 I hope we all had a nice time last night and enjoyed the dinner at TV at house and the delights of Edinburgh. So it falls to me to introduce our first keynote of the morning at Jim Groom. Now although I've known Jim as one of these guys on the internet for years, this is actually the first time I've ever met him. So I wasn't really very sure how to introduce him. So rather than try and write something myself, I thought well I'll ask a mutual acquaintance if he could provide a little background detail about Jim just so we know where he's coming from. So David Kernahan was very happy to oblige. So Reverend Jim The Bavar Groom, alias Snake Plisken, is a charlatan and a fraud. A self-confessed used car salesman clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit. The monster behind educational time sink DS106 and notorious cult and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with edgypunk. Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap web hosting to gullible undergraduates and deluded colleagues and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy. Jim has recently fled North America and is thought to be holed up in his mountain fortress in the Italian Alps. If seen, nobody should approach this man as he is believed to be creative and dangerous. Of course Jim is also one of the most inspiring and amazing individuals you're going to meet. So please a big round of applause for the Reverend Jim Groom. I just wanted to know a little cultural point. How is it a prize to get a book from Martin Weller? I'm Jim Groom, big fan. This is my first time ever in the UK. This is my first time presenting in the UK and I promised myself. I said, you know what Jim, you've been cashing in on DS106 for years. It's five years old this semester. I'm not going to talk about DS106. I told myself I'm not. I realized last night I don't have a presentation if I don't talk about DS106. It is my life. So I decided to think about what DS106 means as a longer kind of narrative of the work I've done for the last ten years. And I'll start by saying this with a confession. You know, I feel bad about this, but don't hate me. I don't really, not, I don't do OER in any kind of important way. In fact, a lot of my work has been directly against the idea of institutionalizing it as a resource that lives on as a licensed good. In fact, the way in which OER is imagined in America for me is far more like a factory of textbooks which politically, I believe, is being used to undermine state funding for higher ed. You put an idea of the OER, we'll fund the OER, look how much money we're saving students, and with the left hand what they're doing is they're cutting budgets across the states for higher ed. So it's tricky for me. And the idea that OER is so directly linked to the financial nature of higher ed in the US at least takes any amount of sacredness from what we're doing in relationship to teaching and learning away from me. It becomes a financial equation. And I'm not interested in that. I don't necessarily mean that it's wrong or that other people can't or that maybe some people are getting things they can't afford because once I start saying, I don't want to give people textbooks for free, I look rotten, right? That's not my idea. So I'm not going to be talking about OER in any kind of formalized way. In fact, I'm going to be talking about something I think isn't being talked about but might be very interesting. It's this notion of open educational infrastructure. It's kind of what I'm interested in because if I don't, I'm not a fan of the OER system as it exists now, at least in the US, the idea of open educational resources become equated with textbooks, well then it's time to look at what an alternative model would be. And one of the kind of frames I've been thinking about this is if you don't like the existing system, and this comes from Black Flag guitarist Greg In, well then build your own. And this got me thinking about my presentation. In fact, there's been a couple of signposts along the last ten years that have really informed some of the work I've been a part of. One of them is this comment which was actually left on my blog September 7, 2007 by Brian Lamb quoting George Siemens, if that isn't complicated enough, I don't know. But that's what it is. What George Siemens said was this, and it's one of those moments in my career when I was like, that is absolutely a vision that we should be trying to imagine and build. And the key point is this. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS would go, or VLE for you all, would go into creating flexible and easy to use syndication buses or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using small pieces approach. Things like student management tools, grade books. