 on the air, we are live. This is Jim Ruhm and Lauren Brumfield from Reclaim Hosting coming back after a long hiatus of reclaim today, too long in fact. But it's good to be back on the airwaves. And we have a very special guest today, Lauren, don't we? Absolutely, yeah. We just met with Katie at the workshop at Skidmore College. So after hearing her story, we definitely thought that it would be a great next Reclaim Today episode. And Katie's an instructional technology specialist, a title near and dear to my personal heart. I came up with an instructional technology specialist. So when everyone says that, to something really clicks in me, and she's been working at Plymouth State for how long, Katie? Almost three years, almost a three-year mark yet. And what we wanted to know, because Lauren and I, and I think I could speak for Lauren, we were both blown away when you presented at the Skidmore workshop that just happened a little over a week ago. And we wanted to know, how did domains get started at Plymouth State? And what was your kind of, how old were the beginnings? Yeah, how and why, I think. Because I mean, you say, I hadn't realized you were there for only three years, given you had domain of one zone at Plymouth State since winter 2016, early 2017. So, yeah, how long? I'm good at weaseling my way into meetings and when I'm passionate about something, just making sure that it happens. But I think I have to owe a lot of credit to Dr. Robin DeRosa, who is obviously an icon in the open movement overall. And initially we were really looking to meet her needs in the interdisciplinary studies department. She was having her students create websites for years before we officially started domains here. And she was telling them how to buy a WordPress, hosting account and how to buy a domain name. In some cases, I think she was using her own credit card to purchase domains for people. So really on a one-off basis. And you can just imagine, if you have a few classes with 25 students each, how much of a headache that might be from semester to semester. So we were initially looking to meet Robin's needs. But once we got started, I think we really saw the value of domains for all of our students. And that's definitely something that I'm trying to push more on campus and find out what other ways can we kind of move the initiative along? Yeah, and for folks who are maybe coming in fresh here, the shared hosting accounts are great to get started for sure, but you don't really have the administrator bird's-eye view of all of the accounts that you're managing. So yeah, I remember Robin, I remember those accounts coming through in the beginning. So it's cool to now see you guys have this amazing platform to build from. And so actually- I'm sorry to interrupt, but Robin was a total trooper because when we first signed up, she was doing shared hosting. One of the IP addresses for a server, it was a new server, was getting blacklisted. So her students would not be able to tweet because that IP had been blacklisted on Twitter. And she went, what's going on? I don't think I've ever seen a faculty member so attentive to her students' needs. But it was also like, that idea of being able to run with it and also not only run with it through thick and thin, but then also be able to kind of build a community at Plymouth State. And one of the things you mentioned that I was kind of blown away is you have Robin DeRosa, a real figure of the OER movement and open practices and what that means. And then you mentioned kind of administrative leadership, which is always interesting to me with Kathie LeBlanc and the work she's been doing and writing about. So I'd love it if you said a little bit about like the, there's more, right? Absolutely, so there's definitely more. And in the past couple of years, Kathie became interested in domains. She's also recently taken on the position of our general education coordinator. So I think she's really interested in kind of moving students through the Gen Ed program here at Plymouth State, documenting their experiences and allowing them to kind of create their own path here. So Kathie for us has been another huge faculty champion. And at the Reclaim Roadshow, I shared a couple of her blog posts and this was really early on. I think it was like March or something after we had just started in January and she was posting about creating a digital identity and how she built her own website and kind of spreading the word on campus. So she would share those links to her blogs on Yammer or other platforms that we have. So... And I feel like that's such a great strategy for early adoption and growth, is finding someone in the community that can be a huge advocate. And it goes along with that peer to peer learning environment where it's one thing if you have someone managing the project come in and say, you guys should do this. But to have an actual user argue the importance of it on her website, on the platform, is super important. I think Jim is sharing his screen here. This is the work that Kathie has done. So June 2017, so still fairly early but this was so helpful to us and Kathie is not only interested in kind of the technical background of this but really the why is so important to her and to us. And that's something else that I talked about in my presentation at Skidmore, really starting with why and I have great relationships on campus but someone who's been a faculty member here for a long time and who has a lot of strong relationships and her word carries some weight. So that was so helpful to us. And I think the why is why folks stick around, finding a reason to be there and to create that loyalty. That's why it builds, I think over time. So- People like Rob and Kathie are walking the walk, right? Like writing about it on your blog, talking about your long practice, whether it's interacting on Twitter or building the resources you talk about doing it in the classroom. I mean, it is a culture and I'm always kind of struck by this and this might be out of place for me to say but I came from a similar kind of environment of small liberal arts public school which is not always the case. And we hear a lot sometimes from private schools like we don't have the resources but we can't get our faculty to do anything or our hands are tied. And I'm always blown away when folks like you, Katie, come in and just be like, you know what? Boots on the ground, I'm gonna get