 So, Paul, I think we're live. I think those WordPress multi-site hippies, they're dream, they're talking about WordPress multi-site and their dream for the future is static HTML. Damn it! You're in the wrong session, people. Anyway, this is the session on DS106, Accused on Trial. And Paul, you and I had the pleasure to kind of sit in and work together on that session, although, to be fair, it was all you. And we either have a special guest judge, the great Martha Birdist, who was really good at putting everyone in their place really, really well. So anyway, I just wanted to get a sense from you. You had kind of dreamed up the session, you came to me with the idea of I want to do a session at Reclaim Open, and I would love to focus it around something with DS106. So I guess maybe we'll start with you talking a little bit about your thinking around the session, what you wanted out of it, and why you wanted to do it. Well, yeah, I thought it's time to do something on DS106, but what do we do? One of the things that I've been thinking about is that theme of the web that was the web is the web that will be. DS106 was set up quite a while ago, things were a little different online. There's a lot of social media wired into the course, and it's not as nice a place as it used to be. Part of the signup form for DS106 requires to have a Twitter handle, and we don't want to do that anymore. Yeah, to be clear DS106 is still nice, but the ecosystem it lived in got a little bit polluted. To be honest, that's never really been a problem, as I've seen it within DS106. We're kind of off in our own world, and the trolls don't care about us, which is cool. But we do run into some problems, especially on YouTube, where things get copyright claimed, but maybe they shouldn't be. So I want to talk about DS106 as something that sort of bridges the web that was, the web that is the web that will be. In some ways we had our feet in all three of those, depending on how you define them. And I'm not sure how it came to me, but I had the idea to run it as a trial. Was it at all influenced by our true crime? Oh, definitely. At UMW, we did a whole freshman seminar, which was Meredith Fero's first kind of class at UMW, about true crime, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, we had that true crime seminar, which was very cool. We got to do a lot of really interesting things with that class, this way of foregrounding the students. It was very DS106-y, right? There would do a video, someone did Charlie's Angels, and they would do crazy early American spin-ups. There was a lot of that storytelling element across media in it as well. Yeah, they dramatized some of the stories. Yeah. Was it that they ran Bridget over the car? Sarah was that one woman from Canada who was out of her mind. Yeah, it was a really fun class. And yeah, I said that ties into the idea of the trial, especially that let's hang them. But it also, I saw that as a way to involve the audience as well. We could bring them in as a jury. And so I guess this was a little weird as a trial to not convict, but ask the jury to save people. But that was kind of the point, let's get participants' ideas of what we can do, what else we can do with DS106, you know, how can we modernize it? So from that point, we framed the prosecution as like you've neglected this. I forget all the accusations I threw in there. Yeah, like coattail writing. It was very funny. You had coattail writing, you had breaking copyright, you had all these like list of offenses. And so, you know, in leading up to the session, you wrote up all the offenses, you wrote the script for me, you wrote the script for you, you got, you know, like you had done everything. I just showed up. But one of the greatest things of the session was earlier that day, we had what is an art fair and it's something we've been doing at several of our conferences. And it's great people bring their projects. And we did a little like flash pop up. And actually, I have found some video on the Reclaim EdTech Discord. So if you don't mind, I'm going to add that to the stream right now. And we're going to look at a little video of Paul and I doing a flash pop up promoting the session that would happen later that day, wherein we are essentially what Grant Potter, who I stole the video from, calls the passion of St. Paul. So let's take a look at this right here. Here it is. And let's see if we get a video. Can you hear it? I'm not hearing anything. Okay. So I'm basically reading off the offenses that you're doing. And I actually, if you give me, this is, this is when, you know, we lose the audience right here is I'm going to try and bring that in. And once I try that, things go totally wrong. But let me just see real quickly. So anyway, I am reading off the offenses that you're talking about here. And I think if we try this, I might be able to bring this in right here. Let me just see if my let's see how good my audio game is. So I am going to try with my speaker to bring in loop back. Let's see if this works. I'm going to try it again. Ready? Go. So that was super fun. So we just popped up. You had written that I was just, you could see in my terrible acting was just reading off of the post of the poster you had created all of your offenses. But it's worth it. I think you have a better copy of that poster. It's worth for you to, to share what you kind of came up with as part of the quote unquote art fair, where we would do this quick pop up and kind of promote the session. So do you have that poster handy? It's coming. There we go. Awesome. Let's do it. Man, we're good. It's like we're professionals, Paul. Hey, we fake it till you make it, right? Yeah. So I did a couple of two different versions of the poster. So we have this one and we have side by side, which is no, we didn't. We used the other one. We might have hung on both of them. