 Thank you for joining us for a Friday stream a little bit later than our typical time because we are joined by Suzanne Norman today who is not on the East Coast like I am. Taylor is a little bit more central. Suzanne is on the West Coast. So to make schedules work, we have it a little bit later in the day today. But that doesn't matter, you hear anyway. And we're thrilled to be talking today to Suzanne from Simon Fraser University. Suzanne, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure, I am a senior lecturer in the publishing program at Simon Fraser University, which is located in and around Vancouver in British Columbia. I'm in the publishing program, which is a program within the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology. And so we tend to have more creative style based focused courses. We have a School of Communication and the School of Contemporary Art and the School of Interactive Tech and Technology and then the publishing program. So that's where I'm coming out of. That is awesome, yeah. We have asked Suzanne to join us today because of that work that she's doing in publishing at Simon Fraser University. For those of you who haven't seen, we have published a case study at the end of January that featured a conversation that Taylor and Suzanne had about her experience using reclaimed hosting in her class, essentially asking her students to get their own shared hosting accounts so that they can work on their online presence. Suzanne, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to that decision and maybe about the course itself and the background on that? Yeah, so I guess it was close to 10 years now ago that we're looking at all the different ways publishing impacts our lives and how the students can use publishing or study publishing in a way that they're involved in the process more hands-on and more part of the whole publisher-to-reader relationship. And so we looked at this book called The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which was written by Irving Goffman, 1970s social media psychologist, I believe he was, who talked about how people present themselves to other people in real-life situations. So we thought, okay, as we move in more to an online environment for many of the publishing platforms that people are using these days, how could we reimagine Irving Goffman's book in terms of today? So we created a course, John Maxwell, he's faculty at our program as well. He and I developed this course called The Publication of Self in Everyday Life. We have posial.com, which is always up and running. And that's basically the site that holds the course. And there is no set course within Simon Fraser University that, well, let me just go back. The course is held on posial.com, which is a reclaimed hosting site. And we use that as the place where the students go to pick up all of their coursework. The only thing we use the SFU platforms for is to record grades and to have secure information on the students. We do that within SFU. Everything else is based on reclaimed hosting sites and is public. So the students then, oh, perfect. The students then start the course by registering their sites through a reclaim. That tends to be the first steep learning curve because most of them have never done anything outside of wall gardens and they tend to just go, what do I have to do here? So we have to go back to that. What do I have to do here? So we give them, you can see up on the screen there, it was like tech docs. And so we give them a step-by-step guide to reclaim and then customizing how to do child themes, that sort of thing. So that's where they start. And they go through that and that's usually the first week we ask them to get up and running. So if they're planning to drop the course, I ask them to do that right away. So we can get people in on the wait list and of course tends to have a wait list. And so they don't get behind, right? So they get their sites up and running and they're not spending three weeks later trying to get ready for their domain. And from there we go through, if you wanna look at the site again, we go through the full semester outline and every week they have a different project, a different assignment that they work on. You see in the week one, we give them a few readings and then the next week they have an assignment, do a mini assignment. And so they're basically building out their personal cyber infrastructures on a week-by-week basis. It's iterative. So the grading tends to go towards the end of the semester. There's not a lot we grade up front to keep it completely flexible. Although this semester we had a, I'll talk about that in a minute if you want, we had some feedback about we're a little too flexible. So we'll see where that goes and how we change things up. But yeah, essentially this is their sites. They then, we go through a lot about the responsibility of having your own URL, your own domain. It's not within the SFU ecosystem or environment. So it's very much their own and the big responsibility, power and responsibility thing comes into play and we go over that early on in the course that this is yours and this is it. That's, yeah, I can imagine that is, I can see you've got a lot of resources on the site to get them started and I'm sure you're also answering questions on all kinds of other ways and venues and stuff like that too. What do you do to, one of the things that I think is so fascinating about this is how A, how it's integrated throughout the course clearly and B, how that's very, it's laid out. It's right there, anyone can look at that, which I love. But I wonder kind of how, what are your students' first touch points to this? Is it like the first day they get into class and you're like, guess what? Or like, what does that look like? I said that there is a wait list and now that the course has been running for quite a few years, we