Recorded at the University of Mary Washington after Open Education 2014, this episode features commentary from:

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This transcript was automatically generated by YuJa.

Hello once again, my name is Darcy Norman, and I’m thrilled today to bring you the third part of the Reclaiming Educational Technology Series, which were a series of interviews recorded at the University of Mary Washington after the Open Education 2014 conference. Interviews were conducted by myself and David Kernahan, and video and audio recorded by Andy Rush. I added them together into a series of themes. This is the third one, Episode 3, Part 3, I guess, flexible and open and it features commentary from Audrey Waters from Hack Education, from Tim Owens who was at the University of Mary Washington and is now at Reclaim Hosting, from Ben Wordmuller who is the co-founder of known which is some software was actually at the heart of the indie web movement as one of the first prototype standalone indie web applications so some really interesting context there and Jim Groom who was at the University of Mary Washington is now at Reclaim Hosting. 

Without further ado, here is Part 3, Flexible and Open. My name is Audrey Watters. 

I’m a writer. I write about education technology. 

education technology. I mean, and there are these other, there are these other practices that higher education in particular has adopted that are sort of counter to, I think, the ethos of the web, right? 

the ethos of the web, right? So we put, we, we publish our research in proprietary closed academic journals that cost, you know, that cost our libraries tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to, that the articles aren’t openly available, and when they are, they’re written in a language that’s, I mean, it’s like the academic language that’s, you know, I mean, I think it’s English in our case, but it’s sort of written in a way that’s really hard, hard to understand, and it’s not, the information isn’t accessible, so we don’t do a lot of the public-facing PR that, you know, that companies like Like Udacity, for example, the technology sector in general, has a huge marketing, has a huge marketing arm. I mean, and I’m not even counting the journalists that just rewrite the press releases. I mean, a lot of what happens in Silicon Valley is hype and marketing around their stuff. It’s not actually a bunch of engineers just making cool things. It’s a bunch of marketers trying to convince us that what they’ve built is really amazing. The project that I’m working on that I’m excited about is I’ve been doing a lot of research into the history of education technology, which is something that, I mean, I just don’t think we talk about very often. I think that particularly in Silicon Valley, which likes to imagine that there is no history. There’s only like the now and the future. You know, Silicon Valley is very much interested in this planned obsolescence, right? Like you buy an iPhone and then in like six months’ time, it’s out of date, right? And they try to convince you that, my goodness, how dare you use such outmoded technology time to buy a new iPhone. So it’s very much history is really not something that Silicon Valley is interested in. So I’ve been looking at what are some of the roots of the technologies that we adopt in terms of the development of education psychology, intelligence testing, standardized testing. How do we end up with these technological practices that pre-date computers, right? Why does the multiple choice, where did the multiple choice question come from, right? Why does it have four, why does it have four choices? How did that get hard coded, you know, now literally with code, but how do those sorts of practices get sort of hard-coded into education so that when we make things digital, we don’t actually address those underlying modes. 

We just sort of replicate them with flashier graphics and on different devices, but we don’t actually ask sort of what’s this legacy that we carry forward with us. 

Again, that turns students into objects to be shaped rather than individuals that should have a voice and a say in what that looks like. My name is Tim Owens. 

I’m from here in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I work for the University of Mary Washington. 

