large, diverse community of students and staff at Coventry University, as well as the public. Coventry Domains currently has 30 undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as research students, department teams, and academics making use of the service. Therefore, the guides need to talk to an audience who may have very limited web literacy, have differing entry points to discovering the service, and who will have very different ideas about what they want to get out of their web posting. The resource provides three paths of content, link, build, and grow, as a way to scaffold the content into a curriculum that the audience can follow at their own pace. At the top of the landing page, there is a large text prompt that asks, what are you looking for? Which sets the expectation that you as an individual can search out and decide how you want to make use of your space, rather than the resource being part of a customer service package or a linear online course. The guides explain technology within context, provide visual aids where appropriate, and aim to provide a meta example of how to write, publish, and structure content on the web. The resource also aims to shift the burden of onboarding and web literacy development from teaching staff and learning technologies through a shared open resource, which can be remixed and repurposed within the VLE and elsewhere. I think one of the many amazing things about Coventry Learn is it highlights the attention to care full. And I say that C-A-R-E dash full. And passionate work that groups like the disruptive media learning lab are doing to share their hard work freely, allowing other groups to not only benefit from this work, but hopefully build on it and riff and adapt it to specific contexts. Open curriculum like Learn often gets packaged up as a MOOC these days and process through an online directory of time based learning that somehow ends up as a badge. But that is not the impulse behind Learn. Learn is an open, adaptable community resource that has created dialogue with ever more pressing need to provide support for educational communities to build digital literacies into every course faculty in order to empower teachers and learners to understand and responsibly inhabit the new online digs we find ourselves in a truly, in a project truly at the scale of care on the web. Thank you. I like the dramatics in that last line. I think so too, Jim, Lauren, there's a huge round of applause, just erupting now. Thank you both for... Splot fast. Oh, I messed it up now. I was going to make a splot fantastic joke, but no, Daniel made me giggle by saying you're presented by Splot Point. So thank you all for a wonderful presentation. We do have five, six minutes for questions before we all have to go for lunch. So I'm going to leave you to your audience before we finish the session. I think we are ready for any and all questions and it is actually Splot Point. We used Alan Levine's Splot to present and there's been some discussion about us singing a web-based song like a musical. We can do that, but Lauren and I have not practiced so we may have to wait to carry OER key tonight, but do we have any real questions? So if you're happy to take questions by Mike and if there aren't, we don't have the ability for every participant to speak, but I can give people mics if they raise their hand and if they want to use the mic to ask a question. Otherwise, please put your question in the chat. So I think we have a certain blade or walk in there and make you a presenter so you can use your mic and hopefully we can hear you. Hey, it's actually Doug. This is my kind of pseudonym for what I'm trying to cover, but that doesn't quite work. So this is fantastic. I've been following this work for a long time and I'm particularly interested in that metaphor of a house and the land and the address. It feels like you're doing such fantastic work with the house and the land, but it seems like we're hamstrung by the address because that, as you pointed out, as Mahard pointed out and as Audrey pointed out, this is given to us by someone else and we can only ever rent it. So I wondered whether anyone in their kind of academic learning technology world has looked into kind of a decentralized way of doing this into a way that we can own that rather than just rent it. It might be something which is tangential to this project, but just whether you thought of that at all and investigated. You know, Lauren, do you want to jump first here? Yeah, I mean, I think we were trying to focus on the idea that obviously there are difficulties with the traditional senses of ownership on the web because almost all parts of it are kind of leased from someone else or we have like time limited ownership on them. But we wanted to kind of stress the idea of ownership as being about learner agency. So kind of giving people a space away from their party services or parts of the web that might collect data on them or they might kind of form or kind of nudge their behaviour in a particular way that people could have their own web hosting and a kind of domain address or a subdomain in this case where they could just start building work and kind of start learning about the technologies that make up the web. So less of an emphasis perhaps on ownership other than the students own and control what takes place on their account with country domains. And I'll like to build on that one of the interesting presentations I saw a couple of years ago when Tim Berners-Lee was kind of going the rounds for the decentralized web is the Internet Archive had Vince Serf who basically like helped invent the protocol that was ultimately the Internet was saying one of the biggest kind of problems right now with the web more generally is DNS, is domains, is the fact that we don't give people lifelong domains and that's not and it's become a marketed program and I don't know how many of you follow the .org fact that that's been sold from a nonprofit to a profit and then I think the domain world is a dirty world I'll be honest about that. It's a dirty business driven world and finding a way to open up DNS or find some way to do that more interestingly would be ideal but it's almost like there's somewhat of a kind of stranglehold on that and it's kind of shady and it's a VC driven market that I would be really interested to see and I think that would be quite an intervention Doug if that could happen. So we tried to like Lauren said focus on giving students the ability to understand and have the tools and then they will have to ultimately struggle with that as Maha pointed out but it's a tough one and that's a real big weakness right now in the web more generally frankly. Thanks Jim, thanks Lauren. We've had loads of different questions in the chat. One of them is from Jonathan and I think that might be a nice question to kind of close the session with your reflections. Jonathan wanted to ask if you could speak a little bit more about the idea of agency. So is there something more about the sense of home rather than the house? I thought that was a nice question. Sure, yeah I think I saw Mia talking about the idea of a home rather than house as well earlier. Yeah, so I think if you have a home then you obviously can choose what takes place there and you kind of feel comfortable with it. You can have a sense of privacy or you can choose who you invite into that space. So I think that's perhaps a better metaphor than a house. A house is useful. I assume this is what Jim was thinking about and you spoke about before where you can think about the infrastructure and the architecture of the space. So how maybe different rooms in the house kind of relate to each other and how you can link people across different spaces and how you build the foundations of that space by choosing what kind of software you want to use to build your website. But yeah, a home I think is probably better when we're talking about agency and ownership where you can take control of that space and decide how you want to lay it out so if you want what wallpaper you want. Are you going to throw a house party or are you going to chat with friends or are you going to read a book or write something? You can decide what you want to do there. Yeah, it's almost like the house is the space before you own it or maybe not own it because then ownership is a problematic. But then the home becomes once it's lived in. Like, Bava Tuesdays is my home online. The idea of a WordPress blog where I can set it up and kind of control it and post to it is the idea of a house. So I think home has that sense of a lived in. I mean I know I moved out of my house in Virginia and it was home for eight years but as soon as my family left and they were somewhere else and I was somewhere else it was just a house. I think that has a sense of attachment and the danger is how much we get attached to these third party spaces which by definition we're just sharecroppers on. They'll never be our home. And on that night I think it's time to wrap up the formal recording of the session so I'm going to ask you all to put your hands together one more time for Jim and Lauren but also for Sarah all three of whom have given us an amazing morning program here at OER20.