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah, you know, the Dr. Oblivion Jim Groom and the karaoke Jim Groom. Yeah, you know, I love Dr. Oblivion Jim Groom. Yeah. And the list of the crimes put under there, inviting people. I really went for that. Obviously, the antique look. I was looking for early American trial rate ups, announcements, flyers or whatever. And that's, I think, where that banner at the top and the bottom comes from. And I just sort of stuck DS106 over it. They fit pretty nicely. Those public announcements of the crimes, right? Yeah. Public shaming, which I obviously fit right into on that video. Like I had no problem jumping into a character. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was brilliant. It's a brilliant like visual display. And I like it because it also highlights, you know, what was and is so special about DS106 is that creative impulse to have an idea to have even like a very low budget DIY idea for a presentation, you make this great poster. And then after we do this, we do get some people who attend our session surprisingly. And where you, myself and Martha Burtis are up there, all who had an integral part in running DS106 over the years. And it was just fun to talk about essentially accusing you. So you heard people who are listening now heard the accusations against Paul. And so Paul, what was your defense? Did you have a defense speak? I want to say my defense was kind of weak, actually. I really felt like I was little less prepared than I should have been for that. And I think both you and Martha really saved that presentation, you know, because Martha's pretty much in the whole thing. You dreamed up, wrote the poster for and bring us in. Oh, that one? We saved you on. Yeah, you know, I had thought about bringing like images of DS106, you know, that would tie to some of those things. But in hindsight, and also because I was underprepared, really focusing on the performance was I think more important and focusing on the people in the audience getting their ideas. So basically, my defense is for, you know, what one of the accusations was usurping the course, you know, which, you know, it's not exactly the way it happened, but I like to frame it that way anyway. You know, you brought me in and then everyone left and I'm the guy running the course, taking it over. But, you know, my defense there, it was like, you know, I didn't, you serpent as much as nurture it after it was, you know, abandoned by people who chose to be thought leaders. You got a double dig in on me. You know, but really, my defense wasn't appealed to the audience, you know, like, you know, trying, but all you people are smarter than I am, you know, so you can save, you know, come with ideas to help modernize, you know, DS 106. And I think Michael Branson Smith, you know, called that out as, you know, a way to like, you know, get other people to do the work. And he said, I thought that was transparent. But that was a nice transition for me, Paul, like, so the fact that you laid out your defense, you know, while you and Martha and others had abandoned it, you had saved it, you had kept it going. And here you are back pleading with the community to, you know, once again, take up your abandoned child and make good on this relationship. And people in the audience, because we had, we had left it for them. And for a good five, 10 minutes, they were chatting and just having fun. Who knows, you know, it was a very loose session, which I loved about it. But the fact that you bring up Michael Branson Smith is nice, because, you know, Michael Branson Smith had a couple of sessions that I thought were really great at the, at the conference. He did one on where it was basically a real experimental session where he did what is called AI Levine, where he, he created a AI model voice, video and text of Alan Levine talking about splots, which was genius and a very fun session. But then he talked about the legal illegal mind of the artist talking about the idea of copyright and the laws really recently that have kind of really blurred the idea of ownership. And a lot of the things that I thought when DS 106, and you mentioned it earlier with YouTube and takedowns, the remix culture and the kind of idea of reusing and riffing on not only each other's work, but the work and the kind of broader cultural milieu was what was most fun about DS 106. And one of the things that came up in the conversation that really got me excited was thinking about like, could we get the band back together quote unquote, and come up with a course where we would use AI as the model quote unquote for the class, you know, train a model of Dr. Oblivion have Dr. Oblivion teach the class purely as an AI based on what's been taught before so train them on these various sections and not not program the class like have AI do the syllabus and then have all the people who take the class do all their assignments using AI. Not because I'm a fan of AI, I have very mixed feelings on it. In fact, I've been trying to avoid it like the plague. But it would be a fun way like Michael's AI Levine to kind of intervene in a creative way to try and get your head around what are the tools? How are they working? What are the implications, right? Like, it's hard to talk about the implications