 All right. Welcome back. We're going to go ahead and get started and I'm not going to talk for very long because there are some really talented people up here that are going to kind of introduce what we're doing. But before that I just wanted to say welcome back to the end of the conference. We've been talking for a while about this documentary which is kind of in some ways our final keynote and it's you all. It's your voice. So we hope that you've had a great couple of days with us. I definitely have. Thank you first and foremost to UMW for letting us use this space. It's been fantastic and it's just been so fun to catch up with you all. So we're going to kick it off with this final I guess session of the conference and then afterwards there will be some time for some more Q&A and just discussion around what we're going to watch. So Taylor? Yeah I'm really excited to kind of show what we've all been working on here and you know everyone who participated in the interviews you know I kind of think of like it's the time's person of the year is everyone in this keynote I think. But yeah I'm excited and I wanted to thank both Meredith and Pilot and also specifically Noah and Amanda on the reclaim team who also helped with some of the clipping up of stuff and then you know I had to throw it in the final timeline. So I also want to give a warning that there probably are mistakes in here that's just and just major shout out to Amanda who is not with us she's in she's in New York right now and she was editing from far away virtually. So major shout out to Amanda there. So but just really excited for this and we can get started or do we want to keep talking does not matter let's do it. I think we can get started. So you're trying to make a documentary during an event and then publish produce it release it at the end of the event. This is a brilliant example of constraint based design. So Antonio welcome. Thank you. How did you get into the open life? I don't actually remember but you may be well the cause of it. So yes you guys from the DTLT and all that movement that sprang were very influential. I am thinking and I have to admit that I copied I mean ruthlessly from you guys and other people too. The MOOC from Siemens and Downs I registered for that and that was also another mind blowing experience for me. I love that. I love the way the class was the class the course was being organized. I love the websites that were done to center the course around and then that that also meant and had sense only on an open web. So I was taught how to hand code HTML in 1995 or 96. My undergraduate program was one that was called professional writing. So this was again in the 90s tech boom in Montreal and so you're being trained for technical writing, copy editing, translation all the kind of very practical writing things. So it was like the I could do an English degree but also make my mom really happy. I was doing something practical and we had a course that we had to take at the time called desktop publishing because this was when desktop publishing like frame maker and page maker were actually really complex. It was in the transition to what you see is what you get and so the the instructor is an adjunct professor who worked as a professional in the field came in on the first day class and say the software is getting easier and easier but further along they go and so we don't need 15 weeks on frame maker. It's like it's a waste of time. He's like so I'll teach you the basics I'll get you where you need to be but if you really want to differentiate yourself out there as a freelancer or anything like that you need to know how to code in html. So he's like we'll spend the first part of the course frame maker and the second part of the course I'm going to teach you how to code in html. Okay, right? We're going up like all right sure html and so we did learn how to hand code in html. We found the little one by one gif because this was like not even CSS so if you wanted to space things out there's a one by one gif clear gif that was available but everyone used right yeah yeah so but that's how you did spacing and so I ended up putting our student newspaper online um you know we got tilde spaces and we were thinking back to to Martha talking about that at uh in Oklahoma and um and yeah I just ended up you know really our university also uh was very well for for engineering and so the year that I got there they had just uh put in um what was then considered high-speed internet all throughout residence the residence halls and so you were connected to the web right at high speeds there was no this was you know it was it was uh mine going right because you could be on the ride you didn't have to wait for dial-up and so just really started getting involved I you know moved away from home moved away from all of my friends um uh another friend of mine started a um what started as a yahoo news group and a newsletter eventually did he turn it into a website and so I'd say I was blogging before before blogging was a thing I wrote for like his online zine that you can find in the internet archives it's very embarrassing how I started my career as you know instructional designer instructional technologist I used to be a high school teacher and I started my career in the 90s in the Canadian Arctic right up on the on the Arctic coast and it was at a time when the internet was just coming to the Canadian Arctic and uh I was teaching high school there in a small community school but I was also the vice principal of the school so I was hinted to rules going on and uh when the internet first came in through satellite relay people was like wow we have this new resource what are how are we going to use it are we going to use and so the natural place for the community was the school so I I started working with technology at that time and became basically the resource person for the district so for the for that and I started getting more and more involved less involved in some of the administration stuff in the school and more involved in some how this internet was going to impact schooling and over to over years and times I moved around I lived overseas in China I did the same kind of thing in China at a school a system there taught some media based courses but also brought in a portfolio system and to a school system there and when I moved back to Canada I put so okay now I'm going to formalize I don't know what that rule is but I'm going to formalize my career as an educator around the use of technology and in teaching and learning spaces so that's how I that's how the internet kind of pulled me out of the classroom I guess and into that role as a technologist and a designer my entry point into the open web was essentially just wanting to make things for myself and not actually have to be bent but do the bending specifically for hardware and software so a lot of my work is a combination of both and being able to customize it specifically for a vision I think it's important and I think that the open web and those theologies support that I got