to work. And seeing the work you've built has been fascinating. So I wanna ask you, Lauren and I both. Yeah, so I was looking over our most recent numbers. I actually just checked the Plymouth State server this morning before we got on this call. Because like I said, you guys started early 2017. It's been primarily you with a few advocates pushing it on the ground but you guys are at almost a thousand accounts now and you just upgraded the server to make room for another 500 users over the next semester or two. So after seeing a lot of schools come through and get domain of one zone, I mean, this is pretty steady growth in the course of a year or two. And so, you know, I'm curious, Jim's curious, what are the strategies that you've adopted to create this growth? And correct me if I'm wrong but it's been mostly you pushing this with and this has kind of been only one of your responsibilities, right? Like you also managed the campus LMS as well. So, you know, how have you created this growth and continuing to push the motivation on campus? Yeah, I'm definitely a believer in kind of the boots on the ground approach. And I, you know, maybe I'm lucky that I'm an LMS administrator as well because I get to meet one on one with a lot of faculty and a lot of new faculty who might be interested in maybe pushing the boundaries a little bit. So whenever I get the opportunity, I'm talking about domains and seeing where that might fit in and not trying to push it where I think it wouldn't fit but finding the places where it does and I think focusing on that. You know, we've focused on art, marketing, English, interdisciplinary studies, there's specific majors and programs and even specific courses that I've tried to focus on and building connections there. And then once you get someone, one person in the art department, they tend to tell their friends and it's funny to say this to you. Yeah, it's a very snowy day in New England but it really has snowballs. So that's worked for us and I have had great support from, I should mention like the other staff in IT, my direct supervisor, our people in the applications and development team who give us great support so that we can do the job that we do. And then another big thing has just been actively supporting faculty and students who are using domains. So, you know- Yeah, I thought that was a- I thought that was a reputation too. Yeah, no, sorry to interrupt. I was just gonna, you kind of sparked something that I remembered from your presentation at the workshop which was making sure that your community feels welcome to come in and ask questions, you know? So I'm wondering if you could maybe speak a little bit to that and how you, you know, do you have office hours, you know, the equivalent or are you washing your inbox or how do you support your faculty? Like how does that actually logistically happen? So here at Plymouth State, we have a central help desk and all requests are directed in that, we tried to direct all requests there first and then those responsibilities are delegated. But we also have open hours for WordPress. We also have student workers who have been just essential to this whole process, writing documentation, being available to work with other students one-on-one when they need help. Have I answered some late night emails that went directly to the buying inbox? Yes, so, you know, you know how that goes. And you never, for sure. Yeah, sometimes it's necessary and I think just, you know, making sure that people feel comfortable and confident moving forward and trying new things because this is a new thing to a lot of people, especially faculty. Yeah, that's awesome. I remember during your talk and again, I was a big fan of your talk but I remember one of the things you said was, you know, you encouraged the people in the audience at Skidmore to do the class visits, to spend the time, like, you know, letting them know you can come and you'll be there. And that really resonated with me on a personal level because when we at Mary Washington were building UMW blogs and then, you know, in 2012, 2013 domain of one's own, it was all class visits. Like it was all being there and being present and letting people know that this is a new thing and you are experimenting, but you will be supported. And I think sometimes there can be an approach to something like domains and I think it's dangerous is we want it, but we don't want to support it or we don't want, like, you know, our fingerprint on it or we don't want those late 90s emails. And I understand not wanting that stuff but I often think that you can't have it both ways. You know what I mean? Yeah, and in reality, I'm not sure we did have capacity for this when we first started. We've kind of made room and used our student workers but yeah, I definitely believe in, you know, visiting classes, working one-on-one with the students even just the step of making sure that people get set up in the right way and making sure they know where to find support. We've built a ton of resources. We want people to use those before they call us, right? So having that initial face-to-face I think is it's just the first impression. Yeah, the first impression and that first user experience with where they go and find everything. I'm trying to find it because I think it's cool. I want to find the glossary, am I right, Katie? Actually, my student worker named Ryan French wrote the terminology section. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So on top of, you know, we'll pass the, you know, our clone of the community docs that we have as sort of a starter but I always love when schools kind of obviously take and adopt that and grow from it but then build out their, you know, additional resources for their community. So Jim, yeah, has shared his screen here, this glossary of terms to know for, you know, new folks. We thought it was important to pull some things out of the general support page and put them right on the Plimith Create site just as a quick reference. So yeah, a student worker made this. I'll let Jim show it. No, it's awesome. I love it. First, install a Tron, right? No, yeah, it's really helpful to understand the differences. I mean, I remember when I first saw C-Panel and interacted with C-Panel for the first time and I had no idea, you know, what the difference between a subdomain and the sub-directory was and understanding some of those terms can help you better than