 All right, so I'm here to talk to you about the tech bar. Tech bar is a group of students. I call them the best students on campus. And that group of students helps other students and faculty and staff with domains or digital projects, really anything. We have something called the Writing Center on campus. And probably a lot of you have writing centers on your campuses. We call this is our Digital Writing Center. So students come to us for consultations. Faculty come to us for consultations. And then our wonderful students take those consultations. And I shouldn't say this, but this is me. I am. He's technically not supposed to say that. That's a secret. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so obvious communications. So this all started back in 2017 before I was there, back when Taylor was there. You'll see somebody reoccurring in a lot of photos. Taylor will be in many of these photos. Taylor used to work at St. Orbit too. But we had the sandbox. And it was a makerspace plus a place that people came for consultations. Those consultations were we video work, really. And we didn't necessarily have a built out staff of students to handle those interactions. Did some hardware checkouts for certain programs as well. And 3D printing, and we had a sewing machine. But that kind of bore out the tech bar as we wanted it to be. So this is what we thought it was going to be like. We wanted our students, our tech bar students, to gain competencies in certain things, like the G Suite mapping, video creation, all those things. We wanted them to be able to sell themselves to future employers and then help other students as well with certain things. So we knew that we wanted students in that role to help with walk-ins, some appointments. And we wanted those students and the tech bar in general to give trainings to larger community groups, groups of faculty, groups of students, things like that. Like I mentioned before, similar to a writing center, we wanted this to be a technical writing center where people came to us, probably, hopefully, on a repeat basis for consultation. We wanted there to be a tech show space, kind of like a classroom of the future kind of a thing potentially. And the student outreach, we want them to be able to explain. We wanted our students to be able to explain their competencies, their technical attitude in a community setting as well. And then for a co-curricular side, we wanted to do badges so that we could sell that on residence. So nuts and bolts of what we thought it was going to be. One staff supervisor, that was me for a little bit, five to tech bar consultants. And then we wanted it to be located in a place where people could walk up and get help, kind of like a service desk or a help desk. Essentially, look at a hub of campus where students already are, soft seating to facilitate those consultations. Some tech dependencies that we saw at the time, domain of one's own, some other software licensing, like WeVideo as well, and then collaborative technology, like a Google Jamboard. An example of a competency, this is a G Suite competency. We wanted to have levels of our competencies. And I think these might be from, I wasn't working there at the time, but I think these might have been from Google itself. But then it became something different. So our initial tagline was serving up digital skills and competencies, kind of like a bar serves up drinks for people. So we were located in an essential hub of campus. Funny enough, not a whole lot of students go to that centrally located hub of campus unless they need to, where the bursts are, the registrar, those offices are. And it, again, was a service desk. So people came up with issues a lot of the time, and even still today, a lot of the time that people come to us, it's for issues that are not consultations. It's more of a technical issue, like how do I install Word on my computer, things like that. We were open Monday through Friday from 1 to 8 PM, and students came for help with Google applications. WeVideo helped, and helping our edTPI students. So our first dabbling with Domain of One's own was from our arts department. This wasn't Domain of One's own yet, though. So we purchased individual domains from Reclaim, but they, again, it wasn't, our Domain of One's own instance is called Night Domains. These were not Night Domain sites yet. Our tech bar supervisor of the time worked with faculty members to present services during class time. So, hey, we can help you with B video. We can help you with these other things. And those were all relationships built by grassroots, essentially. And then we took a tour back in 2017 of this place, University of Mary Washington, Yellenburg College in Brunmar. And we learned a few things after we bounced ideas off of those institutions, or people at those institutions. We learned that the tech bar students need to be located near us. That's something that we learned from here. The difficulty with where the tech bar was, we were in that student information and services building, but that was across the courtyard from where ITS sat. My team is in ITS, our information technology. So there was a gap, kind of an issue with the geography there. And we acknowledged that that was an issue. And then we wanted, from Yellenburg College, we learned that students should be able to articulate their technical competencies. And then they should be able to help other students articulate their technical competencies. And then we based the whole tech bar after that point on the Brunmar framework, which I have an appendix of later. All the art, by the way, was created by students. So whenever we changed to a different era, we changed to a different theme. We started to what we'll call a tech bar 2.0. We moved the tech bar into the office area where we sit. Super helpful for overhearing conversations, really anything. There's really easy access to ask people, whoever they