 There we go. And as is the new usual for our community chats, I'm going to just plug some things that are happening at Reclaim. We've got actually kind of a lot of stuff going on right now. So as a reminder, community.reclaimhosting.com, kind of your one stop for pretty much everything we're doing right now. But we'll start right away with the EdTech button here. We've got a handful of things up on the event calendar. So of course, community chat today. We've got a lot of stuff centered around OER happening. So on Friday, we've got a little preview. We have some folks that are going to be presenting at OER, and they're going to be talking about their session. And then next week we will be joined live from OER by those same people. And so we're really excited to be able to participate in OER 24. And yeah, I'm going to highlight the cool stuff that's happening there. Next Tuesday, we have a mystery stream. It's next Tuesday at one Eastern, and there will be a recording of it after. But yeah, we've got something we're excited to share with everybody. And so you should consider tuning in. It'll be fun. And then coming up in April, we have a flex course. So about midway through April, we're starting it. We're going to be doing one on ghost newsletters. We've done this before about a year and a half ago now. But we figured it was time to revisit because there are... Newsletters is a constant in somewhat right now, I was going to say somewhat evergreen right now, but that's contradictory. I'm going to say usually a topic of interest around here. And there's a lot of things that ghost has been doing since last time we ran the flex course. So we think it's time to kind of dust that off and remake it. So that's what we're doing in April. And so you can check that out on the event calendar. You can RSVP to stay in the loop on email updates and things as we get launching with that. But of course, as always, you can go here and check out recent streams we've done. We've had a couple different reclaimed today's recently that are definitely worth checking out. We've actually had a lot of guests in general between streams and reclaimed today's recently. So that's been really cool. So I highly recommend checking that out. We had conversations with Ann Marie Scott and Suzanne Norman and Michael Branson Smith and Paul Bond just all recently. So really great. So that's what's coming up. But today we're kind of here to talk about edtech origin stories. This is something I always like hearing about. Listening to people kind of share how they got into a particular field. I mean really in general, but I think particularly in the edtech space because there's not a lot of singular clear paths that people find themselves. At least it seems to me that people find themselves doing this work. It feels like we're an industry of vagabonds who arrive here via different methods. I guess it's not again completely unique to jobs like this. But it's interesting to me and I think especially because before this I was a teacher and there is kind of just like one path to do that. So it's so weird to me in kind of a great way. So we have talked about this kind of thing before of course a little bit and actually not in a community chat but in Reclaim Todays and streams like that the topic comes up. But I will also point out that over the last summer at Reclaim Open the documentary that came out of that conference did also kind of touch on this stuff and it's been something I've been wanting to return to kind of since then of like we should really do a community chat and encourage people to kind of share their stories whatever they want to share around that. Because I think it's important because I do find people that will say how can I learn how to work in the education space with technology helping teachers and students. And I don't always personally always have very good answers or at least my experience doesn't really lead to one. So I'm kind of always excited to listen to how other people found themselves doing this work. So yeah that's kind of the format. I'm going to ask folks to share and hopefully have an interesting discussion around it. And the fun part is someone gets to go first. So I will say I discovered EdTech through this tool called ChatGBT and it changed my life. In fact I don't think EdTech started before a tool called ChatGBT started or at least Udass or something like that. I'm reading a definition here that says as a large language model I cannot answer questions about vocation and calling. That's my understanding of educational technology. Jim I thought you were starting with Slide Show Pro. I'll never live that tool down ever. I love Orange's stories. I will share a quick one and it's funny because Lauren would always joke with me and say oh I had no idea. You went to school at CUNY because that's what I'm going to talk about. She would make fun of me but I actually think it's a cool story not just because of my relationship to it but because of what the City University of New York I was a grad student there. What they had built. They had built this kind of fledgling program a couple of professors at the grad center Steve Breyer and why am I forgetting his name. It will come back to me. He ran EdTech at George Audie at CUNY. They basically said you know what we're going to have this new program where we have instructional technology fellows who are grad students in various disciplines who actually work with students and faculty to integrate. At that point it was like 2004. So you got a Mac which is why people did it. You got this kind of little iOS 9 almost iOS 10 Mac and you're like oh my god I got a computer now. But then the other thing was you would work with one or two faculty over a semester and deal with various things like that was when I first started installing WordPress and MediaWiki and I was one of like 20 faculty ITFs and we were at like 20 different schools and we would come together weekly and talk about what we were doing. And that was the model. Like I did that for a year