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools? The idea that IT might reimagine itself entirely to become a series of hubs that would aggregate and bring data that students and faculty use together. Really remarkable thought for me. Well, that led me on a kind of a long process with many other people of actually having an LMS or a VLE at our institution but actively building systems outside of it or apart from it. Not always in direct conflict with them, but things like alternatives. And you'll see some of them here, right? I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those projects. Wordpress, which I'm sure many people in the room now have used in some way or another. Drupal, I hope you don't, only kidding. Joomla. So in 2007, after a lot of experimentation with the group at the University of Mary Washington and I was not alone, there were many of us. Jerry Sleizac, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Gardner Campbell, Patrick Asetti-Murray-John, Jerry Sleizac, if I really didn't say him. And we started building stuff. One of the early things we built was a WordPress multi-site. WordPress multi-site is like a WordPress instance, but you can have innumerable blogs as part of it. So every student at Mary Washington, at least this is how we imagined it, we'd get their own publishing space. And in 2006, 2007, to have a place to publish on the web as part of your university was not trivial, right? Did you have the whole tilde space experience here, right? Where you would get a tilde space and you'd upload files and it would take you like three hours to figure out how to FTP and you'd change some HTML. Well, when these systems came along, it changed things. It allowed us to actually give our entire community a publishing platform. And again, UMW was not alone. The University of British Columbia was doing the same thing as was Penn State. They were building infrastructure for their community to share the work they were doing as part of their teaching learning. And then John Beasley Murray and Brian Land did what I still think is probably the purest, most beautiful example of open education I've yet to see. They said, you know what? We spent thousands of dollars on infrastructure, servers, right? When we have probably the single greatest open educational tool the world has ever known, Wikipedia. Why don't we have students working together as part of a semester-long class on Latin American literature, building and shaping and researching various articles. John Beasley Murray did this. He had three of his students' articles were featured as part of Wikipedia. They were featured articles during the semester. Tens of thousands of students saw it a month, hundreds of thousands saw it a year. This became a model. The infrastructure was being supported by Wikipedia and you had this kind of brilliant model. The students, I think, at the end of the semester were bedraggled and beat up and intensely worked. But think about this sense of reward to know that your work and your research was informing and helping hundreds of thousands of people find information about the stuff you were researching. A remarkable model. Purely open infrastructure, open technology supported by faculty and students. Now, this is a model that didn't go away. 2013, you have a group, FemTechNet, who's a distributed group within the states of feminists who are thinking radically about how technology shapes the way in which we think about questions of gender, sexuality, identity, race. And they started building frames around this, what they call wiki storming. And so they'll go into Wikipedia articles and they'll kind of intervene and start kind of reframing some of those narratives that maybe are so specifically framed around questions of masculinity and challenging some of those. And this has got all sorts of press in the states, you know, whether this is a good or a bad thing. It has a kind of radical intervention of technology and infrastructure that was free and open and available to anybody. The other thing that was remarkable for me, and this is 2008, so the work we did with WordPress Multisite at Mer-Washington, UBC, Penn State, other places, I thought it was amazing. I thought it was going to catch on. I've always feel that. I'm very polyam. I always feel like, where are there people? It's just about to explode. Everyone says, you know, no, it's not, but I still believe that today. You'll see, I still believe that. I said, hey, you know what, let me do a little experiment. There's this new plug-in for WordPress Multisite that allows you to entirely clone your instance, plug-ins, themes, everything on the same box for any school that wanted it. So I tried it. Longwood College, which was another public school in Virginia, or Longwood University, was interested. So I said, look, 895, go buy a domain. And I'll set you up your entire infrastructure. It took us basically two years to build in 45 minutes. This was the first example for me of this notion of virtualized infrastructure. Why couldn't every university around Virginia have something like this, easily kind of framed and cloned so that we could share our resources? Right? And for me, it just seemed logical. Longwood took it up. Eventually it fell by the wayside, no one cared. I understand, I still believed. 2010, 2011, this thing happened. This beautiful, glorious, crazy thing. DS106. DS stands for digital storytelling. 106 was the actual course number. So it was actually officially CPSC 106. And that's important because as this class started to gain a notoriety and infamy, my university insisted that I don't call it DS106, that I call it CPSC 106, to distinguish what was happening online from the institutional course, which I think is pretty interesting. DS106 was kind of a refuge for many of us. We had played, we had built these infrastructure, and one of the things that was still kind of, for us, I think a question is, we did this where we built a WordPress multi-site that other people could host and build on, but we haven't yet proved that other faculty and students could manage their own space, their own domains, their own applications. That's the ultimate vision. It's not that I manage your application that you manage it. So we started playing