 for us to be able to talk about this session or to do this session and kind of talk about, you know, I don't like saying selling it, but there's a component of that, right? Like how do you in a concise timeline explain what domain of one's own is to folks on your campus that may need it or may not know that they need it, right? Like they're looking for something like it. So we'll talk a little bit about, you know, what has worked for us as admins in the past and what we see folks doing that we think is successful. Obviously, the title, How to Talk About Domain, sounds extremely prescriptive, but this isn't going to be at all. So maybe a better title, a little bit more nuanced title would have made sense, but here we are. So we did ask earlier about Domain's Elevator Pitches and I kind of wanted to, before we dig into the session, talk about Lauren's here that she put in. So hers is, in short, domain of one's own is a at scale, cPanel hosting environment for the higher ed community. The cPanel dashboards include access to hundreds or over 100 open source applications, as well as access to key functions for managing a digital presence like DNS, databases, file management, cPanels are automatically provisioned end users upon sign up and all of the accounts sit behind a custom home page login portal that can be branded for a given institution. The beauty of Domain's is that end users can log in quickly for their campus with their campus credentials via single sign on and they can be up and running with a domain of their choosing in a matter of seconds. Domain of one's own encourages freedom ownership and exploration in a digital space and cPanel is completely transportable when students are graduating and ready to leave the institution. Okay, so that's a mouthful, but I think it is a very complete sort of what is this thing and it covers the tech, what does it do, what does it offer, what is it like compatible with, as well as some of the unique things, because cPanel hosting itself isn't, you know, the reclaim hosting is not the only company you can find that at at all. We're not the cheapest company, we're not, you know, but what we do offer is this sort of educationally compatible environment really, right? So it also, that description mentions things like single sign on and portability and tools to explore digital presence. All that stuff's great. Love that. So I think thinking about that description going into this session, I think is a good one, because I'm going to offer us a description that I think tries to check the same boxes, but from a different angle. And so I think it may be kind of useful to see that, not that everyone's going to talk about these things the same way at all. But I do like when folks can kind of share thought processes behind things like this, and we can kind of just demonstrate it and hopefully it's useful to someone. And, you know, before we dig in that a little bit, I've just like totally been yammering for like the first four minutes of this session. So Amanda, can you speak a little bit to some of the experiences you've had talking about domain of one's own on on campuses or with maybe not on, but you know what I mean, with a with students and faculty and what works and doesn't work or what you like to touch on what you like to focus on. Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, starting this off with bringing in Lauren's elevator pitch is perfect, because it really drives home to me that it depends on who you're talking to, right? It depends on, you know, are you in a room full of IT people who want to know about the tech who want to know about the security, or are you in a room of passionate faculty members who are excited about the idea of coursework and digital presence and digital identity. And that kind of will influence whether or not you're you're focusing on certain parts of it. And for me, I always kind of leaned heavily into the, I think what your presentation is going to be talking about, which as Shannon put earlier in the discord, about digital identity. That was something that people got pretty excited about around SUNY for the most part. And something that I think if they're really trying to develop and so being able to harness that kind of idea within domain of one's own was really appealing to folks. So, yeah. Yeah, I pulled up the, okay, so this is this is what Lauren put. And I'm pulling this up just to mention that I, looking at this kind of, I'm separating it into sort of two parts in my head after reading it. This part you mentioned audiences, right? This first part, it's a little bit of, well, it's the technical, what it is. And it also is a little bit about what it is, what is unique about it from a technical perspective and that it all accounts sit behind a custom homepage login portal that can be branded, right? And then the starting with, I would say the beauty of domains is that going on from there is kind of the why, right? So you can do this, but why? Why does that matter? And the, I'm going to share a presentation that I used when I was a domains admin at St. Norbert College quite a bit. I would say, I got a back it to the beginning. I would say I kind of developed this and it changed pretty much every time I gave it, but I kind of landed on this over time. And it's just, I just called it why domains. And typically the audience here for this presentation was a group of students usually, but sometimes it would be faculty or staff too, depending on the context. But most often it was a group of students and it was usually because I was asked by a faculty member to help with an assignment. So they would say, hey, I want my students to do this, you know, name a thing on domain of one's own. And if that thing included students making their own accounts and building a website. So I would, I would ask to do this in their class. And usually only this as the like Taylor comes to the class component. Very often it was very common for folks to say, hey, I want my students to come or I want my students to blog for my class and do this part of assignment. Can you come in for a whole day and get them set up and have them sign up for accounts and do all of that in one session? And I would say, no, I would say, typically I would say give me five to 10 minutes. And then that's all I need. And, and then say, oh, we have more time than that. I go, I understand. But I would prefer to sell them on why they're doing this and what this can do. And then show