and then I went to UMW and then had a very similar model where we were all at different programs and buildings but then we would come together weekly and talk about what we did. But I just really like that because I had no I was going to school for you know American Lit. I had no real idea after a year of doing the ITF I got a job. You know it was that weird moment when if you knew anything about like open source software and you knew what Firefox was you could get a job. Like that was kind of a strange time and that's my origin story is City University of New York kind of a not a kind of like a graduate program to get a computer that turned into a career which is a super strange thing. Not what I thought I would ever be doing but then once I started doing it I kind of fell in love with it. Do you know how to install WordPress plugin was one of the wow yeah that's one of the questions. Yeah I find that like so like the it feels to me like what kind of the core what you're saying Jim like is that you know like this this really cool program kind of created a situation where you know you could learn about this stuff and grow into it and it feels to me like that is often at the core of these things is like you have a person who is trying to create an environment that can foster sort of innovation learning around technology and what it can mean in a school environment at whatever level really and it's so hard to build those things like I like respect the heck out of that work because it you know it requires funding requires time it requires expertise it requires people to believe in what you're trying to build and it all has to go correctly you know so I can I can share I don't know my mind is like not really maybe particularly interesting but like so I have always been even as like a kid like really into like computers and computing in certain ways and the other thing I've always been into is music and and well I shouldn't say always but for a long time so like coming out of high school I thought I wanted to teach music and my second thing was like maybe computer science and then I decided I probably didn't want to be a programmer basically or that didn't seem like something I wanted to pursue so I went got my undergrad in music education of course worked for the IT department the whole time and I went to St. Albert College and then I taught band for a year and decided I didn't want to continue doing that and I think for most K-12 teachers their first year teaching is very difficult so mine not really any exception my wife is also a choir teacher and she's a year older than me so she went through this the year before I did and in some ways obviously she was really helpful but in some ways also it was like a comparison point for me for me to like watch what she felt good at and what I did not feel good at and confident in and what would stress about and I'd be like yeah I need to teach this tomorrow and I want to do this this and that and I'd be like writing up this huge long lesson plan thing at like 9 p.m. the night before and she's like why are you writing all this don't you know what you're going to do and I'm like no and she's like I don't know that I would have lesson planned that it feels natural to me I was like it doesn't feel natural to me and basically near the end of the year there was an opening in IT and I just at St. Robert College working with would have been my former boss one of the student and I was like you know what I'm just going to apply for it because I really don't like what I'm doing at this moment I like working with students I like teaching but just the reality of this is not grinding me down and so I'm going to apply for that see if I like it and I can always return and I just never did and it was I feel really fortunate that I went to go work at a college because I got to then transition from sort of general IT to specifically the academic technology department and work with some really amazing people who taught me a lot and I got to use some of the things I understood and knew about teaching to kind of make conversations with faculty feel more useful to them and now I'm here at Reclaim I kind of fell backwards into it and I'm really glad I did because if I would have majored in something else I probably wouldn't have I probably would have gone and done something else or I don't know who knows but that was sort of how I kind of fell into it it's nice education technology it's peanut butter it's perfect for you well interestingly I did the K-12 thing but maybe accidentally so I started off as a history major was going to go to law school then delivered some sandwiches to the law school and decided I didn't like them as people and so that's how I changed my mind about law school very well it seems like a pretty good way to do it and maybe in an expensive way I was like wait a minute I hate these people and so I did academic support for student athletes and ended up learning how to make websites and things like that because I was doing that back in the day a little bit of HDML, some dream weaver maybe even front page at different times and that got me a little bit of technology and then I got sick of that job for a variety of reasons and got an emergency certification to teach alternative middle school for sixth graders in a place that had one-to-one laptops so in absolute desperation to keep them from rioting every day I tried to use the computers in ways that would like actually get them entertained like weird websites for the class with like pit bulls and all sorts of strange things on them you know a James Bond theme I think one year and that's kind of what led me down this path some bizarre videos where I dressed as a ninja and did instructions later on you know like I did all sorts of really really odd things but then that got me into more in different types of technology because I'm like Taylor I guess I like I hated computers for a good chunk of my life found them mainly really angry and an impediment to most of the things I wanted to do never