do tend to get a lot of people lining up for the course. So most of them come in with a general expectation now, they know that they have to get our website up and running quickly. For those who don't, it can be a little bit of a shock because they're not easing into a course with some readings and getting up to speed. It's like, okay, you have to have your URL for next week. Okay, well, what is the URL? For some students, it's going right down to those basics. Like they're not used to, I shouldn't really put it this way, I suppose, but I mean, they're just, they're not used to having that entire domain to themselves that it deserves. And that takes a good three or four weeks to settle in. When I bring up some examples in the past of students who were one student was being sued or being threatened to be sued by someone whose recipe she had reposted and those kinds of instances, they realized, oh, right, this is mine and now I got to take all responsibility for it. So I think those little moments come into play throughout the semester. And having said that, I mean, we don't leave them hanging in the wind either. We do guide them and provide resources. As you said, in the case of the student who was reposting a recipe, we talked to other faculty in law and they gave us a quick and dirty on recipes can't be copyrighted and things like that. So now we have a really robust copyright section, a module or week that I do a lecture on and also throughout the semester. If there are things that are posted, students might come to me and say, well, you want us to do a mashup? Is that legal? And so what can I do? And so we tread that fine line between fair dealing in Canada, fair use in the state. About what you're using for educational purposes and what you're using for commercial purposes. And in this case, because the students have their own URLs and their own, there's an argument to be made that it's more commercial, if you will, rather than within SFU, but it isn't. It's still all part of their coursework. What they choose to do with it after they finish the course is another matter. Sure, yeah. I think there's no really better way for especially a student in an undergrad or a graduate program. Well, it doesn't really matter where they are actually in their educational journey, but there's no real better place for a person to kind of learn about these things than seeing them applied to a space they own or even the hypotheticals. Now I'm sure part of it, part of you mentioned you have a whole thing on copyright, I'm sure you use past anecdotes, the recipe thing possibly, for sure others, but that becomes so much more meaningful and real when they can tangibly say like, I could have been, I could have, I could see myself doing that and here's why that would have been fine or not fine if I didn't do these things. And it's not just talking in the hypothetical, it's like, I know what the tools look like now, right? And that's so different from my experience when I was an undergrad, I was a music major and I took a composition class and we had this whole thing about what copyright means because most people don't know that, right? They think copyright is like a thing you file for, like a patent or something and it's not, right? Yeah. And the whole point of this little thing in my composition class was like, here's what copyright is, here's mostly what it isn't. And then if you want to copyright your musical work in this case, it is copyrighted. What you have to do is be able to prove that you were the first person to write it and here's one way to do that. And that was great for me, like I learned a lot about that but that was a very obviously narrow context. And one of the things I love about this course is I think it's a much more broad context, right? Because we're talking about publishing in general, really. Yeah. Yeah. And because the students choose a wide variety of topics to blog, blog or post about, they run up into lots of different scenarios. So somebody might be doing more art based. So doing their own sketches and drawings and really are focused on how to prevent people from stealing their artwork, right? And so that's a whole other discussion and maybe more of a sidebar with them about maybe use Creative Commons, watermark your work, or you're not gonna be that successful in getting people to take down your work if they're using it. So how can you work with that to still get exposure for your work and get credit for your work? We talked about another example would be AI. As of last January semester, so last spring, 2023 semester, I tell them to use AI to the degree they feel comfortable because ultimately when you push back and say, well, this is your site, this is your work, you can't say, oh, well, I had to do this for SFU and therefore I used AI because blah, blah, blah. You have to defend it. And you have to, you're building your own audience. You're building your own community and the authority you're lending to that is part and parcel of the content you're creating. And if people are seeing a lot of AI generated content, they're not gonna come back and there goes whatever platform you had. And then we get right into the whole copyright issues that are coming up around AI, like what goes in, what comes out, can AI hold copyright? Just on Tuesday, we talked about the case in Canada that has an AI and an author that both hold joint copyright in a creation. But in the States, unless you're human, you can't hold copyright. So there's a whole bunch of nuances as well per country and because the US and Canada are so intertwined, it is confusing. And so different scenarios that they might be posting about are treated differently in different places and different laws apply, that sort of thing. Music, the same thing, people, poetry, the poets get mad. They're mostly like, somebody stole my poem. And I was like, oh, let's figure out how you