them how they can get help in this. And then we'll go from there. Because personally, and again, this is a very personal thing, I didn't usually like the let's all click along with Taylor style thing, because I think typically that ends up with students being frustrated because they have some folks who are like ahead and are waiting on you and some folks who are behind and are frustrated and all the while no one gets context for what they're doing, because we have to spend so much time on the click on this button in this place. Why is that button? We don't have time, but you're gonna click on it, right? And I think for domain of one zone, the why is the most important thing, especially for folks who are unfamiliar or just haven't encountered these ideas, right, like of building a digital presence and what tools exist to do it and why you might choose one over the other. I think that's really important. So I would give this little presentation between, I think I said five and 10, it was more like five and 15, and I'll kind of talk about why the big gap in here in a second. But it's pretty quick. But my plan was to end with it with students understanding what is domain of one's own do what does it do for them and why would they choose it over alternatives for like building a digital presence most of the time. This is the presentation I gave, so it is like St. Arbor branded in certain ways and night domains is the name of their domain of one's own. So just keep that in mind is it. But I would kind of start off with talking, giving a version of what I just said of like, Hey, I'm here to tell you why you're using this thing. We're not going to actually create an account just yet. I'll talk about what you'll need to do to do that at the end, but you don't need your like computer out right now. And so we're going to start with what it is that you need to make a website. And I would usually also have the faculty member like reiterate what the assignment was and what the goals were as part of this to even if it was in the syllabus. I like that to come right before my thing just so I could connect what they're going to do assignment wise to what I'm going to be talking about. And so we would start off with talking about what what you need to make a website. So I would say you need a domain name and a domain name is your name.com or example.org or Google.com or Facebook.com. Those are domain names. So you basically need something that people can type in a browser to visit the site. So that's one thing you need. You need server space or hosting and that's the domain name will point to that server space or hosting. And you know, I would mention that a server, you know, you've certainly heard the word server before, but in many cases a server is really just a computer that's always on and connected to the internet. Technically anyone can make a server out of almost any type of computer hardware. I mean, you could theoretically plug your laptop in and install the right software and host the website on that if you kept it on and your internet connection was reliable. Most people don't because it would be a huge pain to do that and it would be unreliable. But you know, it's just a computer that's on and connected to the internet and configured correctly. And then third, you need content or you need something to put on that server. So that might be an application that lets you make a website. It might be something that you like coded yourself that's something you want to do. But you need something to host on the server. So and I had this totally rad 90 most 90s picture I could find on the right side. So I'm just a big fan of that. Even though it's kind of upsetting. So then I kind of draw that too. Okay, so that's what you need. What does that translate to on night domain? So I said, well, for our night domains, you get a free domain name. That's a sub domain technically off of night domain. So you can pick something for for instance, Taylor dot night domains you could pick. You can also buy a domain name if you want to domain names like this like that ending.com that don't have something existing. This is those cost money. So I would explain to them like you can register them and bring them in you don't have to. And I think depending on what they're doing in most cases, I would say given that this cost money not a lot, I would recommend doing that when you're ready, right? You don't need to brush into that you can always move things. Then the server space. So this is this is essentially what night domains is I'd explain them and say like the server space is being paid for by the college, right? And it's it's available to you in that case of S&C they offer hosting until a year after the student graduates. And I also mentioned that you can take the site with you when you leave and there's a lot of different ways to do that and I didn't go in all the ways but just to say that what you build here you can bring with you and actually export and we can even help you do that at S&C. So I'd like to lead up with that right away because I personally I think that's really important like whatever you create with technology you have to think about the beginning and end of it and what you're going to do with it. If it matters, you know, another option I could say is you can also let it expire. So I like to be right up front with that when I'm talking to students so that they're thinking about that. I think it's really often for folks to be used to like the idea of like you can keep this forever or it's unlimited and we all know that that's not really true, right? Like business priorities change. So it's in my opinion a good idea to have an exit plan and this is kind of where we plant those seeds for the idea of digital identity and ownership that we'll get into in this little bit later. And then I said finally content on night domains that can be a lot of different things. There's tons of applications ready to go for you. There's WordPress is the most common thing to do on night domains. There's a Mecca. There's Media Wiki. They're all optimized for different use cases. You can program things yourself if you want to. There's a lot of different options. So usually I was like extremely animated, lots of coffee in me. This isn't going to make any sense in this scenario. So I would try to like kind of tie things together like all right, so you've described to me a place I can build a website. Like why are you excited about this? Why are you almost