involved in the open web and the open movement as student an undergraduate student frustrated with the high cost of textbooks and looking at the world around me and having access to an unlimited amount of information on the web instantly at no cost and yet there was the cognitive dissonance of being charged expensive textbooks that you know were old out of day print and trying to reconcile how those two things existed in the same world and this was the early 2000s and since then I've worked with students across the country to advocate for more affordable textbooks for open educational resources I now work a lot in policy advancing open policies and funding for open educational resources on college campuses oh gosh I don't even remember now I mean early days 1993 94 I was in grad school and I was freelancing doing some QA and copy editing for Penguin Electronic working on some of their CD-ROM book editions and my boss at the time Julie Hansen who is now the COO of Babel the online language the online language learning anyway she came into work one day and sort of handed me some HTML something I can't even remember it was like a sheet of paper telling me a little bit about how HTML worked and she said I need you to build this a website and I said you you need me to do what and she said look here's a here's a thing I'm going to show you it's really cool and so she loaded up a web page and she did view source and she showed me what HTML looked like live and she's like this makes that and make us a website and I did and it was the most revelatory moment just realizing that this web thing could actually be like manipulated and controlled and I could make web pages and it didn't take it didn't take like fancy equipment and it didn't take a fast connection and it it just took a text editor and me poking around finding out what I can find out about how to make these web pages so it started then and you know as you heard this morning you know I was an early adopter ever since right picked up blogging relatively early picked up other kinds of things and just loved that sense of being able to make something new I first encountered the open web through two pathways I would say the first was the CUNY Academic Commons I had been looking to do some course blogging with my students and the comments just kind of popped up and I was able to you know interact with a bunch of great people and it led to me being part of the early version of the team that worked on the Commons and I did some outreach at the time but the other one was I found DS106 and particularly if I'm DS106 radio first and was engaging with a lot of people via Twitter and DS106 radio and then I think the summer of oblivion was probably the one of the funniest experiences and enjoyable experiences been interacting people and making art with them and building an online narrative right this story was tremendous fun and I think I don't remember you know that was like probably 2012 I think I guess I remember vividly the first time I saw web page a friend of mine who was a librarian showed me a web page that was an X files fan page so this would have been 1995 maybe and and then I started looking into it and I just grew in my head I was like how does this oh I see I see and I got very excited and I'd already been teaching with technology at that point using technology that's on primitive now I should be teaching one class teaching my students Unix file permission so they could trade files back and forth and then I taught myself HTML and making web pages and I've just been going great guns ever since in fact in 1997 I landed my first faculty job in part because I had experience with the web even though it wasn't part of my formal job description in part because there were just hundreds of PhDs in literature running around for any given job but actually experience with the web was relatively small at the time I came from a family of early adopters my dad was very fascinated with this is in the 80s he was always buying the newest and best gadgets and my older brother who's about seven years older than me he built his own machine and he was very into coding and so it was like computers were a lot around when I was young and then when Brian and I got married in 1993 we had a small inheritance from my from my grandmother and it was enough to either buy a really good computer or a really bad car and we chose the really good computer and one of the things the really good computer had was a really good modem so we were able to log into the university you know bulletin board servers and that kind of thing um you know so there was all the all of the bulletin boards and then the comp you serve aol all of that um started becoming you know a thing so in 1995 I was uh pregnant with my daughter and this is the reason I remember it the first time I'd ever heard the the phrase worldwide web was in 1995 while I was pregnant and we were sitting around talking about the newest coolest stuff and uh so it wasn't too long later that um uh my work started being like well everybody needs an email address and uh everybody needs this and that and then they wanted me to do some html work because I was the only one who I was the youngest person in the office and I was the only one who had ever used email I had to check my boss's email is basically what I had to do and um so yeah I mean since then um I haven't done any Christmas shopping in person since 1997 because I love and despise Christmas shopping and choice.com was a thing in 1997. I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley it was my last year of graduate school and there was a workshop on using Netscape Composer to build web pages it was the fall of 1998 and I went to that workshop and it changed my life I think I stayed up that whole weekend just putting my dissertation online um uh bibliographies everything that I could think of to share that could be useful to someone in the world and that's still how I see the open web I put all my work online and the content development I do all happens through blogs and blogging I'm still blogging and I think I first got into the open web in the late 90s I had just gotten a teaching job in Mexico and um it was actually my first time having ready access to what was then passing for high-speed internet and I was a new teacher I'd never taught before I was in a new country so I quickly realized that the internet was an incredible source of um lesson plans and and teachers sharing their experiences and their ideas in the classroom in different places so that was an incredible resource and a lot of my students were doing websites and things like that so I quickly learned that it was a fun assignment and I was living in a relatively isolated part of Mexico at least other major urban centers and to my home and all these other places but there was this beginning of this thing where you could connect your students with people around the world and set them up and it was all free and it was easy so you know just the ability to um to to get access to that information for free and to connect to