Yeah, it’s been a really interesting path. You know, we played around with the idea of hippie hosting and the server co-op, and we moved with No Main and One Zone at University of Mary Washington and later with other institutions playing around with the same idea of the server in a box, that everybody got their own space, that their own, as Jim would call it, often you get your own slice of a server. Well, that idea starts to fall away a little bit with these newer technologies. Now it might be a virtual server, it might be multiples. you’re dropped into one of, at the moment, four different servers. Don’t know which one you’re on. Doesn’t matter, right? So it’s an interesting world as you start to break away into the different pieces. And it’s not one box to fit everything. It’s sort of breaking things down into the individual needs. I need Apache for this thing. I need a database over here for this thing. And instead of trying to fit this square peg into that round hole, we’re starting to organize things in many different ways. There’s a newer technology, newer, it’s new to me. It’s probably been out for at least a couple years, but people are really picking up on it called Docker. And the idea behind Docker is it’s virtualization technology, but instead of the virtualization technology that we’ve used up until this point is creating entire servers in sort of a virtualized box, which is fine, and it’s great because it’s hardware independent, but at the same time we’re still taking all of these moving pieces and we’re putting them all into one single thing. The idea of Docker is that you have containers, and so you have your Apache container. You have your files container and your database container. Maybe you have multiple Apache containers running in different places, and why would you do that? Because you can mix and match things and sort of architect something really interesting and make it really easy. You can duplicate the – I don’t need to have multiple operating system containers because all of those other services can rely on that single operating system container. But now when I want to upgrade the operating system, I don’t have to worry about whether or not these other containers are going to freak out or it’s things are going to get overwritten. You know, I can – and that there’s this whole community of sharing, which is important too. I’ve seen that a whole lot with the Docker community, which is something that I’m following pretty closely. You look on GitHub and people are creating Docker images on all kinds of things and putting it out there. Hey, this is WordPress with Nginx and it runs on Google page speed and loads lightning fast and it has a, you know, it has a varnish back end and things that it’s like, in order to tell someone how to install that, it used to be, you know, like, oh, I’ll create a Wiki doc, it’ll be about seven pages long, you’re going to need some Unix experience And now it’s sort of you run like, you know, one command and it fires up multiple containers it breaks all those things into different pieces and fires them up and so and then if they update it with like Hey, we got a new version of this. We’re doing things a little differently. 

little differently. It’s just like Rebuild, you know rebuild this container and and and things start firing up in different places So, you know, it’s really exciting to see that move away from the one big thing to the multiple little things that I need and the ability to mix and match them and stack them as I see fit rather than Trying to to fit all of that into one scenario And then what I might want is not something that someone else wants and you know Or there might be limitations within the technology here And that’s okay, right? 

And that’s okay, right? I think in some aspects. There’s some student agency to that right so that the a student who wants to do X, Y, or Z, the answer isn’t, well, you could do that, but we got an ABC box. We didn’t get an X, Y, Z box. And to do that, we’d have to procure something different. It runs all this other different stuff. 

Now, we can start to get to saying yes all the time. 

Just, yeah, sure. You want to run that? Sure. You want to run Ghost over here and Discourse over there, and you want to run WordPress Multisite over there, but you’re really worried about making sure that it’s up all the time, sure, yeah. Like whatever you want, we can do it because these containers exist and this virtualization technology makes it extremely cheap and fast to fire things up on the fly. It becomes a lower barrier of entry because, you know, there’s no failure here. There’s no danger. You know, I can fire things up and I can make them go away and, you know, I haven’t wasted actual resources. 

I’ve wasted, you know, pieces of a server that can expand and contract as the needs do. 

The big thing for me is Reclaim Hosting. Reclaim Hosting was born, as I said, out of hippie hosting in many regards. 