really played video games you know I'm like Jim perhaps don't have a nostalgic year for arcades no interest so like that stuff just ground around in lots of different ways so I mean the reason I mention it to people sometimes is like you know like you don't have to start from the ground to get to different places you know and Jim and I did presentations on hating programming and swearing we'd never learn and now I'm like you know whoops I did accidentally learn some programming somewhere along the way I'll blame Alan for that maybe but you know it's just it's just interesting how different things can happen in really abstract ways throughout your life that lead you down these things not basically because of a passion for computers or anything on my end or even technology but I like to do things that amuse me and I'm particular about how things work so that led me farther and farther down these rabbit holes I relate to that so recently my like being like caring about and something that you can create and what it looks like and for me I have like not a visual design bone in my body so that means like how things might work for me and like pretty recently my parents sent me a picture I can't find it I'm trying to take it up but something that they kept when I made when I was like they figure like six or seven and I guess I always had a love for automation because I drew on a piece of cardboard a universal remote like literally like like literally it says remote control of course spelled wrong for anything and it has like it's like a smart home thing like it's like lights there's like a TV area and stuff and I was like huh I guess I've always kind of liked the idea of automating things I can maybe go next I was thinking about this the other day because it feels like I don't know I was thinking through how I sort of got to reclaim because that's kind of my journey feels very short compared to some of what you guys have been saying but basically back when I was in undergrad I was studying cinema and media studies film so there was a there was a practical element and there was a theory element and one of the theory classes that was taught by a visiting professor was called digital cinema cultures and I went that sounds awesome I'm going to take that and it was really cool it was a look at different ways that digital media is used to create more experimental narratives or the ways that we use like the idea of the digital to sort of the thing I'm thinking about is there's a movie called Hardcore Henry that is shot on a GoPro and it's all first person and it looks like a first person shooter video game so bringing in the aspect of oh this is a video game into what is actually a movie so crossing the streams on what we think of as different types of media which was just really interesting and it got me thinking about how we use technology to talk to people and how we talk to people about technology and then the same professor the next term ran a course called video games and identity which was about political messaging and activism and political movements around video games and that was really cool and I didn't do anything with it for like a year and a half and then I was looking at student job work positions student jobs for my senior year and I saw that there was a digital scholarship program internship program that had a specific position open for the ethics intern and I went alright I can't do the front end programming or the back end programming ones but I could do that and I applied for that and got it and it was great and it was a ton of research and so a lot of it was every week I would pick or be given a topic something timely or relevant like that was around the time the 2020 primaries there was those concerns about people hacking the Iowa electronic ballot counters things like that doing research write ups deliver those to my supervisors researching GDPR privacy act what the school's responsibilities were to people in Europe international students in America versus American students studying abroad things like that and that was awesome and then a lot of or to some degree working with professors who were trying to think through their digital projects but maybe hadn't had a great background in organizing a digital project versus a physical one or just this is a written research project versus how do you make use of digital media to convey what you're trying to talk about and then I graduated in 2020 and there was a huge demand for jobs in academic technology for some reason in June of 2020 so Carlton's academic technology department which was where my supervisor worked opened up one year like hey you just graduated and you know things do you want to please help us talk to faculty jobs and my supervisor said I should apply for that and I did and that was the same summer Carlton got Domain of One's Own and the person who worked with Carlton to get that set up left a month after I started so that became my job and that was the rest of my year was helping faculty figure out how to get websites and then what to do with them and working a bit with the internship program and project management questions but mostly Domain of One's Own and then my contract ended and reclaim was hiring and now I'm here. You know what's wild about that pilot is A. You got hired and didn't realize this as an ed tech height or beginning of COVID I hadn't realized that that's crazy and we knew you through the very articulate tickets you would put in to try and understand Domain of One's Own so when you applied for like we're no pilot that's great because I was always worried about those tickets because a lot of it was going hey so I got like 45 minutes of explanation of what C-Panel was as my training so what do I do you played it very well I have to say just like your emails now you're a professional well I appreciate that yeah that was also Carlton was closing down their old multi site which was suffering from a lot of the problems that old multi sites had so we were doing a lot of manually migrating