things and gather them and then have my students connecting with people was something I saw you know really early on um two comp size students that I lived with when I was in my undergraduate at university I think we were the first year that got email um and they introduced me to mudrooms and talkers and so pre and next gate navigator was the browser and but that was a way of connecting to people beyond my university and you know into a kind of other world uh all like green screen text very old school stuff I think I went to a nightly conference in valve for eight no it was um where was it someone in the end and this guy named Brian Alexander came out and he introduced twitter to attend me so nightly was the national institute technology mobile education it was kind of a spin off to get you know small liberal arts colleges started with you know understanding educational technology and you know bringing into teaching and learning research on campuses so this this dude named Brian Alexander who is nobody to me at the time just a big fluffy beard is on the stage and says hey look at this watch this so I said okay I gotta create a twitter account and you know of course I've already known about the internet I was building websites for 10 years prior um but I got on twitter and then I guess just through whatever you know I started seeing these tweets by you know the people who eventually that I came to know like our movie and Jim Green our course who else was on there um uh what's his name George Seaman so just a bunch of Canadians but I was also following people in France because I was in France there for five years and so eventually it just kind of came down to this like DS 106 hashtag and I realized that that was a really neat community that was coming out and at the same time I mean Wikipedia was really taking off and they had to like bandit mobiles like whoa like this is some like you know alchemist handbook you know people are going to get burned at the stake so I started you know clicking on links and their links just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper and you know search engines were coming out I got on the flicker I was taking lots of pictures and so all of a sudden I realized there was this whole and this thing like pl personal learning environment personal learning networks is those words are coming out and I realized that you know I was like like these different nodes were being started you know like this whole web is being spun up this personal web or as Gardner would call it the personal cyber infrastructure right and it was really fascinating you know so I could find and it was really exciting there was a lot of energy and people started creating stuff and you know make art it was really fun that's kind of where I came into the open web my experience of the web that was as a woman on the web wasn't pleasant even in those early mudrooms there were sexual harassment there was stalking it was kind of it's always been a little bit creepy so I think that stuff may not be better but there's more awareness of it now so there's maybe not much I miss about the web that was because it wasn't always a super comfortable place to be what has grown since then is would be projects like say like Wikipedia where you've had time for sort of a cumulative process of of building wisdom through the contributions of many many community members so you've got resources built up now that are very I mean not not that everything has been resolved to believe documented or more or explained by any means but you but there's that you know the the amount of of good information and content is just it's it's it's staggering um you know I know in a sense that from a from a purest point of view maybe we might want to idealize or even romanticize the early web prior to the big platforms you know prior prior to social media but again I mean there's always trade-offs you know like being you know being able to learn things from watching a series of youtube videos I know with some of our work like with the open pedagogy notebook there are spaces where educators are sharing their practices connecting with each other building on each other's ideas and ways that is happening much faster and can be amplified much more much further um you know I think about projects like the open educational resources university task that really is kind of leading the way with a robust suite of open ed tech that doesn't have people compromise the ethics of what they're trying to do in order to attain some sort of more efficient goal um so there's there's quite a lot but I have great hopes based on on the trajectory of where things are going but I think connection amplification and being able to kind of break outside of where we're working individually is a huge part of that a particular story was one of my courses and the hurricane Maria in 2017 because the hurricane and the situation that happened after the hurricane in Puerto Rico was so dire and so devastating that um together with our living we decided to open up um a podcast and it was I mean a really fun podcast because we had almost no a fixed uh schedule or frequency so we did um um an episode and then more than a week passed without us noticing and etc but it was very much fun and I remember recording the first uh episodes of that podcast uh in the the the real aftermath of the hurricane so when my university was still without any form of electrical power and uh or perhaps it well it had a couple of generators so it was a very nice thing and then Alan had this great idea of breaching the the web with the atomic world and he began spreading the idea that people sent me and my students postcards from all over the world and so we were soon um showered by by the postcard that we received I still remember one from a great woman Parisa an Iranian woman living in Japan uh then teaching English in Japan was amazing that story was really amazing and she sent me an avalanche of little bookmarks done by her students in terms of um encouragement for us to to keep on and so that was such a beautiful story that I I do remember and and that story wouldn't have happened in a in a constrained world there are many many more voices online the barrier to to entry the barrier to participation and the ability to build community and claim our presence is is quite different now still not unproblematic um still doesn't mean people aren't a target um maybe more so now um but in you know our current political climate um but certainly you know the kinds of people who were online when I first got online it was a narrow demographic it was people who had access to computing technology it was people who were had a level of technical sophistication and that's not the case much anymore all the different kinds of accessibility now um like especially something like um good auto captions um for video uh good ocr to get text out of images um good translate services so that people don't have to be putting stuff online in a commonly spoken language you know they can put stuff online in their language with hopes that