with that. This is DS106 the site as it looked in 2011, right? You'll notice these are posts. That's a post from Orgy Waters, which is interesting. There's Alavine, there's myself. If you were to click on this link, you wouldn't stay on the DS106 site. Like George Siemens referred to, you would go out to the post that's on my domain in my site. But what's interesting here is everything that's pulled in here is archived in DS106. Right now this WordPress site has over 65,000 posts from the last five years archived of everything everybody did. This still lives in my own personal namespace, right? Or anyone else's. So that was one piece of infrastructure. Have all the students who take DS106 get their own domain in web hosting and build their spaces and syndicate it through simple RSS into the frame. Right? It's still a community. People are still juxtaposed next to each other, but you have these individual spaces. The next bit that was designed by Martha Burdus, I think it's brilliant. It's still one of my favorite elements of DS106. And you'll notice now we're using WordPress to build infrastructure for a course. WordPress open source, highly hackable. This is what is called the DS106 assignment bank. And Martha and I fight about this a little bit, but she designed it, so she has to find a word. But my mind was this was inspired to some great degree by Ravelry. And I'll talk about that in a second. And Frances Bell and I talked a little bit about Ravelry already. But let's talk about DS106 as an open educational quote unquote repository. As of yesterday, there were 983 student, faculty, open web participants who created 983 assignments. And 11,304 examples of people who did those assignments. Many of which are tutorials for other people to show them how to do it. All done on the open web. Using the DS106 assignment bank to aggregate it. Now, this is what it would look like. I'm going to use this example because I'm fascinated by it and I discovered this last night. You'll know it's hard to read. So far 39 people did a read poster. Now, I don't know if the read posters made it over here. In the 80s, they would have celebrities and political figures in the US have like a read. So it would say read and it would have a political figure or a celebrity with their favorite book. And it was a campaign to get people to read again. Because we stopped reading in America. I don't know if you knew this for like 10 years, no one read. I'm kidding. Anyways, so this actual assignment alone has 2,712 visits, just this assignment. And it was done 39 times. So I found that kind of interesting. So I went to it last night. And this is obviously the assignment. There's a little description of what to do. And there's two tags here. The sign assignments and design assignments 1089. You tag your blog with those and wherever you blog that assignment, it will feed into this space. And Alan Levine, who is with Martha Burtis, another architect of this entire infrastructure, added a little line here. If your blog is not connected to DS106, you can add your example directly. What we call drive by assignments. People come, they do an assignment, bam. They drop it off. It could be on Inger, it could be on Flickr, wherever. And that happened a ton with this. So I'm going to go to this assignment right now. I'm going to jump onto the web. Scary place, but I'm going to do it. Now watch. Here are the people who did this assignment. And I started clicking on some of them. And many of these right here are primary school kids. When your class can be taken by primary school kids as a higher ed, something's happening weird, right? They all created these great read posters. And I said, you know, this is wild. And a student at Mary Washington did it too. So if I click here, and this is great, this student has her own site. You get to see how it works. I made a Donald Trump read poster. It separates us from the animals assuming this is the animal, I guess. I don't know. It's a very complex interpretation. But actually what you start to get now is an infrastructure framed by this notion of syndication that George Seaman has talked about in a comment that Brian Lam left in 2007. So by the time we got to DS 106, it was raucous and amazing and all of that. And the infrastructure was people, absolutely. But we found a way to start linking some of those people in intelligent, thoughtful ways that gave them their content to take with them over the course of time. If I can get back into this presentation seamlessly. I must be a professional. Okay, now. See, I am a little cocky. Is that how you say it? So look, DS 106. We'll talk about Grand Potter in a second. But I need a second. Because it's actually cool. I did this all last night. Click on this button. DS 106 was not only an infrastructure, although we'll talk about the infrastructure. DS 106 radio, which we're on right now, was actually built as an alternative to Blackboard Illuminate. The idea was you can't teach DS 106 and then go in Blackboard Illuminate. So what happened is every course event that happened was framed through the radio. But that was just the beginning of it. One of the things that was cool, and I want to take a side here, is the actual visual was created by a student. So the student got into it. Students were into DS 106 radio for a while. And Andrew Olingham built or designed the logo that is still used. But that doesn't end there, right? And I'm going to take a little bit of an aside about one of the network effects of DS 106. So here's my small side. It goes back to Andrew Olingham. Andrew Olingham still has his website from DS 106. I remember a couple of years after the course, because he did this in 2011, he had done this infographic as part of the class. And it's really interesting. It compares the idea of boatload versus buttload versus shitload. It's an infographic. This is a boatload. It's a lot of whiskey, right? 