It's Gonna Be May
News from April 2024
Welcome to the Roundup! April's been a big month, and May promises to be just as big as the school year starts to wrap up. Let's hit it!
Announcements
New Offering - Custom Professional Development Resources
Digital capability is key in higher education. If you're looking to develop a new vision or champion the power of open-source tools and platforms within your institution, we can help.
We announced this on the blog earlier this month, and we're announcing it again here because we've realized people may not know: Reclaim offers tailor-made professional development resources and custom projects to help Educational Technologists, faculty and staff keep up with the fast-changing tools and technologies that are core to digital education.
If you've enjoyed one of our flex courses and thought, "What we could use is more of that!" or come away from a workshop saying, "Man, that gives me a really cool idea..." then reach out. We're here for you, so the next time you invest in infrastructure, ask about how our expert team can help you and your institution find sustainable, cost-effective ways to support faculty and students with instructional technology skills development.
May Community Chat - Commons in a Box OpenLab
We’re big fans of the Commons in a Box OpenLab, so for May’s Community Chat we want to highlight the amazing work that’s driving the City Tech OpenLab, and the ways that OpenLab can create an open platform for collaborative teaching and learning. If you're curious about OpenLab, join us on May 15th at 12pm ET to learn more! Details, including how to register, are on the events calendar.
April Community Chat - Workshop Share-A-Thon
If you missed our April Community Chat, no worries! We sat down to chat through all the concerns and considerations that go into planning a great workshop, and we even recorded it for those who weren't able to make it. Catch the rerun here!
News from Infrastructure: Changes to Remote MySQL Access
If you missed the announcement: we've blocked remote MySQL access across our infrastructure due to our new cybersecurity compliance requirements. Domain of One's Own and Managed Hosting admins can choose to re-enable this access, but we want to make sure you're aware of the risks involved. This blog post provides details on the decision, the risks that come with allowing Remote MySQL access, what alternatives are available, and how you can work with us in the event that you do need to re-enable it.
News from Infrastructure: AutoSSL Rate Limiting on cPanel Servers
Another recent announcement from Infrastructure is that cPanel is ending support for Sectigo as their SSL certificate provider for the AutoSSL function, and switching over to Let's Encrypt. Because of Let's Encrypt's rate limiting functions, some servers are running into the limit cap when trying to issue certificates to new accounts, particularly post-migration. Check the blog for more information on the situation and what steps are being taken to mitigate it.
(Temporary) Farewell to Amanda
And finally, we're saying a (thankfully temporary) farewell to Amanda. She'll be on family leave for the month of May, and rejoining us in a limited capacity starting in early June. Thank you, Amanda, for all your amazing work. We'll miss you, but here's hoping you have a wonderful time!
Reclaim TV Guide
We kicked off the month with an April Fools fueled game show called Best Support on the Internet! We had a ton of fun putting this one together.
Then on the 12th, we chatted with Quinn Dombrowski about the DH RPG! We had a great time chatting about RPGs as a way to model how life's randomness can impact even the best-planned projects.
On the 19th, Taylor and Amanda chatted about the Arc Browser, as well as the ways Large Language Models are being integrated into web-related tools and services.
Then to round out the month, Taylor and Jim took a look at YunoHost, an interesting tool built on top of Debian Linux designed to make self-hosting easier. Think of it like a community maintained alternative to cPanel. We gave it a spin on Reclaim Cloud to see how it all works.
Finally, during the month of May, we ran a flex course called Newsletters with Ghost! In fact, it wrapped up today! You can check out the blog posts and associated videos here: Newsletters with Ghost – Reclaim EdTech.
Looking ahead to May, we've got quite a bit already on the calendar!
- Friday May 03 @ 10am ET - Wrapping up our Newsletters with Ghost Flex Course
- Friday May 10 @ 10am ET - Open LLMs on Reclaim Cloud
- Friday May 17 @ 10amET - Let's Talk ReclaimPress! with Bryan Mathers
- Friday May 24 @ 10am ET - Protoweb
- Friday May 31 @ 10am ET - Own your slides with reveal.js
And you can see the updated schedule at any time by checking out events.reclaimhosting.com!
Recent Blog Posts
Reclaim kicked off this month right with some reflections on OER24! In her post "OER24: Blogging is the way… open is the way", Maren celebrates her experiences with members of the open community. Meanwhile, Meredith shares day-by-day reflections in "Un-CORK-ing the #OER24 Thoughts," and over on Reclaim the Blog, they put together a compilation of highlights for anyone who wasn't able to make it to the conference!
Over on the Bava, Jim's post "100 Years of EdTech" is reflections on OER24 from afar – in particular, shining a light on Martin Weller and his 30 years contributing to the EdTech world. And in "Aggressive Technologies is Overvalued", he shares a fun moment getting to sit in on ds106.ai, where he and Paul Bond argued that ds106.ai's fictional company Aggressive Technologies has been valued too highly for its actual financials, only to be shut down by their legal rep Martha Burtis.
In more conference news, Taylor and Maren were able to participate in the SUNY Digital Learning Conference 2024! Their presentation, "Reclaiming Our Socials", focused on how Reclaim works to maintain open autonomy when the social media-sphere of today is becoming increasingly closed. Check out Maren's pre-conference pitch and Taylor's post-conference slide deck to see what it's all about.
And finally, let's wrap the blogging with a post from Chris, "Toxitolerant – “Extremophile” (EP)", where he breaks down the process by which his band created their new EP. YEAH!!!
Staff Picks
That's right, it's time for the freshest Reclaim staff picks that we could find for this fine month!
Starting things off strong, Pilot shares Dracula Daily, a newsletter that delivers the classic novel Dracula, emailed to you in “real time”. It starts again in 2024 on May 03 - that's this Friday! They also shared XKCD's (Amazing) Machine. And finally, Pilot also wanted you to know about IANA's Root Zone Database, which basically is a list of every Top-Level Domain. It's always amazing seeing how many of these exist!
This month, Jim shared this post about Jack Kirby's comic book adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Extended Edition: Kirby meets Kubrick, from the outstanding blog 70s Sci-Fi Art!
Taylor had recommended a WordPress plugin that does object caching, called SQlite Object Cache. It might be worth a shot if you have a particularly complex site that is slowed down by certain types of database queries! He also has been playing around with the command line tool Gum, which can be used to add some visual pizzazz to your command line scripts.
Pilot and Taylor both highly recommend Honey Heist, which is an RPG where all the player characters are bears! If you are looking for a fast and simple (it's a one-pager for players) RPG to try out with a group of friends, in person or remote, this might be worth a look!
Finally, from the whole Reclaim team, we've got a playlist we created to celebrate the launch of ReclaimPress. It's definitely eclectic, but also a good listen:
Thanks for another great month, gang! We'll see you in May.