So, you know, it seems wild, but it was, you know, almost three years ago that we started thinking about this idea of the server co-op. And then we took those same ideas from, you know, that little hippie hosting thing, and I said, we could do it with students, too. Why not? So we did the Domain of One’s Own pilot, which grew into an institutional program here. And we’d talk about that at other conferences, and people would say, that’s great, but, you know, in typical fashion, the biggest criticism was, that’s great for you, but I could never do that. And Jim and I last year sat down, and we were talking and spitballing different ideas, and And he said, I really, really want you to just set up something where other people could do this, too. I know you can do it. And I thought, well, sure, the money’s there. And he said, money’s not there. Don’t worry about the money. So we started playing around with it. Jim had just gotten a Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant, and he said, we got a little bit of money here. Could we build on that? And I said, that’ll get us by for a couple months. And so we thought, well, for a year, let’s allow other faculty to just play with this. We won’t worry about the money. So we only charged for the domain. We didn’t charge for the hosting. We made it as cheap as possible and still try to make it as cheap as possible just to let other people play with this. The conversations that I’ve had from so many different people with that, it’s just opened my world to so many different institutions, so many different faculty doing amazing stuff with their students and it’s a constant joy for me to get to talk to people and help them out and what a breath of fresh air for them you know they’re coming from other places where they say things like oh I used to want to do something like this with GoDaddy and they were no help whatsoever or I could never do this because for my students like it was like $20 a month and that’s a ton of money for them at the time you know you might as well be charging a hundred dollar textbook for a semester, you know, and they couldn’t justify it. And now we’re able to start working with them to think about these possibilities. You lower those barriers to entry, you know, and you try to make it as easy as possible, and people jump on board. And when I get to work with those people and help them imagine the stuff they’re doing, it goes beyond anything that I’ve done at DTLT. You know, like, I love the work that I’ve done at DTLT and continue to do with the faculty here. And for me, it’s like, amplify that, you know, to infinity. And that’s the pleasure that I get of getting to work with all of these different people and think about the projects they’re working on. I was talking to an institution just the other day who was inspired by DS-106 radio. But he thought, I talked to, you know, he said, I talked to my IT department. They think I’m out of my mind. They don’t even know what an internet radio station would look like, much less that they have the resources to support it. And I’m able to say, yeah, yes, yes, let’s do that, let’s play around with it, let’s fire up a server, and let’s play around with that software and see if it might do what you want it to do. So getting those opportunities to just play around with stuff, play around with different ideas, you know, with different faculty from all over the world. It’s been really exciting. 

My name’s Ben Werdmuller. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Known. 

And Known is a single website for all your content. So what we’re trying to do is empower students to actually publish all their coursework, their notes, their ideas, everything they feel comfortable with to a space that they control rather than a space that’s controlled either by administration or by some external vendor. So I think it’s important for everybody. You know, we’ve all lost control of our data and our profiles to companies, actually a really small handful of companies that control all of our conversations. But for students, it’s important for a whole bunch of reasons. One of the clearest is that, actually the learning management systems, which is usually a student’s interaction with learning technology, unfortunately, they’re really designed around administration rather than learning at all. And so what we’ll often see, for example, is once a class is over, you know, they’re forced to use the learning management system in their class to begin with, but once a class is over, it’s often deleted, which means that the student actually doesn’t have any way to build on any of that knowledge as they continue their learning journey. So by publishing to their own space, they get to keep that knowledge, they get to keep reflecting on all the things they’ve done at the institution, and they can choose what happens to it. So they can keep it when they graduate even and continue to build on it and I think that actually is, it’s better not just in terms of software because you get to control who, you know, mines your data and who uses it for profit but also for life, you know, you get to build on all the things you’ve written about, all the things you’ve reflected as you carry on. I think there are, there is room for closed spaces as well as open spaces. I think actually it’s about control and, you know, both the individual and the institution should be able to define what their community looks like and what the connected world around them looks like and how they interact with it. I think the thing about the LMS slash VLE, in the old days we were calling them CMSs, which is horrendously confusing, the thing about all of those is they still have a place. I mean, known, for example, doesn’t replace the LMS, you know, not by a mile. And what it can do is sort of sit alongside it or sort of as a layer on top of it that provides a more personal experience in addition to all the security and administration that that software provides. I think being able to take small, you know, simple pieces of software and kind of string them together to form kind of a suite of tools that is suitable for you, that’s a huge deal. I mean, people have been talking about personal learning environments for quite a long time. It’s important and I think more possible because of the open web than ever before to take all these tools and create an ecosystem that is yours. The most important thing that we’re adding to known is, you know, right now it’s a tool for publishing and for representing yourself online. That’s only half the story. It’s possibly less than half the story. What we’re working on is the ability, you know, for it to be the gateway to your entire community online. So you can connect to other known sites, you can connect to other sites that are running other software like WordPress, other platforms that produce feeds or use the interweb technologies that we’ve based our product on. So it’s not about creating a known-based social network. It’s about creating actually a social network that works like the web where every node is independent but you can all connect together seamlessly. And that’s huge. I mean that’s huge in education because suddenly – I mean the current – what I call the silo social networks, places like Twitter and Facebook, they’re actually filtering your feed. They’re choosing what data, what information you get to see, which in an educational context is horrible because obviously you’re connecting people to people to learn, you’re connecting people to share research, and you need to have that direct connection. You need to have actually a proper communication line to them. And so we’re hoping to provide that. 