54 million gallons of whiskey. A buttload is 126 gallons, and a shitload is not even .26 gallons. So when we say shitload, what he's trying to say is, it has no real meaning. You really want to say boatload. This got picked up on Reddit. He had 70,000 views in a day. People love this. You might hate it and say, why did we ask this guy to come talk, and you're right. But this network effect of this simple infographic that a student did was really part of the power of this infrastructure. It was porous. It went all over the web. It imagined itself not as part of a unilateral system. But let's go back to Grant Potter. I digress. I looked for a picture of Grant Potter as I was about to talk about DS106 radio, which he designed while he was in British Columbia. And I remember coming into the class that was in Virginia at the time and saying, you know what, someone in British Columbia built us a radio station. What a bizarre thing to say. And the students were like, yep, that sounds good. I was like, don't you think that's crazy? Well, I did. Image I found on the web. And I was like, oh great, and I was just going to use it and not attribute it because I hate the whole attribute thing, but I know you should do it. But anyway, I got interested. And I said, oh, you know what, let me see who did it because there's a lot of DS106 art. So I went to the next page and it brought me to this, which was the DS106 Daily Create. The DS106 Daily Create was an idea that spawned from something that Alan Levine turned us on to in DS106 when it first started. And the idea was the Daily Shoot. I don't know if any of you remember it. The Daily Shoot was a site where you had one, basically two photographers who gave a prop make a picture of orange or take a picture with lines or do something from an X angle. And you would do it, people would tag it on Flickr and it would all go to that site until you could see what you had done but also in kind of juxtaposition to what everything else had done and you kind of learned by osmosis. So three years after DS106 was created, there was a prompt on the Daily Create because we created the Daily Create because the Daily Shoot went away. And so here was the prompt. Here were all the people who did it and I found this. So wait, I might actually be able to find who did it. And lo and behold, it was David Cernagham, right? But think about the infrastructure here. Google has indexed all of these resources that point back to sites like Flickr or Twitter or YouTube but we also still have archive in DS106. DS106 mimics the architecture of the web. It's why it's powerful, it's why it worked. It's why most of the content and work students have done from five years ago is still there. I think that's a powerful notion not only of teaching and learning and participatory culture but also of archiving. Now here's where I think it's the architecture of DS106 for me goes to another level. Alan Levine and I were teaching this course at Meriwashington in 2012. So this is the second full year of the course or the third but the second it was online. And we had two students who said, you know what, there's so much work in this community that inspires me. I want to feature some of it. So Alan was like, well, you can. Just build a site, we'll put it as part of DS106. They did, that was their final project, they called it Inspire and they had built part of the infrastructure for the class. This was done by Rachel McGurk and Eileen McKenna. It was really kind of for us a kind of astounding moment. One of the things that people did was sign this, I hope this works because I think this is a fascinating moment. They would go in, they would share the thing that inspired them, they would write about it and then they would link. This particular, this was a silent video trailer and this was in 2013, 2012 and you'll know here it got picked up from what I understand is an extremely reputable news source, the mail online. And we got, picked up basically by a tabloid the work the students were doing. So think about coming in to class and students actually going through and seeing that folks in English. Now it doesn't matter whether it's the Guardian of the Daily Mail to us, our ATMs have a British accent. That's got cachet. So if it's a British publication it's got cachet, students are like they love us, we're big in Britain. A lot of places of big in Japan, DS106 was big in Britain. So we got featured in the Daily Mail and I'm sorry Josie, I don't mean that, I apologize, but this was kind of another crazy network effect of being out there online. And what's so cool about it is it's infrastructure that was built and designed by students. So the students were officially building the course at this point. We could do this because we were using open source simple tools like WordPress. But it wasn't all open source simple tools. Some of it was Twitter. We did the kind of, what I thought was radical but again, no one seemed to care. We had a tweet built by a student of everything that we ever put on DS106 radio. All the music, all the life because what happened is Grant Potter not only built this but then