might be, questions. We still took walk-in appointments, still do take walk-in appointments. And we were still piloting at that time domains with personal reclaimed hosting accounts. Current logistics. You have one staff supervisor where you saw a need for a student lead. So that's generally a student, an upper class student, but it could be, it may not be. That student probably has been working with us for a number of years. And they have to reapply for that job when they still have five to six tech bar consultants. And we're, again, in that staff supervisor's desk area, along with the rest of our team, our academic technology team. And we're really oriented more for consultation and support, but we still do do some support. Our tech dependencies are domain of one zone, other software. We have collaborative technology, again, and appointment scheduling software. Expanded support. So we support mapping and G Suite. Now, let's change to Google Workspace. And the way that we drove people to us was by going out into class buildings and interacting with faculty members. It's really the best way that we found to get people to understand that we can help them out with things. We started with offering up digital, or the ability to do digital, I can't think of the word, but digital portfolios, there we go, for our English and communications program and to kind of win into the computer science realm too. And then we started to create training for our tech bar consultants to hopefully get them to have some of those badges and technical competencies. And we hosted events. It's Taylor's favorite. I use this a lot of presentations, my favorite. Yeah, Taylor has a great presentation about called wide domains. And that's, I think, the second image of that. Can I say a quick question? Yeah. That's what you were talking about earlier about going out. So you have this physical space, the tech bar, where people can come to you. But then you were going out to them to drive traffic to that place? Or was that just another alternate space of support? Yeah, we go out to individual faculty members to drive them to think about using our services as part of their curriculum. So maybe we saw an English faculty who had a class. And at the end of his class, he had all of his students submit a physical portfolio of all the assets that the students wrote that semester. So we saw that. And then we said, you might want to consider submitting these electronically. And a lot of that takes years in class buildings to hear what's going on and being out in the community as much as possible. So you have to know what's going on by, I guess, overhearing things, being there a lot of the time. So. And so once that he was doing that on domains, I assume, then he would have his students go to the tech bar. Yeah, it can either become a requirement of the project to come to the tech bar. Some of our English faculty or other humanities faculty make it a requirement of a student to go to the writing center for a paper. That's a requirement of some professors to go to the tech bar to make an appointment for a consultation. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'll stop talking about the whole thing. I'm curious about the importance of the physical space. Yeah. The other space right now that's slightly off of main campus, but we have a satellite space that we're about to start brainstorming on better ways to use it. And this would be a great way of doing that. But I'm starting to wonder, is it effective to have that physical space? Or should we just dispersing, where there's trouble, we'll be there, kind of thing? Yeah. The physical space is really helpful for me because it allows, I'm not our domain's admin. And I honestly don't really have a whole lot to do with it anymore. But I am there, if someone has a question about, how does the certificate work? How does this part of this website function? It's really, it's nice to be able to rapidly ask questions from the student handling the consultation to Anika, who is the tech bar supervisor right now. She can ask me questions, or the student can directly ask me questions. So I know that I wasn't around back when they had the tech bar in the different building to know how well or how not well that worked. But I know that they made the change to our current physical space for a reason, to have it all consolidated into one area that our entire team resided at. So. We have kind of a drop in kind of space as well. Do you have situations where you're working with faculty, where you can actually be in bed, a student in a course, or directly in a course? So the way we're kind of doing these right now is to solicit faculty to connect a specific, we call them digital fellows, connect a fellow with a course. Sure, sure. As far as I know, we haven't done anything formally like that. We've, I'm thankful that our tech bar students are more or less great advocates for us out in the field. So we had a student who was in a computer applications, business applications class. And they were leveraging some technology that we were kind of pushing. And they were able to support some of the things that were happening in the class, during class periods that I didn't have to go up to the classroom to help support. But nothing formalized like that. Claude, do you ever run into any potential conflict in terms of kind of since the competition between student support of digital projects and professional staff support? We had occasional issues where we've got one staff member who is like, you know, this work is going to, you know, that kind of thing where it's... The scope of support is pretty limited for our students. It's expanding every single year, but it is fairly limited currently. So if a person had a question or an instructor had a question about like spinning up a shiny answer for R, let's say, that wouldn't be handled by one of our students. That would be handled by me or Annika