individual WordPress sites onto C-Panel so that was also how I spent like the first four months of that job so now I know a lot about that was a crash course in how to fully build a WordPress site instead of just put blog posts onto one yeah yeah that's Tom just put something in the chat about growth from suffering I feel very qualified to advise people on what not to do with WordPress multi sites now I'd be happy to take a turn absolutely sounds good I don't know if I like ed tech as much as I like working with great people and being in higher ed and they were just things that like over time one of you know I've come to understand my skill set is not necessarily being the person that does the great thing but the person that helps other people do the great thing and feel totally comfortable in that role you know you know I've had a you know one of the things about a job is you can look at it like a job and not your whole life which I think I probably fall more on that side so the things that I need to get out of it are more an enjoyment of the day to day and that really does come from the kinds of things you get to do and the people that you get to do it with right so I feel pretty fortunate for the most part I've had tons of both right so things that I like to do and great people to work with and that kind of has continues today so I still sit here and do this right that is that's not always the case for everybody that's not always the case in I mean even like this you know that more scrutiny on higher ed and what is it good for these days and what the general world thinks about higher ed is I think less than it used to be but you know all the more reason why we have to keep going and because you know curiosity and learning and service all just been kind of what I get out of this job because I came to it all over the place too right I started with an associates degree in drafting and then I got another went to another degree in engineering where I didn't academically make a good progress and then I went and got a degree in communications where I did video production and that was great I liked doing that and ended up getting my first job for Marymount University where I did my communications degree and made videos of HR scenarios for students for you know six months of a year so and then that kind of got me into like oh I like TV I did that as a freelancer for you know a year and then it was like then ended up in western Pennsylvania in slippery rock where there weren't great opportunities at the time I was there and managed the shoe store which Jim knows all the shoe store stories right did that for a while and I went and got a master's in education in University Georgia and then I got a job at Mary and I just been here since then and then I recently just became a Mary Wash alumni because I finished my historic preservation bachelor of liberal studies here because we could take classes for free right so but you know so it's you know I don't know if I can say I've been like attracted or sucked into any particular technology other than I like technology in general one thing I really do like is I get to work on all of the teaching and learning spaces here so I've come full circle back to like where I like the architecture and all those kind of things so I still get to work on that I thought it was pretty cool Jerry when you know you Martha and pretty much everybody in the team but me was working on the new building that you all are in now the Hurley Converges Center like that was and you all were able to kind of build out a space that you know is pretty radical and cool and how many people get that opportunity and you were at the spaces from the beginning so that's a cool like connection with now you're getting your degree in historic preservation which is all about spaces both long old and new right it's funny we're having a 10 year anniversary of the building this fall and the 10 year anniversary of the DKC the digital knowledge center here so we're planning some events and you know an exhibition in the digital gallery and all kinds of fun things to do 10 years that's crazy to me actually when I think about that because I was only in that building for a year that's really wild cool I'd be glad to talk I guess we'll get all the Mary Washington people out of the way and I feel like I got to share some of the set Reclaim Open in terms of like I too I was a history undergrad but I was a student named DTLT so like all I wanted to do was come back and work with fun people I was like I just want to work at Mary Washington so I could work with amazing people in the library and there was a series of unfortunate events everybody DTLT and so I was well positioned to slide in and just kind of be here because of all the past experiences I've had and you know just keeping I was always even when I wasn't in those spaces like professional labs always in the conversations though I never like left those kinds of kind of world like I would still come back to faculty Academy after I graduated and so he's you know reading people's blogs when they still blog some people never left so yeah and you know I'm at this point in about to wrap up grad school and because Tom mentioned he got a degree I was kind of in the similar position where I'm like I kind of need an advanced degree in order to do other things that in higher ed but I've found luckily I was considering doing something like a structural technology like I got to figure it out I wasn't super excited about that because I feel like maybe if you come from this particular vein some people like you know I don't really find problems with a lot of that kind of stuff but I found a program MFA in Design Thinking through Radford and I was like this feels like this will be fun and we'll kind of check that box that the institution kind of you know looks for because I could look around it everybody else in the field with me and be like well nobody has a degree that is like in the field like it clearly doesn't matter like just go do a thing that excites