can take what they posted and reclaim it for your own platform again. Yeah. And it's so easy to, when talking about these types of ownership and copyright type things, it's so easy to get stuck in the, I guess, technical or even legal with while ignoring the practical. And that's why I like these kind of courses so much because on the one hand, to a poet whose poem was stolen, you could say, well, you posted it to your site and you didn't put a license on it, which means you reserve all your rights, technically, that's how that works. And let's say you could go in the internet archive way back machine and find it last year. Okay, so you've got a handful of pieces that maybe you could make a case, you know. But are you gonna hire a lawyer? Like, you know, and that's where this falls down. But it's an important thing for folks to think about in the entirety, especially. And if you were running a huge business, then maybe you would, right? But if you're an individual, the power sacked up against you in that way. So. It sure is. I'm a poor student who posted the recipe. I mean, all she really did was take the ingredients. She changed up the method a bit. She posted back to the original website, tagged the creator several times and just was like, this is a fantastic recipe. And here's how I'm gonna modify it, blah, blah, blah. And then she gets like, I think it was like $1,500 that invoice sent. And she was like, holy shit, what do I do now? Like, oh, that's $1,500? Don't pay it. That's what you do. No, I'm telling you that I was violating anything. And so it was, you know, I felt so awful for her because she's, that's a lot of money. And, you know, we calmed her down and just said, okay, don't worry about it. We're gonna fix this. And here's the first steps to it. And so we really got into copyright that. That was like maybe the second or third year we were offering this course. And we had given general copyright overviews, but now we dive deeper into it and give specific instances on things that they tend to blog about fashion is one. And we talk about patents and trademarks as well and all those differences. So yeah, but it is by doing and it can be pretty eye-opening. It's really nice to. And I think that one of the things of this course makes me think about, and you had mentioned it earlier was, you know, working outside of walled gardens, whether that be institutionally or the way that I think a lot of students, but you know, folks who aren't as comfortable on the web, you know, we're all online in some way and a lot of it is through social media. And that in itself is like a walled garden where you don't have to really understand how the web works to have the presence of some sort. But this is very different because as you were saying, like this is theirs. And on top of that, you've got people who, oh man, I'm losing my train of thought. I'm sorry. What is so interesting about working outside of social media is that you have that freedom you're talking about to kind of explore and to maintain your data and your content in a way that is transferable. But it also like. I mean, I think I know what you're saying with it. There is within the walled gardens, I mean, you get this sense of security that, oh, you know, if you're on Twitter or you're on TikTok even, well, TikTok maybe not Instagram or Facebook, you kind of feel a little bit protected, like insulated from, I can say this anonymously, all they're gonna do is just tell me I'm suspended for a week or whatever. You can use pseudonyms, like you can do so many things that are anonymous or invisible or asynchronous. Like there's things that you do that you feel, whether or not it's true, that there is a buffer and good and bad, of course. But with the URLs, I think they start to learn or feel around week seven, eight, like around now that, you know, if I post something and someone comes at me about it, it's me and it's only me. I can't really say, you know, disappear and go, I'm getting off Facebook for the next month or whatever. I mean, you can on a website, but it's still ultimately you're the buck, right? Or whatever they say, the buck stops here. And I think as they start to realize that, they start to reconsider for the most part how they actually present themselves and how they interact with their community and start thinking about community guidelines, how much will they tolerate because we're all for free speech and free expression and let the people talk until you have to actually look at any legal ramifications or social ramifications or, you know, the social media bunches that sort of come and take you away. So they start to understand a little more about that part of it and just how hard it can be for them. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's, I think when you get to a certain point with, of experience with this kind of stuff, there's like sort of a comfort for me in some ways of the realization of like, there are cranks out there, right? There are people, you know, people can ask you for $1,500 for modifying a recipe and citing your source. Yeah. But you don't need to pay it, you know, like that, like anyone can ask you anything and you can say no. And obviously the scary thing is understanding when you are responsible actually or accountable maybe is the right word and not. And again, like that's probably such a valuable experience. It can be very scary, but you know, I hope that, I tend to think that the good outweighs the bad there, especially because you can, you're doing it, that your students are get to do it in an environment where they do have someone to consult, you know, for advice. And they are, you know, they're adults, right? This is a time to make those types of realizations or be confronted with them maybe. So yeah, it's really valuable stuff. And again, you know, like, this is publishing. This is an element of it. As you were saying