literally jumping around the front of our classroom? And I'd say well it's because of something called digital identity and data ownership. I'm excited because while you can build a website a lot of different ways, I don't think anyone is wondering how do I put something on the internet? People have lots of options for that. Night domains is a really good option for two main reasons and that's a way you can sculpt your digital identity in a way you can explore data ownership and have some agency over what you create. So we'd start with digital identity and I would just say like as a concept digital identity you can think about the questions like who are you online or how are you represented online? What traces do you leave online? And depending on this privacy would come up a lot, right? Like and I'd mention that like in privacy is definitely an important part of ownership and identity but in this case when I mean traces I mean intentional things that you specifically say I want to post this about myself. This is Taylor putting himself out there. How do you describe yourself to others and how do you shape your digital presence? I would often ask folks if they had heard of the idea of like digital citizenship and pretty much all of them would have many many of them from like K-12 and they would say yeah digital citizenship is like being careful about what you post because you can't remove things from the internet or you can't have control of that and I'd say you know yeah I mean that that's true to this extent and now you're an adult so you I'm here to encourage you if you're comfortable to think about what you do want to share about yourself on the internet and the best way to do that I think is to create something and that that's how you can shape that presence because you don't have a lot of control always anyway of what in absolute terms can be removed you should think about what you can create and and how you can take ownership of that so and in this screenshot this is super old at this point but I have mentioned over here that like just the fact that I have a domain name with my name as the title of the site means and I've had it for a little while means that when you google my name on google and I believe I did this in a private window so it's like not logged into my google account it's the second result on google which is kind of cool and not not everyone wants that first of all and not everyone can get that depending on your name right like there's a lot of a lot of the complexities there but just to say that this is one way you can shape that presence is by adding to it okay so I depending on the time this would be a session that an element that I would potentially remove in some cases we would also do an exercise called visitor resident mapping I don't think we're going to have time to do this today like in this session but I just wanted to mention what it is if you're familiar unfamiliar or if you're not familiar with it but it's basically like a framework that lets you kind of map out how you represent yourself map out your digital identity and I would if you're interested in this at all I would highly recommend checking out the link in the slide deck that I have but David White and a team of that he leads I believe developed this and they have actually a bunch of other frameworks including a newer framework that they that kind of supersedes this one but I I really like the represent the way visitor resident mapping is very simple to represent and explain to folks but basically you make a grid and you use the terms visitor and resident to explain visitor are places that you don't leave a social trace an intentional social trace and a resident are spaces where you do leave an intentional trace that you create something about yourself and this doesn't have to be you you could be representing a different persona of you right like I am one of those pretty boring people I think that like uses their name everywhere on the internet but a lot of people use different names in different contexts for different reasons and I tend to kind of mix my professional and personal interests on say my blog site but not everyone does some people use separation and that's really interesting and this is one way to represent that basically so I have a link in here jaden.me slash make dash map and that will actually let you just kind of quick make a digital version of this but I would typically have students actually do this on like literal pieces of paper and pen if we are in person and I would usually have this is like if you want to it's up there if you want to use your laptop to make it that's cool too but basically you can just put different tools or websites or social media things whatever on this grid and represent yourself in that way and the cool thing with this is because this is a single grid you could do a lot with this you could make one of these four different personas potentially if you if you think of yourself in that way typically we would do this all in one so I would say like all right I'm going to put Instagram on the resident and personal side because for me I use that for pretty much only personal things and it's certainly resident like there's pictures of my kid there right so it like you definitely get a glimpse into me as a person and how I represent myself but maybe I'd put like say Reddit definitely I would I don't know if I would say it's very personal I use it I read Reddit a lot I consume Reddit and for kind of personal and professional things but certainly more personal so I'm going to put it lower on the scale of personal professional on the y-axis here but I am like I almost never post anything on on Reddit so I'll put it over here and the cool thing about this is depending on what you're doing you can again you can represent this a lot of different ways so I just have like simple text here and I'm changing the color because I because I like it but like you could I've seen when I've asked folks to do this depending on this the context I've seen people automatically do like come up with oh I color coded them by this third metric or I put them in boxes so that they can overlap the the axes and so I'd ask them why they did that right and and what does that mean to them so basically we go through this I would only give them a limited amount of time to do it if we had time at all and then we would I would ask some questions about it so really leading up to the big question of like okay so in the five