all kinds of people around the world would be able to access it um so not just accessibility in that sort of legalistic sense of of what you're supposed to do as a teacher but accessibility in the biggest broadest sense of of that total sharing that can happen online and that needs to happen across languages across modalities of of how you access information online visual oral whatever the great work that software developers for WordPress and others the developer communities out there they're making it easier for non-technical people to accomplish goals they couldn't have done in the past you know um you know just being able to build a really beautiful site that can tell a story with multimedia has gotten a lot easier and we couldn't do that before you know there was a lot of tinkering and a lot of you know the more technical the geeks had to figure that stuff out so i like the fact that you know pretty much you know content that i create on my mobile device is is pretty pretty good you know audio video etc so that that's something that um i think is a great accomplishment the web has gotten very good at making our lives easy and over time that's one of the things that i've just continued to notice as the web has evolved that everything just gets so easy to find what you're looking for to connect with people the the programs become more intuitive how to navigate menus how to find settings it's just all become so much easier and i think that's come at a cost though because it's i guess the forces that are driving those tools that have become so easy to use are designing them not necessarily to make our lives easier but to extract our data and build a business around that something that the past web did not have that i think the present web has is ease of use right um you know it was always really difficult to understand how to do things and um you had to really search those sources out whether that be educational like going to college for something um joining trade groups joining joining homebrew clubs those types of things um now you know you're you're a good 10 to 20 youtube videos away from mastering something and i think there's a lot of power in that i think that there is um a lot of power that is actually given back um to the consumers of content um and from a positive positivist perspective um i think that's one of the best things about the web is being able to educate yourself to make really amazing cool things so i think the thing that inspires me about the web and where we're going forward is more around there's enough tools and community around building the web that i can now point to things that other people have made in my classroom and i can just tell my students we're going to build that and 10 years ago the tool set surrounding the web were not well defined the communities weren't there but you can actually start it's transferable to give someone else the shoulders to stand on of giants it used to just be hey there's a browser suite hey we can search for things on the web suite but now it's actually here's the tools used to build those things and you can click a button or you can run a single command in a terminal prompt and you have that capability and we've got enough documentation you've got a lot of automation with tools like chat gpt that i can then ask like how the hell do i use this and you end up getting a decent enough response you can get started my classroom teaching from three years ago is completely transformed because of the standardization and stabilization of those lower levels i still keep looking for the same stuff i've been excited about since i first started doing stuff on the internet i just get so excited when i see people working whether with students or people in the community where the affordances of online technology help people find a voice to articulate things to gather knowledge to learn and then share back something that maybe benefits somebody else somewhere else and that basic dynamic of seeing people share their learning or sharing their passion online in a unique idiosyncratic voice or collective voice that they're part of is super exciting to me and i still anytime i see a project that empowers students or community members to do cool stuff and share it i get excited well i think for me it's just fascinating because of the engineering that keeps taking place i mean i think about it in terms of you know the way the trajectory that silicon valley is on right now will likely have you know ai generated essays submitted by students that are evaluated by ai driven grading platforms for faculty which is terribly efficient but there's zero education happening in there so so for me i'm you know nostalgic about the elements of learning that are intensely human that sense of connection and and belonging and i and think part of that is you know what can happen in a classroom even without any technology that that allows education to live up to its potential to have to student to have students feel like they belong to be able to flourish and for educators to really personalize their learning that's not driven by an algorithm that that is driven by the humanity there is a movement um if you've ever looked at yesterweb that's more like the old school uh blog chains where um and i'm looking for that sort of coming back and also again with the discords with creating our own communities but they're not such world silos because this is one of the things i hate about like facebook because of the way the algorithms work it will hide things from you that might be really good to know whereas you know the yesterweb is more like old school web surfing where it's like oh that's an interesting topic i'll i'll click on that and read that for a long time and i'm hoping we're going to see more of that and definitely the diy aesthetic um you know many of the uh sites have gotten like youtube used to be delightful in that it was everybody was an amateur and nobody knew what they were doing and i'm waiting for that new thing because everybody on youtube is terribly polished and and they all have like wonderful production values blah blah blah and i'm really looking for that you know sort of old school scrappy garage i whip this together in my mom's basement type stuff you know what i want to see in the future is a a return to the values of the open web um of a growing inclusivity and a growing sense of access and a growing emphasis on on real sociality in the ways that we connect with one another across the web will we see that i mean i think i think we're we're at another fork in the road we're at a place where it's a real possibility um and so i i think it's going to take it's going to take a kind of conviction and it's going to take um a lot of collaboration and mutual support and um i mean what else would i say i think it's going to take a lot of determination to get us there um but i'm really really hoping that the future of the web brings together a lot of what we know now that we didn't know in 2003 um but also with that innovative spirit of 2003 that can lead us in some new