earlier, the idea of the course is the publication of self and what that is supposed to look like online. And one of the things I was trying to kind of go back to earlier was that, I don't know if it's changed from when I first started looking at college, but back in 2013, when I first was like looking to go to college and when I would go to school, they would be like, you know, if you need to like check your online presence and make sure it's clean and there should be almost like they were saying like nothing should be there. Just wipe it clean, especially for people like teachers, like my friends who were going for education, they were like, you need to make sure you delete everything about you or have no social media, have no online presence. And when I, you know, just a few years ago, I kind of started thinking like, that is a horrible piece of advice. And I think that courses like this and having students understand they're building their own space online, it helps them build an online self that is like intentionally positive. And instead of trying to take themselves away from the internet, the digital sphere, it's putting out intentionally good stuff. So like all of that building yourself up online in positive and intentional ways can be a lot more impactful when you go to look for a job and they're looking you up and they're like, wow, this person's really impassive. They have all of this, you know, look at all these examples they have on their site of what they do and what they think as opposed to, you know, obviously bad social media stuff wouldn't be good. But even on top of that is like, oh, there's nothing about this person. That was always one of the things whenever I talked to students about this stuff I'd be like, hey, like who in the room has heard of digital citizenship? And most of them would raise their hands and I'd asked someone what it meant and it was typically like, you know, it's like the idea that everything you put on the internet is potentially permanent. So you have to be careful and maybe don't post certain things. And I was like, sure, I'm gonna add to that definition for you now that you're 18, like, you know, like that's a completely understandable thing. And I, there's a reason why you were taught about that stuff in, you know, probably elementary through high school, I imagine. And now we're gonna build on that because now you have an opportunity to actually take control over some of it in important ways. Yeah, very true. And I think the, I mean, we do read as like, we do Mike Caulfield. We talk about publics and counter-publics and Audrey Waters. Like there's a bunch of different articles that they read about like, what is it we can do with the internet? Like, how do we take it apart and put it back together again? And when you do that, you get to understand how it's built and what it is and what you can do with it. But as you were saying, Amanda, it reminds me of some of the educational institutions who after the chat, GPT first became more open in November 2022, I guess. And when we started this semester in 2023, January, I was just seeing all of these institutions that we're not using AI, we're not using anything. Like just shut it down. And let's figure out how we can call out students on it. I'm like, no, no, no, we're gonna start right at the beginning and say, this is what's out there. Have a full around with it. Let's look at what it can do, where its limits are. And then we start moving into some of the ethical parts of it. But it was like, why, if you scrub your social media presence, that's a red flag to me. Like, why don't, where have you been for the all of your life? You digital native, right? And so the same thing with AI. And I was just like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Help them learn the tools, help them take everything apart, figure out how it works and how it can be used ethically, responsibly. If you just let them, it's like any kid, right? You say, no, they're just gonna go try it anyway. So I'm not gonna go that down that. I'm not gonna go that down that allegory. But you know what I mean? Like you need to work with them to help them understand what it is that they're using. And why some people are saying, maybe you shouldn't use it. Well, why are you telling me that? What's wrong with it? How come I can't use it? Well, let's figure it out. Here's what education is supposed to be, too, is unable. Yep. Especially in this context, where we're talking about content that you may put on your site. Like my favorite argument is when you touched against certain uses of those tools is when you already touched on. Which is like, if that's all your site is, why would someone go there? That's a pointless visit. I don't want to read that. Most of that stuff is not very good. No, it's like when we wonk a Glasgow thing, right? So you've heard of that one, right? Everything was written by AI. Who wants all the other problems with it? But you're gonna get what you put out. And I mean, if people want to read AI stories, that will go to your site. But for the most part, nobody really wants to see that kind of thing. But yeah, work with the tools. Figure out how they can work for you or with you. And I think students start to feel more responsible, too. Like when they're actually using the URLs themselves or AI or whatever it is, when they really understand it, they feel more of a responsibility to do it ethically. There's no third party they can pass it off to. And so I had to do that for whatever. There's more ownership in it and there's more responsibility to it. That's the sense I get from them. Yeah, and it's fostering a different kind of critical thinking online that a lot of us are not exposed to. And by the nature of social media in particular, is don't worry about it, don't think critically about this. Just keep scrolling. But I do wonder, and this is something that