you so yeah that's that's kind of my story just like I've always kind of like you Taylor like always interested love technologies always something background to what I was doing and just never left you kind of got a BA in DTLT didn't you absolutely I probably spent more time in DTLT than I did in class that was awesome I loved it all right old stories actually took a programming class in high school we use punch cards we had to get on a bus to go to a different school but I liked it and when I went to university I didn't know what to take and my sister had gone in computer science and it's like oh well you get a job and I went to university at Delaware and did a year of it and I hated it I hated computer science I saw my future being in some closed warehouse of programmers and skipping I went and flipped the catalog and I picked geology and got my undergrad and that's my training but I suffered through one more class that I don't even understand that I got a minor in computer science and then I went to grad school at Arizona State University it's been so long I forgot where I went and I was a geology grad student I loved doing that stuff and they saw I had this minor in computer science and they had just gotten this lab full of little Mac pluses and said oh do you want a TA running this stuff and I was like yeah why not and I just figured some stuff out and helped other grad students use it for writing and started writing some programming to teach a couple things and all of a sudden I kind of liked using something like that and later on just kind of short I decided I didn't want to be a geologist and I went to look for jobs and found one at the Maricopa Community Colleges I was like totally unqualified for but they took a chance and they hired me and everything there was just learning stuff off the internet as I went and one thing led to another and the web came out and people were blogging and that Jim Groom and Jerry and Shannon there spent some time at Mary Wash and it's just been one like I've never had a real job I mean I've always been in education so I've never worked for a profit and don't know anything about a bottom line and so I think I will stay there but it's always been fun I mean because of the people like you know Tom and I are having a conversation through blog comments we're not even emailing it's great I know there was a time Alan when we I think it was in Vancouver and we were sharing a room and you had just you just run a marathon and I knew that because you had the I hate running blog running for years but then you also took me for a trip through all of the old Maricopa sites that you had built and then archived and I am blown away by your archive of your old HTML work and I think it's macro media director stuff that's just awesome I think it's because when I left I just for some reason I said all my files because I had them all on my computer and I actually still have that little hard drive I stole from Maricopa I think like this little I can't remember the brand name but it was like a 10 gig it was huge it was 10 gigabytes and I just have all the HTML and there's one one website I wish I forgot to export my SQL and I would have liked to rebuild it without the database so thank you Jim old stuff anyhow that's a rich archive though of the web at that moment and you blogged all of this but I love that stuff I don't know I don't want to bore people with the old stuff and it's not like nostalgic for it but that's what we live through and I love that everybody here had like different paths in and yeah I remember working with some edtech grad students from ASU they came in to do some mentorship sessions they didn't know anything I don't know what they're teaching over there they couldn't do anything they didn't know how to think creatively I'm being a little bit judgmental but we saw by going through a focus on the discipline like in a subject area I've been learning a bunch of because of tech stuff you can pick up and the tech stuff is like easy to find out if you're doing wrong that's my favorite thing about technology is it just stops working if you break it like instantly and immediately yeah and I know that frustrates a lot of people but like I find that useful feedback that I can act quickly on right and yeah I don't know I kind of agree with that I feel like I learned so much by just trying to understand what teachers needed and what students wanted by talking to them basically and trying things and finding out what didn't work and I don't know that's the work of it to me sometimes I remember working with faculty and they didn't know anything about technology but they knew exactly what they wanted to experience and sometimes they say I don't know what I want to do let's talk about what are some of your course activities like where are students getting stuck what can we do I'm sure all of you dealing with faculty have felt that ride from people to come in with very good plans that you just need to implement and maybe add to and other times you just help build it that's where the magic is yeah I feel like we're dancing around what I think is always the central attention of ed tech which is like people look at people in our positions and see the technology but forget there's a reason education is part of that we're not just somewhere setting up debt work or infrastructure those things are important we've just been called IT when we don't report up through IT our interest is helping you think about these things just think of us as experts in this particular thing we want to help you with it yes it's technology but we want to have those conversations with you yes I can help you fix your canvassing but really I want to have a different conversation with you like what you're trying to accomplish I'm so glad we learned those lessons during COVID I'm so glad that we finally changed we dialed up the meter I'm kidding I'm just giving a man the time I was going back and forth and whether or not because I was so excited to listen to everyone here and your stories