he built a drop box where anyone could upload whatever they wanted. So DS106 radio became an actual cultural hub where people were sharing the music and the stuff that they loved. Some of it they created. I remember one of the remarkable moments on DS106 radio for me was hearing the crickets in Melbourne, Australia thanks to Rowan Peter, Peter Rowan who was going through his summer while we were in our winter. And he would go and narrate the sounds of Australia from where he was. And it didn't stop there. Infrastructure was one of our first moments where as a group at UMW we started to play with live video using Amazon Web Services. We built an entire infrastructure where the students built an entire infrastructure in Minecraft at the time. Right? We didn't regulate this at all. We also did a kind of alternative reality game called The Summer of Oblivion and I won't go into this here because it's kind of weird but it was this whole framework around the idea of using the online infrastructure and the online frame to completely rethink what a course could be. What happens if your faculty member is not only made up but goes missing and your students take over the class. And all of this in terms of infrastructure we're kind of still I know that Martin Hoxley is using Wirecast which we used during DS106 to stream this out online. Hi mom. I know that John Johnston a DS106 is right now using not only edge of talk radio but DS106 radio to broadcast this out. To a raucous million people. There's millions. There's one or two or three. There was a joke with DS106 radio and Brian Lamb and I kind of while we were doing this at first were like nobody's listening and that was kind of the idea that nobody is listening but we are as a community and so the infrastructure as much as it was built on some of these open source tools and it was it started to become a community and some would argue a cult. Right? And that's DS106 as a model to say hey wait students and faculty can manage their own spaces and aggregate them in and the syndication hub that George Siemens is talking about is not crazy. I revisited a talk in 2013 given by John Newdell in 2007 called the disruptive nature of technology if you have an hour I highly recommend you listen to it. It's on the web you can find it and it was given at edge of cause in Denver or in Colorado somewhere and what he argues here is really interesting he argues the idea that infrastructure as we know it right now will change and how it will change is that more and more of the digital bits as people produce we will have an own within our own repository what he calls a digital token but it's not just going to be our grades or our registration information it's going to be our medical records it's going to be our police records it's going to be the finger painting we did in third grade but it's also going to be the graduation picture it's going to be a digital repository of all the artifacts we have as individuals and he used this individual Gordon Bell who's a Microsoft researcher who kind of framed this idea of digital life bits and what Gordon Bell has done and has been doing for decades as he's been digitizing all of the data connected with his life all of his emails he's been storing all of his images all of his documents everything for easy access right? and he saw it as the kind of the realization of the Vannevere Bush Memex where you can have all these documents at your fingertips at any time and I was really taken by this idea because the extension of everything we did in DS106 was infrastructure was to give that infrastructure to students and faculty at Mary Washington and so we did in 2012 DS106 which allowed me to meet Tim Owens who came on to work with us at Mary Washington who built Domain of One's Own it was basically our in-house hosting we built web hosting and gave everyone who was interested at Mary Washington their own domain in web hosting and we said you know what? don't use WordPress multi-site and have our domain like JimGroom.Umblogs.org get your own space and when we pitched it it went like this this is really innovative but I'm afraid we can't consider it because it's never been done before and we did the research it hadn't but in fact we had a really cool interim CIO we said you know what? call it a pilot, here's $10,000 see what you can do 2012 we piloted 400 faculty and students to do this very thing and it was a success it worked the technology and the infrastructure had been simple enough that people could build and manage their own spaces they couldn't have done that maybe in 2005 some good examples are Sue Fernsebner, a history professor built one of the definitive resources on the Chinese typing civil war if you search for this on Google this becomes the third hit after Wikipedia and another site and it's interesting she used all open tools but the students created the resource and they all can point to it as part of the research the other thing that was really compelling to me was a librarian who was basically in the process of writing it's a life's work a magnum opus the history of the early history of the Cubs which is a baseball team from Chicago and he did all this work on paper he started using his site called WrigleyIvy.com to share it and he has gotten not only invites to speak all over the world he's gotten places to publish he's become a kind of phenom as a result of the work he's simply putting on the web and is searchable through his own domain which I'm just struck by and he's a completely