or somebody else on my team. But if you wouldn't want me to give you a consultation about how to build a WordPress site, I would not lead you to the right place. I wouldn't do a good job with that. But our students do an incredible job with that. You wouldn't want me to tell you how to use Illustrator, for instance, but we have a few students who would be incredible resources for that. So there's pretty clear lines of support there, which I guess. So part of our goal was to be in the community, selling ourselves and promoting our services and training people how to use technology and showing people cool technology. We have a VR headset there. We have a session about open domains where people came and built websites in more of a workshop setting. And each year we have an involvement fair and SNC day where we're out in the field showing people and parents mostly what we do. So it kind of drives people to us too. So we support many things and we offer training in many things right now. These are more or less, most of them are built internally, which is pretty cool. And then we've stolen some from other places too. There's a great Python training called Python for everyone that you should all do if you haven't, if you're interested at all in Python. But we, again, created all these internally. They're housed in Google Docs with Loom Videos and Documentary for some of them as well. And then presently we track them in a spreadsheet. We have goals to track them elsewhere. Kind of get back to that Muhlenberg thing where we talk about how students can express how they actually know things. So right now we take, we have students create appointments via Bookly. If you go to techbar.domains right now, you can actually make an appointment with me. We still take walk-in appointments and virtual appointments. Those are, the virtual appointments have to be done via the scheduling software. And we support, of course, Domain of Ones own another software. And before Taylor left, he and I put together a studio space, not physically located in the same area as we are right now, but we found a path of least resistance in a different building that is actually being leveled this summer. So we have to move it again, but that's fine. But that space, I'll show you more of that in a little bit, but that space is a place for a lot of cool digital projects. So techbar studio, probably the newest thing that we've done, like I said before, our primary objectives of the studio were to, of course, free of space in our techbar. So we had all this equipment in our physical office and that wasn't really good. So we knew that we wanted it to facilitate podcasting, and video production work. This isn't professional quality, but video production, almost all of our equipment is prosumer, probably level equipment, but it's, you know, it does a really nice job, I think, and it had to be modular. So we had to be able to tear it down, put it back together without any issues. And if somebody unplugged something, pretty easy to know what was unplugged, so you can just plug it back in. But really nothing that you can mess up in that space, which is great. To use this space, you just have to make an appointment with one of our techbar consultants. And we train our consultants how to use the technology that the person wants to use. And one of our secondary objectives was to build it out as people requested software. So we knew that we wanted to do podcasting, screen casting, video production, all that stuff. But if somebody had a compelling reason that they wanted to do a full wall green screen or something like that, then we could facilitate that potentially if we could afford it at the time. And so, and because of where the space is, it's just meant to, and the space that it is right now, it's meant to be that modular and be that flexible. We wanted to make sure that we could efficiently move between the different functionality of the room. So these are some pictures of the space as it kind of was after Taylor and I initially built it out. We even proved the mic stands and the mics that are on those stands. We made those whiteboard tables pretty hard of us. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good job, Tom. Yeah, we found some tables in the classroom. This is an old high school, by the way, that this- We nailed whiteboards to them, but yeah. Yeah. And then we built the little mount for the backdrop there too. These are some pictures of it in action. Pretty interesting and cool. We have an awesome top-down camera rig for our whiteboard tables that you could use and then some C stands that you could put your lights on and your camera on if you wanted to. Really interesting. We have a screenscasting station, really nice photography taken on that black backdrop over there. I think, oh, Annika's not in there, but some roll-up green screens from Elgato that are pretty nice and cool. We have a VR computer as well in that space. All right, so getting away from the studio real quick. We put on this last academic year, I guess over our January semester, a something called Domain's Camp and I wanna just promote this real quick. If you all wanted to participate in a Domain's Camp, we are having a camp counselor session in August. Our, the actual event took place on January 10th, just an event that we showed people like visitor resident maps, things like that, how to build out your domains. And, but we want to participate with other institutions and so if you wanna stop by the art exhibits tomorrow, I'll be out there with some more information about Domain's Camp. So where are we going in the future? We're physically moving, as I told you, as I mentioned earlier, so we need to make sure that we do that right and I'm a little concerned. We have some other big initiatives, big physical building initiatives happening on campus right now, so we're not sure when that physical move will happen, but I think it'll happen