That’s one of the reasons we’re doing it. And another reason is really it’s time for social networking to evolve and really to work like email where you can choose your own provider but still interact completely seamlessly without having to care what provider the person you’re communicating with uses. Right now, I mean, I’m excited about what we’re doing with Reclaim Your Domain or Domain of One Zone. It’s got a lot of different names. Reclaim Hosting is another kind of outshoot of this or offshoot of this, is the idea and it kind of came to me and crystallized to me a little bit for today because I’ve been through four of these domain of one’s own or reclaim your domain sections now. And things that are coming back again and again are questions of Amazon Web Services, this kind of virtualized space for doing these things and controlling notions of infrastructure in a very distributed way, GitHub, this idea of a kind of collective sharing versioning software to also start running an infrastructure on top of a third-party service in ways that are just almost alien to how we’re thinking about EdTech. And another one that’s interesting is APIs. And what’s great about them is I don’t understand any of them. Like I’ve come to everyone for the last two years, four times, and every time I’m like, okay, I think I understand what an API is, or I think I understand how GitHub works, or I think I get the idea of virtualized servers, and I never do, but I know that it’s important. And I know that as a group, So we both have to understand the difficulty of the tech and what it means. And I think why DTLT might be particularly good at this or might be particularly interested in this is that because we don’t necessarily live in that world, we spend the time and energy to try and translate how it’s significant for our institution. And so right now I’m really interested in getting back into the work of translating some of that stuff. And it’s hard because we have a lot of projects going already and we have a building to take care of, and we have faculty to support, but I think carving out the playtime, and that’s where that play might be interesting, is carving out the playtime to understand it and do it in a way that’s actually through metaphor or through analogy or through some fun, stupid thing that no one ever thought to talk about Amazon Web Services in relationship to The Wire is a good thing, and it’s A, that’s fun, but B, that starts to break down some of the kind of fetishizing of the tech and also obscuring of it. And usually the fetishizing, obscuring it is for a different reason, a political reason, a reason to kind of keep people who don’t understand it maybe in the dark around what choices you’re making as an institution and why. And we want to really be as open as possible about the decisions we make and about the technology that’s available and around the real politics that drive them. And I think when you do those three things and you do them well as a group, you’ll at least have a kind of dialogue at any given time around the state of tech now, because more and more it’s inescapable for a university to pretend like they can’t engage deeply and have the technologies defining their mission. And a group like ours is an investment in actually kind of thinking through that. And one of the things that made me most proud, and you talked about it, like I was really proud when the president reached out to us and said, what’s this whole MOOC thing? And they had six people who had thought deeply about it and who had thought like really critically, but not dismissively about it. And you know, we were able to share with them what we knew. And we were a resource that they had been paying for and investing in. And I think it paid off, paid off just in how they understand themselves as the liberal arts, the digital liberal arts, a liberal arts that’s dedicated to thinking critically about this stuff, but also to investing a group of people who can help them make a path forward in a time where everyone’s saying education’s over, higher ed’s doomed, the apocalypse is now. And I’m really proud of the fact that we can kind of tone down that rhetoric and have a longer view of the field and of what’s possible moving forward, because higher ed’s not going away. Education is not dead, but how we use this and the choices we make now matter for the next generation of students, which is where our attention should be. You know, let’s get away from this hype and let’s start refocusing on what it means for our students to understand the web, to understand their relationship to these third party services, to understand who they are online, to understand the implications of digital and identity, to understand the questions of how they are a product now of a whole new ecosystem of consumerism. You know, that’s what we did in American studies and history and English and all these other humanities. And the great thing about EdTech is it’s a field of sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities at once, rolled into a field that’s in some way still marginal enough that they can have its doctor oblivions. because no one’s paying attention and I think that’s a it’s a beautiful moment to be exploring that stuff and be both within disciplines and outside of them and it’s cool that our university trusts us enough to a fund us but to be turned to us when big issues arise that really shake the foundations of higher ed so I guess I’m proud of that