directions um i think one possibility is that we will maintain our the indie web idea and carry that forward and i'll become a kind of cultural artifact um that may or may not be economically viable but it's maintained by love i think it's possible that we will either see a a web that is aimed at climate change to have as small a footprint as possible which means a retro web a smaller web or we may see a web that is actually designed to help us be more resilient let me just this morning um taking my wife showed me this news about the Canadian terrible terrible fires in Nova Scotia in Quebec and how the smoke from that has been drifting down each in the seaboard so actually i went looking on on the web to find some information about this there's a great uh air quality site maintained by the US government pulled that down so more of that site and i think it's the kind of thing that we may see more of that maybe be maintained by crowds supporting and crowdsourcing as well another possibility is that the web shrinks drastically and it could shrink because of physical damages such as by solar storms or by human storms it could be cut back by our failure to grapple with climate change it could also be just regulative existence either through formal regulation or through people's attitudes we talked last night in one keynote about the idea of rewilding the web and one possibility is that we wild it through abandonment and we have lots of abandoned websites so those are some those are possibilities i don't like that possibility but as a futurist i i have to show people the wide range of possibilities where is the web going i i don't know and i want to say that's an optimistic thing like i don't think there's any kind of inevitableism about say you know facebook taking over the internet you know that they certainly have ambitions in that regard but it's an open question i'm not going to make predictions i just know i'm going to make my opinions known as i see things happening and and also just to you know we vote with our digital feet about where we go where we spend our time where we devote our efforts and that's why i'm so glad for this conference because i meet people who are doing really fantastic work that i want to support and i want to spread the word and this place to find out about it well i'd probably take a more erin schwarz schwarzian view that everything should just be out there we have these standards they're great for communication transport these protocols exist why are we locking them back down or assuming that the big four are in control of our destiny we all have access to them maybe blogging will be back but certainly the creativity is not going to go away i think that that's that's the important parts that people will continue to create things i think federation will add some back of the human back into some of these you know web platforms and you know teaching and learning and living on the web i mean i'm seeing glimmers of the quote unquote ban getting back together again like it's really nice to be here in particular and engage people haven't engaged in a while um and just finding ways to interact and build things together i've been lucky to build a couple things like for you guys you know um and that was that was like a glimmer of you know hope for me and like and to see it used by so many people and really it work um in a in a in a satisfying way for those people that were using the the conference site and so if that's the starting point i just hope more things like that you know you know see people get back and start making things together again and you know ds 106 for life right i still i'm just still amazed at the idea of the the idea of the web you know going back again i i get inspired just thinking about you know jim just mentioned that day wine burgers idea small pieces loosely joined just kind of that um um you know that that that we had the system where you can you can discover so many things and just learning how to um like i said how to how to how to understand and parse a url and explaining that to students and saying this is this is what this all means and if you understand a little bit of this um it can you know you can it can be so helpful for you and connecting to other people and to ideas and um so i'm not a very good um prognosticator in terms of you know what what is the web going to become um i don't know i i mean i hope it there will still be places where where people can make it that what what they want to yeah congratulations taylor it is now time for the q and a portion um i think we'll just sort of take turns running mics out and then answering questions and things like that but we did it i should say too i mean uh the q and a here i guess i don't know we the three of us didn't talk about this um but i'm kind of hoping what did you say yeah probably um but i'm kind of hoping i'm thinking of this as a q and a at stuff you just watched right so feel i feel free to direct questions or pose questions i guess not everyone's here who is in the video some folks had to leave early but at the room is kind of what i'm thinking um but yeah thoughts or stuff will run mics out to you it's on a quick thought which is that if you guys are going to do a you know a transcript to go with this it would be so cool to get a word cloud out of it because there were words and themes that just came up over and over again i think would be really beautiful to see that visualized just like an in one shot of all the ways that connect share discover um came up yeah i think that's a great idea and i think too the a lot of the conversations that we had outside of what we just saw like in through throughout the whole interview like i i just asked the questions pilot was next to me well typing away on all the transcripts of like what everybody was saying so i think even just taking like a word cloud from your notes pilot like that would be so cool i may have a ai tool that can take a transcript yeah that is going to whisper we can do that that is going to be objectively higher quality than doing a word cloud out of my notes but i appreciate the thought questions or notes or this isn't so much a question i i already noted some mistakes i'm missing some titles in there how hard was it to do like you know it'd be inch i'm sure people know like this was all taken over the last some of it this morning right over the last day and a half two days what was your process like how did you all figure out how to do because i kind of said i want to do a documentary right figure it out so like what did you all do what is it you do here um um yeah so i mean meredith kind of kept a little bit right yeah yeah so we kind of just as we were planning the rundown of how we were gonna like even just all of reclaim like kind of put this on like for the last couple of days we just it just ended up that the three of us were kind of more the documentary folks and pilot was really instrumental in like setting up the the shot every time just to make sure that like the person was sitting in the right spot the camera was pointed