humble, cool, awesome person whose work should be out there now we start to move into this moment of reclaim and I'm going to talk a little bit about what reclaim might mean but I got to give a nod during the whole DS-106 time 2011-2014 there was an individual at CUNY Boon Gorgas who became one of the most important word press developers for buddy press on the web who started talking about reclaiming all of his stuff from these various third party institutions and organizations and services and he called it project reclaim and he did this for about three or four years got himself a Twitter, got himself a Gmail got himself everything and blogged it Darcy Norman and Doug Belchaw also did that alongside him but 2013 was a really enjoy him, he was there he was there MIT Hackathon I met these two characters in my life in some ways and I mean that in a very good way Ken Lane and Audrey Waters came in talking about the work we were doing with the main of one's own talking about the work they were doing about rethinking notions of data and privacy and APIs talking about the new oil being data and the way in which Audrey framed this as a very pointed thoughtful articulation of a criticism of Silicon Valley and the hype and hysteria and the way in which Ken framed an alternative vision using these application application interfaces which actually led us to a very different point and I think it's the trajectory we find ourselves on now and I'm really excited about it because again it's reinforced by this notion of infrastructure this notion of the personal API Tom Woodward who's an instructional technologist at Virginia Commonwealth University took the advice of Ken and Audrey and he started to go through all of his different applications and spaces online everything he had and he started to inventory it and the idea of the personal API was it's a very simple thing make a spreadsheet of all the different applications you're a part of and articulate them like what do you use where is your data and the point is to try and bring everything back into your own frame that doesn't mean avoid these applications but that means understand an inventory where your digital life bits are around the web and so this is a post from yesterday that Tom Woodward is starting to go on this process so you had this idea of the personal but then you had Alan Levine and Brian Lamb at TRU University in Canada starting to play with what I thought was a really fascinating idea inspired in some ways by Tom Woodward this idea of the splot and I'm not sure what splot means could mean the smallest possible learning online tool it could mean several other things but what it is is it's a very simple tool that does one thing allows faculty to use a form to post images to post a writing prompt to post x to post y to post z and the idea is it's not a system it's a one singular tool using something like WordPress to create and using a clone tool in an infrastructure like cPanel you can create it for as many faculty as you want seamlessly and Brian Lamb has talked about this we had a discussion about this just the other day about the power of this to get people thinking about these tools without worrying about once you get to a WordPress do I use tags, do I use categories what's a post, what's a page sometimes technologists like me assume too much the other thing that I think is really compelling is the work Grant Potter and Brian Lamb are doing right now with open infrastructure in relationship to virtualization this right here is part of British Columbia's open educator network and what they're using is they're using an application called sandstorm and sandstorm using various sign-in tools like your Google account I think you can do github your email but they're also trying to single sign-on through Shibboleth right now allows you to access to a wide range of applications right whether it be WordPress Ghost which is another blogging platform Davros et cetera you can do all of these things as you see fit and this is also happening with people like Tony Hearst who's experimenting with this notion of the cloud and containers and I know I'm running out of time so I will stop shortly but I want to think for a second we're in the moment where what web publishing was in 2005 we could be with infrastructure right now we could actually be in a space where as easy it was to get people a blog and rethink how they can publish online it may be as easy to give people control and power over their own spaces and that's for me the kind of I was talking about this with Tony Hearst yesterday and I was like is that a crazy concept to use things like containers to use things like sandstorm to reimagine how we personally manage our own data and I'm really in the mindset that it's not a crazy idea at all sorry about that that's it, thank you I didn't want to stop I think we've got things just far apart from the questions something like that something like this for us who need the door to help it's such a wonderful position to have that so what you're talking about is very scary to a lot of people in institutions but you know it's got huge potential and you know how many like talk tips that we did maybe no I do, I think that's a good question and I think to be clear we didn't always have CIO support for many years we did this on the outskirts of the actual I think the IT organisation was happy that we weren't bothering them with the support but we got an 895 a month account from Bluehost to start building out some of these infrastructures