but I mean long story not as long as some of yours I understand I haven't been in the game as long but for me long story short is I went to State University of New York Geneseo for English and medieval literature specifically and I was all like you know I was going to Italy I was like all about interdisciplinary stuff just seeing like constantly trying to build connections between what an English major specifically in a meta way can do in the world and then I got dragged into a creating like a digital exhibit at a museum which was like I had never really considered working in a museum or anything like that but I did it and I was like oh that's pretty cool there was a need and I was able to serve it with like a digital component and then I kind of like let that lie for a bit and then got into OER Publishing right out of graduation because SUNY was doing cool stuff with that and they needed somebody to do like publication print design specifically and so I was like I've never really done that but I'd like to try sure would like to try and that just like it wasn't possible for that to just exist by itself I was exposed immediately to ed tech at that point and all of a sudden I was doing much more than just creating you know helping faculty across the SUNY system create OER texts I was advising them on all sorts of open tools and then that led me to working with a digital humanity center at Geneseo where I was kind of refining that and then I came to reclaim so I love that OER is the gateway drug there it was a drug and I think it's really kind of relevant now because OER 24 is coming up but like I had never felt more energized or I remember like I started working in that job I was talking to all my friends who were newly graduated from undergraduate and they're all kind of slogging through what they're doing at that moment I was like is it weird that I absolutely love what I'm doing and I was really really all about it and I still am still love it all good things must come to an end in terms of that it was so cool and I feel like when you get introduced to the space through OER I mean it's a certain kind of magic I just remember being very bright-eyed bushy-tailed about the whole thing it was awesome because it also had a philosophy behind it I'm doing this openly there's the textbook element but that's kind of the thing that I thought was awesome when I came into Ed Tech at Mary Washington first thing to like is you have to blog I was like what? I was like that and then there were other people commenting on it and there was this open dialogue and I was like this is awesome I felt kind of like you I had been like tortured by my PhD and by all that I hated writing and then someone's like I don't care just write it's like you don't have to be good there's no level of expectation and I was like this is awesome and so I had stupid stuff to talk about but like you I was later I think I was 32 years old when I came to Mary Washington so I was a little bit pushed on I had been living in New York on subsistence wages trying to get through my PhD but at the point when I kind of it hit me that this could be a job I was like yeah this is awesome it was kind of if somewhat similar like for me in the aspect like when I was working in IT like doing like like help desk stuff like answering phones fixing broken computers that kind of stuff and like I see and it's still this way that the academic technology is embedded in IT it's just a different department but I kind of like watch the weirdos over there doing their thing and I like obviously I knew like not a huge department or anything but like I would you know kind of see what they're doing with like I was like this kind of just feels like IT but plus a lot of critical thinking like that was sort of my take at the time which felt good and attractive to me I was like that's really cool and then as I kind of like learned more about sort of the work they did and then it's sort of like it's sort of like radicalized me against like because a lot of the stuff that they were talking about like exploring OER and stuff like really connected back to things I learned about as like pre-service teacher about like social justice things connected to education and that just kind of and I was like alright yeah I really want to do that work and work on that team and maybe they'll have an opening someday and I'm right here you know and I ended up working out for me but and that's very similar kind of to how I like came to reclaim too like I you know I became familiar with what Domain of One's Own was and then we had that at St. Norbert and it was like a similar thing to me this is like a very pure expression of a lot of these things I care a lot about and I like a tool to do it that does it in this way meaning Domain of One's Own in this case and so yeah that kind of worked out twice for me so I think origin stories are rad though because they do tell you a lot across various fields I'm fascinated coming in a little bit earlier like to hear people coming in at the point where it's like COVID or OER it's part of their BA seeing a group like this which probably wouldn't have existed five years earlier in the same way it's just trippy you know and then the crossing passed but people you never really worked alongside like I only worked alongside Tom because I knew his blog you know what I mean and then we could talk about that story at Richred and that's its own thing but like yeah it's interesting I dig it that was kind of an interesting place because as I joked in the beginning like one of the questions in the interview how do you install a WordPress plugin and I think maybe at the time you had to like drag and drop it into an FTP program I can't remember if you got auto-install at that time you know or whatever extract a zip file that's how I've been messing with WordPress for a long time but the other question was like some obscure question around like sql join query statements no but I could probably Google that you know there's no reason I couldn't like