organize your C-Panel and that's crucial for a faculty member managing multiple courses, you know, are they gonna manage them all on subfolders or are those subdomains? And I reference that information all the time. I don't have an IT background. So, you know, I need that information too. It's been really, really helpful. But yeah, our student who built it is great. Didn't even ask him to do it, you know, that we're getting students involved and excited about this too. That's indicative to me that we're moving in the right direction. Absolutely. And so, you had mentioned earlier on that you, you know, focused on departments and courses and faculty members that where domains could work, you know, and you had mentioned the art department, for example. And I think, am I correct that Plymouth State has created templates for these specific use cases? Could you maybe speak to that and how like where you saw the need and how you created those? Because, you know, Reclaim Hosting has a few of these templates, these spots or tiny teaching tools or whatever you wanna refer to them. But, you know, it's obviously very fascinating, you know, to see domain of one's own schools then create their own templates. Yeah, and I think every school's needs will be different. Here, we do use Mahara, which is a portfolio building tool and that's used significantly in the art department and education as well. But yeah, we wanted to build our own where we kind of knew exactly what they needed. And it's typically like faculty are assessing student work or portfolios in their fourth year. And so we built WordPress templates and put them and pushed them into the WordPress installation. I don't know the technical term for all of that, but we built, you know, it's plot a couple of different art templates. We did kind of a digital resume, just a basic, you know, here's my resume and about me page for students who might just need that when they're graduating. And I think for us, that's really the next step. We really just started down that path. So I'm excited to see what else we might build in partnership with faculty. I think that's another important point. It doesn't really make sense for me to build a bunch of templates without understanding their needs. So yeah, we'll see what happens in that realm. Check in with us in a year or two, I'd say. Okay. Yeah, Jim, did you happen to have any links? I do have links. Oh boy, do I have links. I don't know what I have. Now, but rather than me just randomly go through your links, Katie, which, you know, could be inappropriate. I think we have a series of links that we talked about before because we're professionals, right, Katie? I mean, this is what we do. We're instructional technologists. So do you want me to pull up something or are you gonna? I mean, if you want to share, feel free. If you can share screen cleanly on this Google Hangout, that's fine. If not, I can do it for you. Let's see. I do have a few pulled up, but maybe let's see. See if the share works for you. Yeah, screen share is I think over on the left hand. Yeah, cool. Awesome. Yeah, because you're riffing on that stuff during the talk was awesome. Yeah, so, right, I don't think we got to see too much of this, but this is what we were talking about would be about Plymouth Create and kind of the additional documentation we made. So yeah, we've got references to FERPA, even what is open education, the terms to know, which is that glossary, and again, a student did this and I was like, oh, that was a great idea. I didn't think of that. The same student made this really creative and interesting site for a final class project in lieu of writing a final paper that would be submitted in Google and never seen again. So it's all about Tai Chi and what is flow. And I just love the way that it looks. There's a personal account of Tai Chi and flow and I feel like if we take students out of that mindset of writing a final paper and it's just about the research rather than making connections to their own lives and this personal account, and the students so funny too. But I just love to see this as one, it's just one example, but it's so powerful to me and this will live on. Right, and you can't put gifts like that in a paper. I may be a bit biased, but embedding videos and that sort of thing, but then also making it a more interactive experience for the entire class as opposed to just the professor who's maybe doing the grading. So being able to share it on a larger scale too. And there's a lot of web vernacular to it. Which I am very compelled by, like the idea that these resources they're seeing and using find their way in to their critical thinking and writing. It kind of blends the web and teaching and learning in ways that oftentimes more traditional assignments don't. Right, and when students leave here, they're not just writing papers when they're at work, right? They're interacting on the web and collaborating with other people. And I think this more closely kind of mimics what their work life will be. Well, and we probably don't even know what they'll be doing in 10 years or so. Another example is an algae database that we had a student build for her final capstone. She did this in Omega. So kind of, yeah, on these, you know, going with these examples, have these students graduated? Okay, so have they graduated? The one who built the algae website has and the one that built the Tai Chi website is still here and works for us and also wrote the glossary. Yeah, it brings up kind of a, the next topic of conversation that I wanted to touch on your migration strategies and how you handle, you know, data ownership. And maybe those are two separate conversations, but, you know, once a student graduates, you know, these are obviously wonderful resources. Does Plymouth State plan on keeping them as a university archive of work that's been created or, you know, you know, I also know schools that will terminate everything at the end of a semester on the very other extreme side. So how do you guys manage that, you know, that growth and needing to maintain storage quotas and that sort of thing while also keeping these resources after college careers are over? That is a really good question. I don't think we figured it out completely yet because we're still pretty small. We'll always be, you know, about 4,000 undergraduate students. So maybe we'll benefit from that in a way and being able to identify, you