the right way they were looking in the right direction um i just asked questions like everybody came up with the questions i kind of introduced everything to continue the conversation and facilitate to make it seem more like a conversation than like i'm literally sitting at sitting and talking to you about questions so it was really cool yeah and we did have uh jim asked some questions for folks and lauren did as well and i don't know that i'm missing anybody but meredith did the majority of them and it is kind of interesting from my perspective as the editor it was uh easier to edit the ones where we had fallen into a rhythm a little bit um because it was easier for me to go like oh i'm looking for something like this that's probably the third question asked you know yeah i have two specific things that i wanted to say which is um to what you were saying meredith about just asking questions i could as easily say oh i was just taking notes and taylor i i don't think you would downplay your role but i know that a time or two you've said that your job was made substantially easier by um amanda and noa trimming clips by my notes and the idea of that you were just pulling it all into the timeline which is simply not true um and i think that it's very easy for us as a team to say oh i was i was just doing this other people did the real work um uh our last interviews finished two hours before we were set to start talking here uh so this was an amazing team effort um and i don't want anyone to sell themselves short the other thing is that in terms of team effort and people contributing at the start uh last week basically we put out a call in discord that said if anyone wants to be interviewed for the documentary we'd love to have you please share your stories and we got two signups and we are very very thankful uh to lee and to brian olandike for signing up ahead of time but we were so scared on monday morning that that was going to be it and it would have been a great documentary but it would have been about 40 minutes back to back of lee and brian um i think everyone but the director's cut the director's cut um but uh the reclaim hosting version throughout um monday and then throughout tuesday and even this morning we had people saying you know what actually i do want to be part of this to the point where on monday and last week we were saying all right we'll have half hour interview sessions and then we'll talk to everybody for a half hour by midday yesterday we had to cut them down to 15 minutes um i was nervous about whether we'd be able to get everybody in um so i wanted to say thank you to everybody who signed up to be interviewed because that was great and it felt very scary monday morning yeah and a couple couple other notes it mentioned before but amanda and noa caught up clips separately so we kind of round tripped some of these through google drive and but uh we did find uh that takes a lot of uploading and downloading i really knew that but um but that was really helpful for me and then um pilot is a known prolific note taker in the reclaim internally at reclaim and so that was great too so i could look at these like surprisingly complete notes and with time stamps so i could go yeah that sounds cool zoom to that time code in the clip and find it other questions this isn't so much a question as it is a comment i just wanted to say that it was uh as as someone kind of new to the space one thing you notice as i don't know if it's yeah just being new to the space there are a lot of connections that have already been made by folks here and that you know if everyone's happy to see each other and so it was really nice to see some of the people on the screen in them talk about their experiences and then kind of get a little bit of the history so i know and it's not lost on anyone here i'm sure that this is going to be like a really great artifact about the folks who are in the spaces and stuff so i would appreciate it seeing that thanks so much and i think that was uh part of the core idea uh jim mentioned earlier that he uh said he wanted a documentary and told us to figure it out uh with the idea of we were all really excited to have all of you here and to preserve this moment um and the conversations that came out of it and what you were thinking one of the interview questions that we asked that mostly didn't make it in and it probably might if we do a director's cut was what did you think of the event what are you feeling what are the conversations here sparked and that was really nice to the the answers that we got were really great there and i just want to like riff off of that too like with the jim's creative restraint of like documentary do it um sort of sort of attitude was really fun um because that's kind of where the best stuff comes from is those creative restraints and it's really cool to see everybody's perspective because we have a wide range of ages here from like my first interaction was 2013 literally in jim's freshman seminar class of mary washington that's like kind of one of my core memories of the internet and then hearing stories from 1995 1993 like all sorts of like like years ranging throughout the whole thing is really cool too so like that that to me was like really really helpful and good perspective for for everything um i just i wanted to first just commend you guys because that was incredible and just as a comment about what people were saying in general i i particularly really enjoyed the section on the web that was in hearing so such variety of origin stories um from everybody in this room all of you know all of us kind of share a lot in terms of i think our vision and our experiences but the stories of how we came to this place um there's just there's a lot of really rich variety there which i think was important too right that there isn't a single path that's gotten us where we are and then the last thing i'll say is that if you are going to do a director's cut i think it would be really cool to because i know a lot of the sessions were recorded to um to pull in um some of especially from our keynotes and some of our the other sessions because there was just some really great um connections between what people were saying in those interviews and what we've been hearing for the last three days um so which is you know not surprising but but it would be really neat to see that even more i'm because you guys don't have a lot to do over there and you pulled into discord was the idea of people have been taking photos and maybe some of those photos have been shared on twitter or mastodon and maybe they haven't but the idea of bringing those in and seeing people together seeing um photos taken of the presentations that have happened the keynotes taking that footage like you were talking about and what other aspects of the conference we could bring in or we make a separate documentary about the conference that's absolutely and that that is a good option for reclaim open online in a couple weeks so good plug good plug all right yeah i was just going to say basically what martha