was mentioned in the case study and our initial conversation with you as well, what is it like when you have students who maybe are less receptive to the idea of being so out there online? And what does that look like? Oh, you know, when Taylor and I talked last semester, I had just finished teaching this course with a cohort of Indigenous students and it's one of the, I think one of the students you highlighted in that case study if I'm not mistaken was one of the Indigenous students. And there was a cohort of them within the class and it was awesome, I loved it. And I really got into Indigenous copyright. That's a whole other topic and it's fascinating because of some oral cultures within the Indigenous community and how do you hold copyright? Anyways, whole other topic, but a fascinating one. But in this case, there were a couple of the students who really wanted to talk about issues within the Indigenous communities they were from. And some of the topics too in particular were very personal, very personal and very, problematic for some of the students, but they felt that using their sites to write about it was one of the ways that they wanted to talk about it. And it, there were a couple of times I had students come to me and say, I don't know if I should write about this because a family member is involved in the content and I don't know if I should or am I liable? Is there's something that they can come back at me with legally and then it was, do I even want to talk about this out front? This is all public. And I said, well, this is what this course does touch on, right? Like these sites are all super public. And unless we work on, we configure it a different way for you to present it, that's something you should be thinking about. Do you want to be public with this? Do you want to have this information out there? Is it, it doesn't balance out for you with your family life and with your career, with your student life and where you want to go professionally. So there were those kinds of discussions and that was the most recent ones. And I found those very, very insightful but also have been thinking about them a lot and how we do handle more difficult conversations around these public domains. But there was in an instance, a number of years ago with a student who, a gay student who wanted to have his site be a resource for high school students in smaller communities in particular who had no information at their fingertips or whose libraries weren't really forthcoming with information about being gay as a teenager and discovering who you are as a person. And so he wanted to have this resource of all the things that he would have loved to have had. And he's like, I can't make this public because I haven't come out to everybody and I know I'll be judged and I'm not ready for that but what I am ready for is to start the process of helping others. So we agreed this is gonna be, there's gonna be a pseudonym on here and all of his coursework would be through the site but through a protected, a private link. And so we worked it out that he used the pseudonym. The peers in his class, we had agreements with them how they were reviewing his site and so all the logistics were sorted out. And he was just so happy and so grateful and so, and I say grateful to himself, I think in how he handled it and how he decided, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm taking a risk but I'm gonna do it my way and I will, on my terms, how I'm going to roll out who I am. And over the course of the semester, he just got more and more great information. He had people commenting on his site. He had started to build a community of his peers and younger who are in high schools in St. Louis. This is amazing stuff. Thank you for creating it. And he presented at the end of the semester and he was like, and here I am, this is what I'm doing and this is a pseudonym up here. He was presenting it to the class. He said, this isn't me as you all know. And it was good. It was really, it was good for everybody in that class to see how it can work. That's incredible. And I think that it's a great example of, yeah, it's scary because it's public but the way that you're doing it and that you're encouraging your students to do it, it gives them more freedom to do things the way that they want. And it's just about, honestly it just comes down to creativity. Like, how can I make this work? And why do I want to make this work and how are my values aligned with this and my goals in the future? And I mean, it's a lot of big questions that students get the opportunity to address just through a website. It sure is. And sometimes I step back and think, would I do this now? Would I actually create a site and chat about all these things that they are? I don't know if I would. Like, it's easy for me because I don't have to do it as much as they do. So sometimes I do step back and think, okay, I don't know if I would be as out there as some of them are, but I think that's also how they're growing up, right? Everything is so public and they want to be able to control what that public face is. I've seen, definitely over the past 10 years, I'm seeing more of that. Yeah, okay, fine, I'm out there but you're not gonna manipulate me. I'm going to do this on my terms. Well, and hopefully I imagine there's some kind of cohort thinking there too, right? Like you've got, they're doing this amongst their peers at the same time in this class. So that probably pushes folks to kind of, hopefully consider it in a positive way. I mean, what you want, and it sounds like you all are doing that, is fostering resources so they don't do it irresponsibly. So that would be the flip side to that, but in a real, very real sense, it seems to me that this course is about those types of considerations in some ways. So yeah, it's really powerful stuff, I think. If we have a second, I just found some, so I do