of artificial intelligence as it's being framed right now. If you don't know how to use it, or if you don't understand it. And I know I can't speak to it very intelligently because I've intentionally avoided it, but that cannot last, right? I'm gonna have to come. I'm gonna have to come to some sort of relationship with it, whether I like it or not. So what better than train an entire DS106 course slash community on AI? So at least I can dive into it with people who I have fun with and who I can share with and who I feel safe to kind of explore my duplicity around this technology and what it means. So that's one of the things I took from this that I thought was super fun. Yeah, I mean, we had several conversations during the course of the conference about AI and DS106. Ben Harwood, I think, was talking about doing it and where he is. And I really like the idea because it raises a lot of the questions about, you know, what is art? What is creative? And let's you play with that technology. What can we do with this and how can we make it creative? And you had a recent, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you had a brilliant recent post on your blog about this talking about it's about the dance, right? And this idea of you took a quote, I believe, was from an old school. It was originally from T.S. Eliot, but it was reused in a sci-fi novel by a guy who wrote Neuromancer, am I right? William Gibson, yeah, it was in count zero, like Dick. I mean, I read that back in the 80s. And I remembered there was a thing in there about an AI that was producing art was like one of the plots of the story. But that line came up in there, you know, it's just the dance. But yeah, I didn't know at the time when I read it that that was T.S. Eliot, you know, when googling stuff after the fact, I saw this is where it came from. And it's sort of an illusion in there. The dance, you know, makes me think of the judge, so that'll be going as well. Yeah, from Blood Meridian. And it's actually an interesting frame, because we always do them with themes and AI obviously would be the theme of ideas 106 course that hopefully we'll do. And I think Martha was into it, too, in spring, maybe of 2024, and test it out before. But like the idea also of the idea of the dance being a broader kind of aesthetic frame for it, right? Like so you have AI, you know, you maybe have it happening at various schools. And then you have this idea of a dance, you know, not only with the tech, but also amongst the community. Yeah, I mean, it's that interaction between between the art and the viewer. Like that's the aesthetic experience between the art and the artist is sort of the creative experience. And I think these are things that we look at in TS 106 as we, you know, blog about our work, what we're doing, what we're trying to do. And I think that's a way of focusing on the dance is where I'm sort of like a foregrounding that part of it, you know, and I think that would let us think through how we can use AI creatively, maybe think through some of those issues about, you know, copyright and AI scraping things. I've always had this fantasy wish of having a text to speech reader that speaks in the voice of Bob Ross, you know, and you know, from what Michael Branson Smith showed you like this is something that could be done pretty easily. Stuff like that is what always makes that class so amazing as someone comes up with this bonkers idea and then executes and then you're like, Oh, wait, it's possible. And, you know, Mark Corbett Wilson, hello, Mark, who's in the chat right now, is talking about a series of resources he has. And I think the thing about it too is it's on a lot of people's mind. And there's obviously a hype factor around it. But there's also a real genuine curiosity and a genuine, I think, desire to communicate and work with a bunch of people to enter that dance to try and wrap your head around it and see what that means. And just, you know, even when I saw Michael stuff when you're talking about the Bob Ross text to speech, like, I know my inclinations to kind of discount it, you know, are limited. And I also know that there's there's some real potential problems with what's happening and how it's being done by companies to, you know, deal with things and erase ideas of like provenance and authorship, right? But these are not new issues, right? Like they may be, you know, they're not new, as you're saying, as you're pointing out there, but like it would be a really good place to deal with some very powerful and, I don't know, large, broad, academic, intellectual questions. Yeah, I mean, like that idea of, you know, Bob Ross cloning the voice, you know, there's, I mentioned to other people and, you know, everyone really likes it. But there is an ethical issue there, which, you know, it's probably why it hasn't been done. Exactly. And it's trademark copyright issues, right? Yeah, yeah. My kids have Bob Ross shirts. So like he's a product. The things that are going on, you know, in Hollywood right now with the strike, you know, as you mentioned, nothing's new about this. I remember reading a story about Jet Li, martial arts actor, that he like quit making movies because the studio wanted to basically scan all his moves and own it. You know, he just didn't want to be part of that, you know, and that's kind of the fight that's going on right now. That's super interesting, actually. Yeah. So I have another, because one of the things you brought up early on in this talk, and we have about six and a half minutes before the next one, so I'll be mindful of