did because there were lots of moments where there were very specific references to a moment in a keynote or a talk or a session if there's any way to cut that in i think that would really enrich the experience of watching this for people who weren't here we do have a couple of minutes left and there's some of you here who've been here for a while dtlt faculty academy style you know you are one of the things we used to do at faculty academy that i loved is at the end of the session we would just basically shout out something over the course of the conference someone whatever that meant something to them so we have three mics here anyone who wants to share and just say you know what that was pretty cool like i'll go first like alex masters talking about the cloud and his like talking about was five petabytes and a thousand pounds of hardware that took the first picture of the black hole and his excitement explaining that really made my day and so i want to thank him for coming and being so awesome and i wonder if anyone else had a similar experience over the course of the last three days that they want to share i really appreciate your bringing that back from faculty academy i hadn't thought about that in a really long time i just want to give a shout out to my um former colleagues here at umw and jerry and in particular shannon and cartlyn who did an incredible presentation about what they've been doing in the dkc for the last four years which you know not surprisingly is near and dear to my heart but it's just you know it's like one of those it's a little bit poignant because you're like wow i didn't i think of that but also it's just like incredible to see and and what was most important about it for me in having worked at the dkc was how it was so centered on our students and on the ways in which the work of our students can drive this in directions that we can't even anticipate and if if we can remember that i think it can bring so much joy to this work even at times when things can feel a little bit a little bit difficult a little bit hard to find hope at times so i just that that meant a lot to me thank you guys driving through so in addition to what martha said about the the current umw crew i want to thank reclaim hosting crew and as jim and i are talking and watching this video thinking about the new generation of not dtlt crew but kind of you know that that seed that was dtlt and and seeing what you folks do and and basically reclaim hosting making us feel comfortable at this conference and and it brings out emotion it brings out happiness when you can share the stuff in this open way and it's what reclaim open i think is is all about is is sharing and and a conference where people make each other comfortable so thank you reclaim for me it's a small thing but laura laura walked in the door and for the last three years or i think our online communities have been how we've maintained ourselves through that lockdown period and laura and i spent a lot of time talking about folklore your interest my interest um and we didn't know each other we're going to be here you'd seen my name on the program thought i was going to be dialing in remotely and yeah play me away i just wanted to shout out everybody who stuck around for karaoke last night i i needed communal singing on a level i didn't even fully comprehend and i really really knew i needed it so thank you all so much for that wonderful uh evening of of uh raising our voices um i thought it was really cool to kind of come in as sort of an outsider not really knowing about the web that you all grew up with and me kind of living in my own echo chamber of i'm so i mean not but like i've i've i've had such an echo chamber of of using the web and the tools that i thought that people use for development and what i thought the web was used for and so just to see an entirely different perspective i mean i came in uh the first day and i was like wow this is weird i was not expecting like what is going on nobody's speaking my language but by the end of it i really appreciate the ability to see a totally different perspective on what i thought i knew something about and i i don't um and then i guess to shout out a couple specific examples i was talking to brian olandyke and i loved hearing about how he incorporates his students at penn state into his own project so he starts off um by teaching them how to be a web developer and then by the end of it he's like now you work for me now you get to build something and have an impact on your community and i think having a community building a community that you can have students to have an impact in that's how you get lasting um participation from students that you build a lasting community um and then i'd also like to shout out uh mr brian alexander for his wonderful talk today and i was just blown away by being able to see some things that i knew about um and just i don't know i i really enjoyed that that speech but thank you everybody um and yeah so i want to um just quickly um mention first of all how delightful it was to run into a bunch of familiar faces that i haven't gotten to see in person or even at zoom events necessarily in the last i don't know how it feels like it's been 10 years but i know it really hasn't um it was really great to make contact with a bunch of people that that you know i feel like i've known online forever and to get to to come back together in person but that's it's also been great getting to meet new people and in the realm of new people i want to shout out molly um who yesterday um i did not make it as long as karaoke alas um but i was completely collapsing at dinner i was like headed for my bed directly and she was like oh come on come to the arcade just for a few minutes and got me there and i am so glad she did um because i can imagine like not having gotten to see that in person so thank you molly i'm sorry i'll pass that along to her um i as as somebody who is um long in the community in that kind of opposite way it was just so nice both this was my home for a while too but literally and figuratively being able to come back and remembering it's like uh these are my people right new people old people that i've known but this is this conference has always been really special because of sitting in the intersection of educational technology digital pedagogy um teaching and learning it's an awkward space within the academy in terms of a place to be and to go and to have people who speak who speak the same language and um approach these issues i don't want to say think all the same way but approach issues with that openness of the open web there really is in a space for that um to my mind other than here and so i really just i am thankful for this event and thankful for all of you because it is it does feel like coming home and that's really nice so thank you um i don't see them here but i wanted to give a special shout out to ruth and amy from being tim uh but uh i have a special place in my heart for librarians libraries that's kind of where i got my after i graduated start