with this anonymous midterm survey. Each time I change this course and I ask the questions, is the course meeting exceeding or not meeting expectations? What's the worst thing? What's the best thing? What should we continue doing? What should we stop doing? And there was, so in the worst thing about this class is you always look for the worst ones first, right? Right. Fix those, hopefully. And this past one was sometimes I'm confused about what I'm supposed to do. Sometimes I wish I had more guidance because I don't know what I'm supposed to write about. Then everything is vague. I would like to have more structure. So that balances against what is the best thing about this class, creating new content every week, the flexibility I get to create new personas with each post if I want to, artistic freedom. I love the student run bit. There's no pressure. The class discussions, it's self-directed. I got my own pace interacting with people online on my terms. So right, you see this, but I need more structure, but I don't want any more structure. So it's... I think it is. And I think that that is also the reality of having a course like this within a higher education setting, where you've got these students who really want to make the grade and are used to very structured classes. So you're probably gonna not be able to really avoid that kind of push and pull of it because it's really trying to go out there. Especially like, I mean, too much structure, not enough structure, that is the center conflict. Conflict's not the right word, but push and pull at lesson planning, course planning, right? Like that's just... Students need structure, of course. And the way you present that is so important because you want them to be successful, obviously you want them to understand their expectations. I love your semester outline. Just because I do think it walks a really good line of like, this is all of the things that are expected of you. However, I'm not going to tell you what you are or are not going to do to meet these expectations, right? Like that is the point is that you need to explore that and that is not easy for every student. It just won't be. Oh, it's not easy for me. Like if I had to write something every week on a particular topic and then explore it from different levels, I don't know if I could do it. I mean, I could, but I would have to really bear down and think about it. For some people, writing comes so easily and topics come so easily. For others, it's struggle. So I say, do videos if you want, do podcasts, do whatever you feel comfortable with. I think one of the biggest challenges they do have outside of learning WordPress and setting up the domains is figuring out what they're going to talk about every week. And we start with a vision board and we start with Venn diagrams like what's your passion? What's your catnip? What makes you excited? What do you look at first thing in the morning when you wake up? What do you go to on your phone? And then we have to balance that with but can you write about it every week? Because you don't want to take a passion and fun and make it work. So you might love cooking, but are you going to cook every week? Do you have time to cook every week? You might love reading, but can you narrow down your reading to a manageable genre that you can post about every week? So I find that is another challenge. I have like, oh, I don't know. I can't write about that every week. So it may end up not being a passion of theirs that they're writing about every week. It just might be something that they can. So it might be academics for that matter. Like I'll just post something from various courses or it could be, we get a lot of lifestyle. So we get a lot of, I'm going for coffee this week. I'm going to try this restaurant this week. And then we get those who are trying to set up little businesses. And so they're really looking at it as a commercial enterprise eventually and seriously building out community to further their business. We've had an esthetician who went to university and actually has her own skincare business now and has started with that site that she used. We have another one. Oh, if I can find it here. We had one from 2023. I'll see if I can find it really quickly. And she had started a small art business and she was trying to build it out a little bit using this course as a place where she could learn some dos and don'ts and how to handle customers and how to relate with people, how to handle negativity, that sort of thing. I'm going to put this in the chat. And she was doing really well. She was going to like craft fairs and flea markets and selling her stuff. And has now transitioned over to one of our venture capital or venture programs in our Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center. And she's learning how to make this into a little more of a business. So, and she'll be presenting at our undergrad conference in April about the process she went through. So she used the site as a place to serve brainstorm and figure out how best to meet her customer demands. And her work is amazing. Those earrings are incredible. And she presented a few times in class and it really inspired others to present. Oh, and you see up here the accessibility thing. All of our websites, that's part of their grade, now 10%, they have to have accessible sites. Beautiful. