Leaping Newsletters, It's the Roundup!
News from February 2024
Leap Day only comes once every four years, so let's make the most of it. Join us as we recap February and leap into March together!
Announcements
See You at OER24!
We have long been huge fans of the OER Conference, and over the years we have had a lot of amazing moments with the wonderful community of the conference. This year Meredith, Maren and Jim are excited to be part of the program with our session Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education happening on March 27th!
Maren's announcement post on our blog has all the details, but for those who can't make it in person, we'll also be sharing a sneak preview of our session on-stream on Friday March 22nd as we get pumped – and on Thursday March 28th we'll have a special stream recorded at OER! (More details on both of those in the ICYMI section – look for the upcoming streams, and while you're there check out Maren & Meredith's "Reclaim & OER #4Ever" stream from this past month.) We'll even have the chance to give you all the scoop on our brand new projects, too, including ReclaimEDU and a preview of a new launch just around the corner.
It's been a huge year for Reclaim, and we couldn't be more excited to return to OER and celebrate open education with you all. If you can't make it in person, join us on the streams, and if you can, come say hi! See you at OER24!
April Flex Course - Newsletters with Ghost!
Who ya gonna call? Ghost-bloggers! That's right, in just a month and a half (oh jeez) we're hosting our next flex course, all about how to run your newsletters through Ghost. Since we last ran a course on Ghost (November of 2022, how the time flies), it's has grown and changed a lot as a platform, and so have we! So from April 15th to May 3rd we'll be revisiting this classic with fresh takes and a year and a half's worth of new experience. Check out the events calendar to register, 'cause this flex course will truly be the Ghost with the Most...
March Community Chat - EdTech Origins
Every superhero has a great origin story, and there's nothing more super than EdTech. So for this month's Community Chat, happening March 20th at 12pm ET, we hope you'll share your EdTech Origin stories! How did you get started in EdTech? Who/what/when/where was that entry point, and what got you hooked? Come join us by registering on the events calendar! (Our email invites may not be as dramatic as the Batsignal, but they're still pretty cool.)
February Community Chat - Reclaim ❤️’s Open Education Week
And if you missed last month's Community Chat, no worries! When we sat down with Alan Levine to talk about Open Education Week (which is happening in just a couple days, March 04-08!) we made sure to record it. Alan gave us an awesome overview of the work OE Global is doing to put on this event, and you can check it out right here.
News from Infrastructure - CentOS7 → Ubuntu Transition
You may already know, but CentOS7 is beginning to reach its end-of-life. As a result, we're starting to migrate servers over from CentOS to Ubuntu. Some of you may have already received notifications to this effect regarding your specific servers, as we're reaching out to each admin team individually when the time comes for their project to migrate.
You won't need to take a direct role in any of the migration work, but you should be aware that if you have any top-level domains pointed to the server that aren't managed through Reclaim, you will need to be ready to repoint those domains to the new server when migration day comes. This includes any .edu subdomains, as those are managed through your institution's IT department; it also includes TLDs registered through another provider. The notification will include information on your new server's IP address so you'll know where to repoint.
For each migration, we'll be sending out the notice two weeks in advance, along with a reminder a few days prior to the actual migration date. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Support.
News from Infrastructure - Disk Usage Phishing Campaign
We've recently seen emails from a phishing campaign targeting Reclaim & Reclaim Hosting users. The emails are disguised to look like disk usage notifications from cPanel indicating that an account is close to its storage limit, and they're designed to get users to click on a false link claiming to "extend your disk capacity" in order to avoid data loss.
More details on how to spot the fraudulent emails are available in Noah's post on our announcements blog. Please never click links you don't know in an email and always check that an email came from the correct sender. If you receive one of these alerts, please do not click any of the links. Instead, reach out to Support right away and let us know.
In Case Ya Missed It
February has been a month of guests! We've had some pretty awesome folks from outside of Reclaim join us for some pretty awesome convos.