back at mary washington um and librarians always seem to bear bring to bear a different kind of perspective that is think important in our spaces that that long they they seem to think longer term maybe than some of us about like where is this going and they um that that the richness of like librarianship and the history there um i appreciate them coming even though i think they they were worried like well like we're just doing our little thing over here but i'm immediately stealing so many the frameworks that they shared so i appreciate them so maybe just a couple of things one is and i appreciate you're already talking about karaoke because that was going to be one of mine but i'm probably sort of midway through the group like you know in terms of when i got to know many of the people in this community but of course still meeting even more and for me one of the things i treasured about this community is you know brian lamb is somebody who's been a hero of mine for a very long time and he is exceptionally not just self-deprecating but unbelievably humble and authentic and just a beautiful beautiful human being but he is illustrative to me of many members of this community because i have no doubt that many of you are heroes to people in your networks in your institutions and the fact that you're you're you're not these arrogant pieces of shit means so damn much you know it meant it it made the community accessible to me number of years ago i imagine it makes it accessible to other people who are who are meeting you today so what i wanted to convey was just my deep deep gratitude for you know embodying these values and not being these brilliant you know exceptional geniuses who are you know exist in my discipline exist in many disciplines and are completely unapproachable you know inhumane organisms you know this is not what what this community is and that's what makes this special to me is you take seriously that responsibility of building and continuing and caretaking and stewarding and then on a small subsection of that i also want to thank kathleen and brian who had not met in person before and who i was trying to restrain my sort of fanboy behavior around but thank you for both signing my copies of your books just really quickly people anticipated some of the things i wanted to say i wanted to thank you for food the food here was delicious and as as a vegan i really appreciated that i could eat and then last night we had a fantastic dinner so this was ably organized where pilot go just there you are ably organized by pilot and a great conversation and delicious food and that means a lot food is crucial for community bonding and i really appreciate that all of you made this all possible i want to give a shout out to the reclaim infrastructure and support team uh chris and noah and uh gal tom normally of course we support we submit help tickets uh by email but i had the thrill this warning of actually getting support in person because i had a user who had a website who was throwing an error and which was throwing an error i couldn't quite uh nail it down myself but uh so i just took the laptop out there to the registration desk and there they were and pilot brings me the laptop back in about five minutes it got fixed so um you know the support has just been great of course all along so it was just a special pleasure to experience it in person um i just want to thank jim for this idea right here um he's leaving out the part where we always cried when we passed that microphone around and talked about you know the things that we did faculty academy was always like a big we were we were seeing basically the work that we did made real right and it's so simple to just circle the drain some days right that you need these kinds of things and see what others have done and hear them talk about it with uh other people that love what you're doing because it gives you the strength you need to go and do it tomorrow when we'll be missing this right that's like there's something to that right that's what i i have a quick one literally happened half an hour ago um bringing it back to my dkc roots martha helps me with my wedding website i was having an issue with element four and she originally introduced me to element four back as i was a student so that was a full circle moment for me i don't think i'm the only learning technologist that came out of about a three-year period that was just chaotic and miserable and debilitating and dangerous honestly and um i came here and a number of people i talked to were coming here you know said you know i hope i'm going to rediscover something and i definitely felt things just even a certain excitement when people were showing me things or just that sense of connection and it was honestly the first day i i was really spaced out because it's like i'm in a room full of people here who you know we we have different ways of approaching things different interests but there's a certain set of core shared values that i'm not used to being around and honestly i found it just completely disoriented at first but everyone was so sweet i just want to echo what andy said too this conference is so flawlessly put together right from the high level programming stuff amazing keynotes really good programming every session i went to was strong so thank you to every session i went to every person i'm sure gave me something and and then the the actual on the ground logistics the people that were running the cameras the people that were running the food the people that were at the desk it's like it was flawless and just other what else it felt like we're in a machine it felt like we're in a real community and it's a lot like how you do your business it was great to see some faces of people i've harassed over tickets over the last years that too i could say a lot more but yeah it's just huge gratitude to all of you and i i'm both exhausted and energized right now and i'll be interested to see if i will either be a new birth or i'm going to go into some kind of catatonic oppression that i'll never come out of when i get home i have to thank lauren hanks for all of that too all of that coordination that she's done over the last six months eight months however long as we've been planning and i do have to say she made this super cool schedule personalized for all of us that reclaimed so that's how we knew where we were supposed to be when we were supposed to be but everything lauren's done to help coordinate and even make it a collaborative space for all of reclaimed help plan and make this come together so thank you lauren well i think with that we have you know hit every way we had the checklist of what we used to do versus what we did and i want to thank those people who tolerated some of our indulgence around what was what is and what will be um but i also just want to thank again everybody who came you all brought your a game you all participated you were in it we were in it together it was a wonderful three days and uh i look forward to the next time we all cross paths thank you all again for coming