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. That's really impressive. Yeah. So it's just like, that was a good example of where you can take it and what you do with it. We have a chat with a live stream chat on our Discord server where community members can watch our live streams and comment. And we've got a regular Eric who's commenting and has made some great comments, but recently said, no wonder this class has a wait list. He's very impressed. Seems really lovely. Well, it's so fun, right? Like I love it every semester. It's one of the classes I'm like, I got a class on Tuesday. Because I just see them what they do and they all start off like, I don't know anything about WordPress. Do I have to use WordPress? Do I have to do this? I'm like, well, we're using WordPress for the class. Once we're done, you can use whatever you want, but WordPress is a commonality so we can troubleshoot things easier. And I'm like, I know at the end of this class, so you're gonna be really proud of what you've accomplished. And they're like, yeah, yeah, sure. Sure, sure. And they still have a 404 or they have like reclaims that VHS tapes, but at the end of it, they do. And you see it in their faces. They just go, yeah, it's pretty good. I spent some time on it. Yeah, not bad. We have one student this semester on week three, I pulled up the sites and I was like, so here we all are. And this one site was pretty much done. And I'm like, wow, did you? And I didn't know what student was. I said, whoever did this, like, was this from before? And she said, I thought we had to do it all. When you said like register the domain, I thought we had to have the whole thing finished by next week. And so she spent the entire week building my site with all the tags and menus and posts. Oh my God, no. But you're farther ahead than everybody else in the class. It gives you the opportunity to spend the rest of the semester perfecting, I guess. But wow, that must have been a lot of work. Yeah, it's a good, it is a fun class. Because there's so many different sites, it's never boring. And we start off every class, what's new in socials? I should add that. So every morning, every Tuesday morning, I go, what's new in socials? And I'll bring up two or three things I found. They'll bring up two or three things they found. And then we take it apart a little bit and try and adapt it to the topic of the day. So as I said last Tuesday, we talked AI and copyright. And so we talked about the Willy Wonka Glasgow thing and how they were using AI and expectations versus reality. We talked about the Wendy's dynamic pricing thing. They will usually bring up Kanye West and Travis Calci and Taylor Swift. There's always something going on. And sometimes it has absolutely nothing to do with what we're talking about in class, but all of it kind of does because it's how people are interacting with it. Right. And how it's, what's paying attention. Yeah. And how did it get to be so popular and why is it people are so upset with Taylor Swift? Like, what's the bottom of that? And so we'll take that apart a little bit. And that's consistently one of the best things they like about the class, like sup and socials. And it gets them talking. That's brilliant. I love that. Yeah. Was there any other kind of like closing thoughts you might have that you wanna share just about your experience with this and with this? I think it all kind of comes down to digital agency and that citizenship question that Taylor mentioned, yeah. Yeah. I guess, I mean, we do focus heavily, more heavily than in the beginning. In the beginning, it was just like, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg was still figuring out what Facebook was gonna be like. Twitter was Twitter. Right. You know, there's so many changes over the years. I think having to keep up with and always sort of analyze what's going on. Like what's going on with TikTok now and how is the privacy thing impacting us? How are students interacting with these types of platforms and why? So there's this, it's important to stay on top of and to continue to be critical of things. So in the curriculum, I've focused over the years, I've focused more on digital literacy and critical thinking and it's kind of a thread through all of it now. It is its standalone module, but it also is, we've throughout or woven throughout the whole course that, you know, who, when someone says, well, they said, who are they? And that's kind of where we start with. Like if you're the day, how are you going to present it? So your day is more, is the authentic voice here. How do you position yourself to be, to have integrity as a publisher? Awesome. Oh, sorry. I think dust. Great. So this was awesome. Taylor, did you have any closing thoughts you wanted to add? No, this is great. And I just, thanks so much for jumping on and chatting with us and sharing your work around this course openly too. That's really appreciated. I don't think we've had too many people read course feedback on the screen, so very much kudos. And yeah, this is great. And I, yeah, thanks so much for sharing. Yeah, thank you, Suzanne. Don't worry. Yeah, well, I mean, thanks to Reclaim for having this out there. I mean, I think one of the big things about it is that when I asked the students to go through Reclaim and, you know, Jim Groom and Tim Owens, who are clones of something because they're always available, I swear. But I think that helps the students feel a level of reassurance. They're not just going through a go daddy or something. There's support there. And, you know, if there's an issue, we contact them and get the answers they need. So I really like that relationship we have with Reclaim and how the students can feel a level of, even though their own things, they still feel like they're supported on the tech and on the backend of stuff. And we really value that. Thank you so much, especially folks who can, we are just people on the other end of support. When you're talking to support, you're talking to Taylor, you're talking to Amanda. So I love that. No, it's always, it feels, it just feels more of a family thing in that everybody's looking out for each other as opposed to just making dollars on stuff. Sure, awesome. Well, thank you so much. We'll let you go and enjoy the rest of your Friday. And thank you everybody who tuned in and chatted with us as well. And we'll see you next week. Okay, great. Thank you. Bye.