in the next two years. It'll be located in the library, is where they're gonna put us in the base in the library and they wanna make that into the student hub of campus essentially. We want to refocus on our trip out east in 2017, so we kind of lost our way on the Muhlenberg concept of helping students tell you a story about their digital competencies. So how do we do that? Extracurricular transcripts, things like that. How do we facilitate that? What kind of application do we wanna use to facilitate that? And we're getting started again with campus outreach. Well, we've continued to do campus outreach, but it's kind of dwindled and fallen off since because of the pandemic. So we have some tech bar training sessions coming up in about, in just a month and we wanna keep on fostering those department inter-department relationships. We wanna enhance some of our offerings, so offering more advanced consultations for Adobe data analytics, so our Python, things like that. Focusing more on the advanced things you can do in HTML and CSS as well, would be really cool. And we wanna pilot new technologies in our studio. So I mentioned before that we build it as it's needed. So we wanna make sure that people are aware that there's a lot of flexibility for them if they come to the studio. So, and they could change it if they wanted to. And we wanna offer some class-specific workshops. So right now, Anika and our instructional designer go out into the classes and help students onboard into night domains, but we wanna do something more specific for disciplines who are doing portfolio work. Maybe kind of killing multiple birds with one stone instead of having everyone come in for a tech bar consult consultation. All right, so if anyone has any questions, I'll be, I can take them right now or we can always talk later. It doesn't really matter to me. You get about six more minutes of questions. Oh, cool, awesome. Not really a question, but we absolutely need to talk. Because I'm sitting here watching, so I run the digital knowledge center, which is basically our version of it. And we've gone through the same exact like evolution. Like watching different evolution like that, we did that, we did that one year. So we need to talk because I think it'd be useful that I put on that. But that's not really a question, but it kind of actually needs that to see that things that we struggle with are similar to the things that we thought. I think that we're kind of, maybe it's similar to the size college, maybe the same number's a little bit smaller, but like those kinds of things. So, I don't know, that's, that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. So come to the section of the Carmel and I are doing the work, too. So you can kind of see some of the stuff that we're doing. Awesome. So I may be able to answer this, but what kind of, how would you describe the training that the students get to sort of check for? And kind of ongoing professional development in that? Yeah, we, we try to make it better each year, but, or, and try to make it more formalized each year. So right now it's an opt-in kind of a thing. So we, we have a list of training most, and they're all on Google Docs and then they reference other material. And then we say, okay, when you're not taking a consultation train, basically, we say, this is your time to train. And then students get paid during that time, of course. And then they, during their one-on-ones with their supervisor, they talk about the training that they're going through. We need to do that better. We need to do that in a more formalized way. And we know that, and we need to be able to have that co-curricular transcripts that at least this would play into. If you were HTML sufficient or whatever it might be, that needs to be a badge or some way of showing that you have that competency. We don't currently do that, but that's something that we want to be able to do. Give our students. And I don't know if you guys still do this, but when folks are new, they get paired up a lot. Yes, yes. Yeah, there's a lot of pass-down knowledge from upper-classmen to lower-classmen. I don't know if you guys still do this, but what's your funding source? Is it institutional funds? Is it federal work-study students? It has to be institutional. It's institutional funds. So it started as a group out of part of it, like an actual college initiative, and then it isn't technically that anymore, but it proved its worth kind of there. Great. So now it's a remark in the brochure. And do you roll up under like the CTL or...? We're all in IT, so this is an ITS student organization. Yeah, there's differing opinions about should our teams move to the library or not. Half of us will be in our, we're in the business building in the first floor of our business building right now. So half of our team will be in that space still, even after this move, and then the service desk and our team will be off in the library. So there's a lot of differing opinions about whether or not we should do that or not. Is there other? So... We're in peer kind of versions, too. Yeah, we're in the process of building out a Center for Teaching and Learning. So, well, I don't know. We have aspirations to build out a Center for Teaching and Learning as an institution, and we want that to be adjacent. We want that to be in a similar location as us, or if the institution does. So that will be over in the library too, different floor, but same building. So we're hoping to be able to help on board instructors or help instructors rapidly. And so all the services that an instructor might need should be in the same location. And then, because most of those, a lot of those resources are similar to what a student might need, then those student services will be there, too. But our registrar versus our things like that will be in a different building. That's probably about all the time we had. Cool. Thank you so much. Yeah.