As we prepared for our DoOO & WPMS 101 Admin Workshop this month, we were doing a lot of thinking about how we interact with our community completely virtually. We've been doing this for some time now, and are feeling pretty comfortable with the way we deliver content to and connect with folks in the Reclaim orbit. There are few more qualified to discuss online community-building than Martin Hawksey, and we were stoked to sit down with him on Feb 12 to chat through the past, present, and future of connecting virtually! Check it out at Building Community with guest Martin Hawksey!
Reclaim Today also made an appearance this month on Feb 16 as Jim spoke with several scholars to discuss the embedded laws and public traces of racial exclusion in property rights across Northern Virginia in episode 040: Discovering Exclusion. This team is exploring mapping tools to visualize this piece of history, and using Reclaim Cloud to do it!
Then, Maren & Meredith took over the stream on Feb 23 to amp us all up about the upcoming OER24 conference! They chatted about Reclaim and the OER Conference's storied history, and looked forward to what's to come this March in their stream Reclaim & OER #4Ever.
At the end of this month on Feb 26, Taylor & Meredith sat down to reflect on our stellar DoOO & WPMS 101 Admin Workshop in Reclaim TV: Recapping our recent workshop and looking ahead at whats next for DoOO and WPMS. These workshops just keep getting more and more fun for the team to produce, and the admins who join are rockstars. If you've ever wondered about what a Reclaim workshop entails, check out this recap!
The streams keep on flowing next month, so don't miss these upcoming topics!
- March 01, 10am ET, Reclaim TV: Using Open Source tools as key infrastructure with Maren & special guest Anne-Marie Scott
- March 08, (time TBA - keep an eye out!), Reclaim TV: Simon Fraser University Bulk Shared Hosting: A Reclaim Case Study with Amanda, Taylor & special guest Suzanne Norman
- March 15, 10am ET, Reclaim TV: ReclaimEDU with Jim & Pilot
- March 22, 10am ET, Reclaim TV: OER Preview: Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education with Maren & Meredith
- March 28, 10am ET/2pm GMT (psst, this one is on a Thursday!), Reclaim TV: Greetings from OER24! with Jim, Maren, & Meredith
As always, we stream at https://reclaim.tv/!
Recent Blog Posts
It's been a bumper month in blog posts, with lots of blogging goodness to both educate and entertain, starting with Noah's post on his in-development game, Devlog: Introducing GrugNet, and Taylor's Breaking WordPress with a simple plugin.
Sharing Reclaim's work with the wider community are Meredith's posts on the Communications and Digital Studies Panel: UMW and also a final reflection looking back at WP Campus 2023: New Orleans. Looking forward, we also have Maren's Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education (at OER24).
More from Reclaim's HQ was contributed by Pilot, who shared some behind the scenes magic in Drafting a Scope of Work, and Amanda, who talked all about Using RSS in Zotero.
Staff Picks
As always, we're here serving up the freshest staff picks!
This month Maren shared a transcript and recording of Cory Doctorow's excellent McLuhan lecture on "enshittification". If you aren't familiar, Cory coined the term to describe how platforms can degrade over time when business incentives stop lining up with the incentives of the user-base of a platform. Cory has also used the term "platform decay" here and it's really resonated with many people. We highly recommend carving out the time to give this one a read or watch!
Speaking of avoiding big platforms, Noah found two lists of excellent free and open-source tools, awesome-selfhosted and awesome-sysadmin! Community maintained indexes of software in the "awesome" style like this are getting more popular as people find more value in promoting tools that you can use however you like and in a way that you can control. Who knows, one of these might just have a place in your toolbox!
Finally, Taylor shared Tom Woodward's ChatGPT Bias Exploration Tool post, which documents some of his work during Middlebury's 2024 Digital Detox. As always, Tom's posts are an excellent blend of technical exploration and thoughtful analysis.
Thanks for another great month, and of course, Happy Leap Day!