that, is you brought up the idea of, you know, social media changed. You know, we did a lot of our community building and a lot of our kind of, you know, cross sectionality with different groups coming together from different places or even students who had taken the class or people who contributed over time. It all collapsed into Twitter in a very elegant way with the hashtag DS106. And it was great. Also where the radio happened and there's no two ways about it. The universe of DS106 misses Twitter because of that because it was a great place to track time across, you know, various spaces in a very simple way using that hashtag. But, you know, at Reclaim Hosting, we've been doing a lot with open publishing stuff, right? Like WordPress has always been the engine that drove the blogs and that. We now have PeerTube and Taylor Jaden, who's been on a crazy roll, just got the DS106.tv site up and running cleanly again. It had been kind of, you know, in between. I had left it in a half working state. And now we have basically a YouTube clone that will never get copyright claims. It's kind of like a beautiful, you know, it's kind of niche. And we have the Mastodon for DS106 already, which could be a nice substitute potentially for Twitter. Like, I think a lot of the open source pieces to do this in a way that's a little bit more protected and community specific are in place now. And so part of me excited about doing another DS106 is also rolling out the new tools and creating kind of an upgraded version of it. I have some dreams of moving the site and then integrating all the pieces with Taylor before maybe this spring session. So we really roll out a new and improved DS106 kind of presence. So I'm always interested in the technical piece and how to make that, you know, buttress what's happening with the creative piece. And I think it might be a great time to do a kind of overhaul of the ecosystem, at least of the technology, and make it all open source and make sure that it's really serving the community. And people don't feel like once they get on, say, Mastodon, you know, they're locked in and then, you know, some jackasses making claims that they may not agree with ethically or beyond. So I'm excited about that piece. Yeah. And I mean, doesn't exactly qualify as open, but Discord is another tool that we've been using. And I think that helps like with when we used to live tweet stuff, we sort of moved that to Discord, that makes that conversation a little more flows a little better. It's a little more elegant because the other noise Twitter is filtered out. But you can also invite people in. So like when we the last couple of times that I live tweeted radio shows, you know, Joe Murphy joined us, just to hear what's going on, that Discord community for DS 106, it's technically still open to everyone who was in there before, you know, so, you know, that community is there, people want to stick with it. Yeah, their toes back in. And I'll tell you that Discord slash what we're using here, StreamYard, that's going into YouTube, but it can also StreamYard can go right into PeerTube. Like that's really nice for those live sessions. And like some of those highlighting pieces. So I do think that, you know, I don't have to be a purist about open source. And obviously with Reclaim AdTech, we're not we're using Discord because it works and it provides us what we need. So yeah, I really like the idea of exploring alongside exploring AI, exploring a kind of infrastructure that will support the class going forward, given one of the key elements of it, Twitter is not really viable in the same way it was in 2011, 2012. Yeah, but all tools go bad eventually, you know, so we just pick up a new one and figure out how to work with it. I mean, we just came from a WordPress multi-site session that ended with all static HTML sites all the time. So I mean, even WordPress is on the chopping block for these EdTech hippies, right? But we are green or something? What are we, Paul? We are for life. DS106 always gets a spot at a Reclaim Conference, right? It's kind of like, you know, you know, coarse nepotism or something like that. Oh, it's DS106 people again, they're going to get a spot, of course. And Beware Hacks is pilot noted. Beware. But I do think Federation makes a lot of sense for a new iteration of DS106, not to mention focusing around artificial intelligence and what that looks like. So that's actually, you know, I'm using this follow-up in the July Reclaim Open Virtual event to say I'm definitely still committed. I'll reach out to Martha. I'll start touching base with the folks back at Reclaim, like Pilot and Taylor and others, and try and kind of come up with a plan. And then I want to see if I can maybe get a course, like whether at UMW, you should reach out to your contacts there, maybe Georgetown. I was trying to kind of, you know, sow those seeds, like somewhere where we could also teach at other universities, because I always like that. You're like, I just love to teach, but I always like. So anyone out there who has ideas of universities that might want to do some version of this, don't be shy. Because we might, you know, I mean, Michael Branson-Smith said, your college, he might spin up a version. So I would love it to bring in students and kind of have some space. But with that, I think we're past our time. Paul, thank you for joining me on this session where we kind of reflected on the always evergreen greatness of the mighty, mighty DS106 for life. Yes, DS106 is always dancing and it will never die. Yeah! Thanks, everybody. All right.