look up left join table or something but it was just you know it's always weird like what questions people think are pertinent to the job and how different they can be technically when so much of it is more about like human stuff and actually having an idea worth pursuing rather than which button do you click or how do you connect database tables in a exclusionary way and I still don't know the answer to that to me like the core skill that I use most often that is maybe most unique to like being a technologist in whatever field is like knowing when to step back and say like we need to talk about what the problem is not the tool and how and when to do that and not that I always get it right frequently get it wrong but like because there isn't necessarily right answers but like especially with working with faculty right because you have to identify like this is a time where we need to talk about what they're trying to do or this is not a time for that like you know they don't have the time for that or don't want to or I need to get them there you know that kind of stuff I think that that is when I did have that opportunity for you know faculty who were who did have the time for that that was probably the most impactful part for me in this whole journey was coming I mean because I wasn't a technologist when I came into this type of stuff I wasn't very interested in computers I wasn't very interested in the digital stuff I have characterized it as I got dragged into doing a digital project and that's very true but I always liked about the work and the way that I tried to kind of sell the value of liberal arts education was especially you know specifically English was focusing on the narrative of whatever it is you're doing and I think that that is what has been so appealing to me about ATTEC especially the way that we do at Reclaim is that a lot of it is about the narrative you know what's trippy there too is so when I was with I did a presentation with Alan where he created a kind of a fake Twitter account called antisocial which was this anti kind of complaining and I was like I didn't really I was like that's weird you could just do that and then I went to work with Tom and he created a Twitter account called Jim quits which we basically because I was leaving and he was basically like trolling me in a very fun creative way and I was like one of the things I was trying to wrap my head around is this emergence of these new tools that gave like new ways of writing and connecting which were powerful Twitter was super powerful and then in fact we lived through a moment where culture grew out of it a way of communicating and you saw the hashtag and then you saw it become part of a presidential race which everyone was saying that's just to show what you have for your breakfast and then it's like no no no no this is actually a cultural phenomenon that we're living through and I didn't understand any of that when Tom was like I just thought it was funny like Jim quits what are you doing Jim or whatever and part of that thing with being an attack was kind of like living in that and trying to understand it which I can't claim I did at all times but it was weird just to look back after 2008 say and then see where everything went in 2012 or 16 and how much it really became a part of the fabric of the culture it's really trippy well you remember too we were in a lockdown in the early days of Twitter at the University of Richmond and we got like a picture of the person who had what turned out to be an air gun in the library before it was live in the news and stuff like in like how all that stuff was happening in the moment but super crazy you know just a weird thing to live through got active shooter and social media a nice combo deal there Tom literally like to give you a sense had to delete the Jim quits account because like not everyone understood like how the media worked and the joy of a group of people like they read it literally and it was kind of a very weird like moment where it was like wait wait wait wait you won't let us install wordpress making us delete this Jim quits account like I don't understand it was such a trippy moment I still hope that when the Library of Congress makes the tweets a little more accessible that I'll be able to get the old ones out and I will definitely do something with it was a lesson in context too because I would have people like who I knew and various other guys is like DMing me and being like are you alright have you seen the Jim quits account like I'm sitting next to the guy who's writing it it's such a weird thing well I mean that to me is like if I look back at the stuff that I've done that like I care about and like and the reason I like the job it hits on stuff that you've all said throughout this but it was always about like exploring a new thing doing something that's kind of fun and a little bit out on the edge of something they might be something dumb like Jim quits or you know non programist in or the ed tech survivalist or whatever but like it was about having fun pushing the boundaries of stuff as a way to show like who I might be and to keep kind of going along those routes with people who who had like a spark of joy left in their soul rather than like you know and like there's a place for doing the mundane and you have to do that as part of the job but the reason it was worth continuing was for those things where you did something bizarre with cool people that you met in just weird ways and that often were facilitated by the internet in one way or another it's not all bad social media not all bad you know like so I don't know that's kind of what I think of origin story it's about those people those connections and those moments of things be they face to face or digital like being Alan and I interacted for years before I met him face to face so I don't know I think that's a good note to end on we're at time anyway or a little bit past but yeah thanks everyone for sharing today and I'm gonna hit the stop button on the recording here and