know, sites that we want to keep and even being aware of them, I think is another challenge and maybe finding some way where people can submit information about their sites to us. I know at some other schools, they've done like awards for best website in different categories and maybe doing something like that would be a good way to collect some of that work. And I think with permission, we'd like to keep a lot of those alive. Certainly the algae database is a great one. It's a database of algae that we have in a collection here at Plymouth State. So while it was a student's work, it definitely holds value and is something that we can build upon in the future. And I love to keep things just as an example anyway. So I think we'll find a way to do that. Do we have a formal process yet? Not quite. For most students, we send out an email and we say, you know, after you've graduated, we give them 30 days. And migrate here, your options. We can walk you through the process, you know, trying to be as supportive as possible but letting them know that's an option to take their content with them. Gotcha. Yeah. I saw you guys had the, like on the page that had the terms to know and everything, there was the migration options there as well, which it's nice that you, you know, highlight that right off the bat. Yeah. I also like that you kind of are like, you are Tai Chi flow too, meaning like you're pretty mellow with stuff. Like you're not like, you're kind of making it up as you go along, but it's building kind of organically that a lot of that seems to kind of reflect. Like I was really taken, I'm going to share a site that I was taken with too, actually that you showed. One is by Katie O'Leary, I think her name is. And it's going to show Rob Hansen site, but I'll talk about that second. There were two student portfolios. This one is, I think it's Katie O'Leary, that's how you put it in here. But just her art is awesome. And I can't imagine that you wouldn't have a, basically a student who did this wanting to say, you know what, I'd like to take this with me. Like I can see the value in this stuff as it reflects the work I've done, the art I have. And I just really thought that was a really great example. And I'll be using this as a really cool kind of portfolio. And this other student Rob Hansen who works in various media and you know, offers images and you know, basically descriptions of the stuff he creates. And like for me, this is a portfolio. Like this is a frame of the research, the methods, the statement and beautiful work. And sorry to interrupt. I just, I love Rob's site too, because it also shows the, you know, the process of creation. It's not just the final pieces. So it's almost more than a portfolio because it's a, you know, it's like a living, breathing, you know, blog of his process. So I thought that that was great. And I have a rock that needs a very similar, like wire mesh. So I was hoping to walk to Rob about what I've done for my rock. We'll get you in touch with Rob for sure. Yeah, students are doing amazing things. And I think it was last year, I met with the graduating BFA students to talk about their websites and offer kind of any last minute assistance they might need. And a few of them migrated their sites, I think, to reclaim. I think I mentioned I was looking at one of my old examples and his site was gone from our, you know, accounts, but it's because he had migrated his site and purchased his own domain when he graduated, which is exactly what we want to see, I think. Oh, cool. So kind of to wrap up here, you know, so without going too far over, if, you know, do you have any parting words of wisdom for maybe schools that are looking to do domain of one zone? They're interested in it, but they're maybe not sure how to just get started. You know, it's a big initiative to take on. You know, so what are your, I guess, yeah. Yeah, so I think my advice would be to start and to start with why that's kind of been my major theme. And, you know, if possible, I know we have the luxury because we're a little bit smaller being a little bit more maybe laid back and learning as we go, but I think that that approach works for this. You might not understand or fully see the potential of how domain of one zone can fit in at your institution until you get started and begin having those conversations with other faculty and staff in your community. So I know at Skidmore, I heard a lot of questions like, what about this? And we need to have this figured out before we start and, you know, yes and no. Maybe there are some things that you can figure out as you go. That's a great point. I think that there are quite a few schools that sort of get, that stop because they don't have all the answers, you know, and they don't have everything figured out, but I agree. I think that domain of one zone is, it's meant to be an exploration tool, you know, and part of that is exploring the policies and management side as well. So I mean, we can do what we can to prepare, you know, and we have quite a bit of experience in that category, but yeah, if this isn't about student agency, then let's allow it to be that and allow the students to decide what they want to deal with it. Am I right? Did you say let go? Is that, was that? I didn't say that, but yes, let's just let go a little bit. Maybe I was just interpolating that because then I started thinking about frozen and the fact that we might be able to put together a whole let it go video and like, you know, dance. It's snowing in New England. Like it could kind of be a really great ed tech musical intervention. I have a big background, Jim. You can sign me up for that project. I do like, you know, I think the quote of the day is what are your words of wisdom to just start? Of course, yeah, and also start with the why. I think that's absolutely brilliant. Like I think the one question when people come to us is it's clear who doesn't know why they're doing it and someone told them to do it and who's coming with a real reason. And that's important for us to suss out because it's not good for anyone if you're just doing it to do it. You know what I mean? Yep, agreed. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for meeting with us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I've enjoyed it very much and can't wait to see what happens next. Yeah, flame hosting is a big fan. Katie, much, much, much, much, much. Absolutely.