Remembering September with the Roundup!

News from September 2024

Welcome back to another month! School is kicking into high gear, and the Roundup's here to cap it all off.

Announcements

Fall Workshop: Domain of One's Own & WordPress Multisite 101 (October 01-02)

It's almost here! Tomorrow, October 1st and Wednesday, October 2nd, we're hosting our virtual admin workshop! Sessions will start at 12 pm ET each day and ending at 5 pm ET. We'll provide both applied training and concrete examples of both administering and teaching with Domain of One’s Own and WordPress Multisite, as well as sitting down with admins from schools to hear about their work and experience in the systems.

The workshop is broken up into two distinct days. Day 1 will be dedicated to getting you comfortable administering and troubleshooting Domain of One’s Own, and Day 2 will focus on WordPress Multisite. You can sign up for either or both days, whatever piques your interest! It's not too late to join, so check out the events calendar for registration and ticket info, and a more in-depth breakdown of each day's agenda. We can't wait to see you there.

See You Soon at OpenEd2024!

OpenEd2024 is coming up next week, from October 8-10, and Reclaim can't wait! The conference is happening both online and, for the first time since 2019, in person.  It's definitely going to be a special occasion and the program is packed with interesting sessions.

Taylor and Pilot will even be presenting! They're doing a session on reclaiming our socials – check it out on the program here. Social media platforms are an important channel for advocacy and knowledge sharing, but in the last few years we've witnessed them becoming increasingly polarized, privatized and exploitative. Our goal is to offer resources and exercises for using them in ways that are meaningful and valuable to your work instead of falling into the traps created by large social spaces, and maybe even finding new platforms that you can own yourself. You can find more of our thoughts in this blog post.

We're looking forward to seeing you! Even if you can't make it to Providence to attend in-person, our session will be virtual, so consider tuning in.

October Community Chat: Looking ahead to OEGlobal24!

That's right, it's the October Community Chat! On Wednesday, October 16th at 12pm ET, we'll be joined by Alan Levine to chat with us about the upcoming OEGlobal conference, which will be happening November 13-15 in Brisbane! We’ll also share some plans we are cooking up to bring the conference from Brisbane right to your neck-of-the-woods.

OE Global works hard to uplift all of the amazing projects happening on the Open Education web. Their recent OE Global Awards for Excellence are strong proof. Our recent blog post "Celebrating the OE Global Awards 2024" highlights a couple of the winners who we know personally, but you can check out all the winners here, or explore the nominees as well.

And once you've done that, you know what to do: RSVP for the Community Chat here.

September Community Chat: Chatting about web archiving with the folks from Webrecorder!

Hey, if you missed the September Community Chat, no worries! We were lucky enough to sit down with the folks from Webrecorder to hear about the amazing work they're doing in web archiving, and we've preserved the moment (aptly) right here.

Reclaim TV Guide

Don't forget to tune in to Reclaim.TV! Live on Fridays at 10 am ET. Here's the schedule for October:

• October 4th - Looking ahead to OpenEd24 with Pilot & Taylor, who are heading to OpenEd24 the following week
• October 11th - St. Olaf and WPMS Blocks! Bret Farley is joining us to talk through his exploration and customizations he and his team worked through to allow for St Olaf to create a custom WPMS instance for their school
• October 18th - University of Tube (U Tube) with special guest, Rachel Winchester, the President of the University of Tube. She'll talk about this brand new University and all their offerings for students.
• October 25th - The Future of Multidimensional Scholarship with Amanda Licastro about the future of multidimensional scholarship! Increasingly scholars are using immersive technologies to provide enhanced access to cultural heritage objects, as well as designing immersive environments as pedagogical spaces for the recreation of historical and literary sites.

And check out this past month's streams if you haven't already! We've got all the hits, like a sitdown with special guest Mary Isbell to hear how the University of New Haven is using CBOX OpenLab:

Meredith and Taylor's spooky Friday the 13th spectacular, all about 3-D printing:

A cool walkthrough from Taylor about how he sets up simple Docker containers (and you can too!):

... And finally, Taylor and Pilot getting hyped up for the workshop (which is coming up tomorrow!)

Recent Blog Posts

Things have been quiet on the personal blog front at Reclaim – back-to-school is always a busy month for tickets! :) That said, we can always count on Jim for at least one missive from the ether.

Jim highlighted a recent podcast he joined at the invitation of fellow Reclaimer Maren Deepwell. The episode reflects on the challenges and possibilities of remote working, and what that elusive magic dust that makes it special might be. Beyond the brief blog post you can actually listen to the chat by clicking on the embedded audio link below:

Staff Picks

We'll kick off this month's staff picks with one from Meredith, a subreddit focused around making greenhouses out of Ikea furniture: r/IkeaGreenhouseClub. She used this as inspiration for building her own cabinet greenhouse!

Reclaim Hosting is officially on BlueSky now, so we have a few BlueSky related recommendations to share if you are just dipping your toes into it like we are:

• Amanda Wyatt Visconti's guide for BlueSky beginners - This is a fantastic resource that will not only get you up to speed but teach you some more advanced tricks
• How to set your domain as your handle - Did you know you can use your domain name as your Bluesky handle using the magic of DNS?

Next up, Pilot wanted to remind us that it is THAT time of the year again... that's right, it's Fat Bear Week! Katmai National Park's annual bracket celebrating their brown bears is coming up starting on Wednesday, so be sure to vote for the fattest bear every day from October 2 - 8.

Taylor's bookmarking tool has been working on overdrive, so he had a few internet treasures to share:

• Every webpage deserves to be a place
• Is My Blue Your Blue?
• GPU Hosting and Open Source AI Will Revolutionize or Kill WordPress

Maybe while you browse all of those links, you can use this white noise to get you in the zone. This comes highly recommended from both Taylor and Pilot for both trekkies and non-trekkies alike:

That's all for this month, folks – see you in October!