minutes I've given you to do this which one of you in this class of like you know 31st year students has anything in resident and professional and it would usually be like a couple people would be like I have a LinkedIn and I was like oh do you like LinkedIn they go I hate LinkedIn like cool um and there'd be someone that would be like um technically like I there's like an article on my high school website of me like having received a scholarship and I was like oh great um do you like the picture in there is there a picture in there and in in a couple cases it was no I hate the picture it was like oh what are you gonna do about it and they go well it doesn't matter to me or I guess I could ask them to remove it if it really bothers me but that would lead pretty neatly right into the idea of like agency and ownership right so I'd say like what you need in my opinion is something you actually have control over that you can represent yourself um and I'm gonna kind of speed through this metaphor but I would talk about data ownership as like hey an easy way to think of this is music so like I use Spotify and ham for a while and I also have a small record collection and I would say that I own the records but I wouldn't say I own Spotify or I own my playlists right it's a service to subscribe to and I'm of course at will of the business model of Spotify right like if they decide next month like Spotify premium is $70 a month if your name is Taylor Jaden I would probably be like that's rude and I would stop paying for it right and I would lose access not a big deal though right I have alternatives I could go to a different service I could just not and just use my records like all kinds of things for me in my life this music collection is sort of a commodity that I can replace in certain ways which as a musician hurts me to say that sentence but like that is how I my relationship with music that I listen to right so where that gets tricky is when you're talking about ownership over your identity right like you put time and effort a lot of time probably in many cases if it's important to you and I think you should have a lot of options for what you can do with your identity where it goes what happens to it so I mentioned like all right so like the idea of like wicks wicks is a service you can make a website on and this is going to sound maybe not uh super believable me being an employee at reclaim hosting but keep in mind these slides are when I wasn't um and I was like I don't have problem with wicks as a service or like Squarespace or or any of those alternatives they're good tools if you understand what you're giving up right you you understand that you can't export your site out of Squarespace or Wicks which you create there is going to stay there and as long as you're fine with that and knowing that they could change their prices on you and you either have to decide to start your website over or take the price hike that's what you can do and so I'd say like okay so so why does this matter for night domains and that's because of three things right so you can build your identity using the tools you have a lot of tools available to you they're very flexible and you own the content because you're building the websites using standard technologies and you can bring the site with you when you leave and in fact we will help you here at s and c we will help you do that if you if you need help with it um and then finally you've done this um you've gained a valuable skill in fact that's maybe the biggest one is now you know how to do this and you could do it again because the tools are in most cases free and accessible to almost anyone um and so that was my thing that was basically the whole presentation then after that I'd say hey here's where you get started um hey once you start something post it to our community site because I want to see it um because I in other students want to see it it's great to have examples out there for people to visit and then I would say all right and if you have any questions you should go to the tech bar which is the group of students that we had that I trained to um help uh anybody who needed help with this stuff um and we won't really have a lot of time because we only got a couple minutes left but um you know if you have any questions about any of this stuff the the slides the okay well how how do you um get like students helping with uh other students that kind of stuff I'm always gaming and others at Reclaim are always game to talk about that um but that's that was my elevator pitch I mean it would be a long elevator ride I suppose but um but I like I said I could really do this in about five minutes if I didn't do the visitor resume mapping and occasionally we would leave that part out um so that was a lot Amanda do you have thoughts about like what you would do differently yeah well I think it's so great um I mean we don't really have a lot of time for me to go into all of my reactions about this um I really really hope that people put in discord what they think um and how they would change things in this presentation to fit their purposes on on their campuses um a couple things that really stood out to me were understanding the why definitely helps the how make sense because you could just do button clicking but if they don't understand what they're doing or why they're doing that um um yeah then I mean at the end of the day they're not really learning anything and it's they it's difficult for them to replicate that um and then this I am obsessed with this idea of you know not having people take things you know scare people off of the internet um and and make sure they have as little of a presence as possible on the internet so they don't get in trouble but rather a large one that they cultivate well and I and I don't think it's and by the way we'll probably end up starting this uh last day we'll unwrap up in a few minutes here as it's supposed to start right now but um I don't think it's invalid to say you are not allowed to be private right like that's that's fine and that was not one of my objectives is to say like if you want to have control over this narrative this is a way to do it um I was very careful not to say this is the only way to do it right it's not true all right so thanks um I guess uh we I plant we've maybe planned more more for this session than then we actually had time for and that's all right um we'll see everyone over in the wrap up session so see you on the flip