and I think it's my belief and I kind of I messed it up there at the end but with some of these tools right now like digital ocean or docker and the ability to imagine infrastructure that could scale for fairly affordable is kind of the next wave of web hosting right, I mean what we had with Cpanel in 2003 2004, 2005 we're starting to see it's becoming more user friendly and accessible and it's not limited just to PHP applications you have a whole range of applications you can choose from so I think if I was going to give anyone advice I mean the 10 bucks a month it might cost for experimenting with a digital ocean account and seeing what some of that hits and what some of that does it now note I'm speaking from the perspective of a technologist right I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who spends their time thinking about building infrastructure for faculty and students to learn on and to experiment with so if you're in that situation and even if you don't have support centrally I don't think there's anything stopping you from going on one of these services and start imagining what that infrastructure would build just the other day I played with this resource Linode which is a virtual server to build with a predefined script a WordPress multi-site that could scale for thousands of people and someone had built that it was just a couple of clicks to actually make that possible so at this point I think doing that would be just finding the people on the place to have space to experiment I don't think financially it would be ruinous whether or not someone's watching you so closely that they would just stop it is another question that's a bigger cultural problem that you probably would still have to work around and like I said yesterday maybe get yelled at or ask for forgiveness is it still the right thing to be encouraging students to get onto the web and start sharing parts themselves on the web and at the stage I wouldn't recommend that people actually went on Twitter at all because it's horrible and I'm just actually wondering where the next step that kind of interaction is if those platforms are different than the expected the other second question is west socks the socks I will not answer I'll pretend I never heard that I'll tell you this is part of a really good question and I think it gets to again to that point that Seaman's made and that Udell makes in that video in that podcast is I would rather be in a situation and known which is an open source application that plays with this idea that when you're working for my class or you're doing something and I'm like I need you to publish X, Y and Z to this I'm not telling you what tools to use I'm not telling you to use Twitter I'm not telling you to use Facebook I'm not telling you to use YouTube I'm telling you to log into your domain and those tools you use would be buttons like you do use Facebook you do use Twitter even if I didn't tell you to you do use delicious no one uses delicious anymore but you get the idea right and you would post into that and you would send it to the places you wanted it to live as well as to maybe a course aggregation hub so it wouldn't be me actually defining where that those tools that you used and the two studies that I wasn't able to talk about one from ELI and one from surf here in the Netherlands was about rethinking this infrastructure that would allow that very thing to happen using APIs and using an interface that would disaggregate and abstract any one tool from the process of publishing which I think gets a lot closer to John Udell's vision of what it means for us to have a kind of series of digital life bits that we manage and take with us over time at the point where I'm not telling someone to use Twitter or someone to use X, Y and Z as the point where I think we've become post system for how we teach and learn and I'm excited for that moment but I really I didn't talk about it extensively but Twitter was an amazing platform for DS106 amazing the hashtag DS106 is still as strong as it's ever been and it's a way for me and for students to fold time and space back upon each other so that you might have taken this course in 2011 but still be a part of it in 2016 that's powerful so whatever happens in this new space I hope it imagines some of the affordances that social media still provides and Alavine says this and he says it really, really well I want to be able to manage and archive my own spaces but I also still want to go to those dance halls whether it's Facebook or Twitter and be with people and hang out and be part of a social frame so I can see what happens but also thinking and so for me the idea I know you want me to stop talking, I'm sorry but the idea is the only thing that will scale on the web is the individual and our idea of our work that we take with us that we decide and have power over and share out broadly but still we ultimately become the long term maintainer of our archive and of our teaching and of our learning and of our process and so that's for me why the blog still has so much power and why I still have struggles with people like my call field who imagine the garden and the wiki as a kind of clean better alternative to the web I don't necessarily think he's wrong but I have a very hard time feeling as passionate about that as I do about my own narrative over time Great Thank you very much Thank you Thank you It's a great privilege to have you and please take this as well and if we could all thank Jim please Thank you very much