The tech noir edition of ds106 is in full swing this spring, and I’m feeling locked-in. It’s been a while since I have felt energized like this, and so much of that is rooted in commenting. Not only has ds106 given me a bunch of reasons to blog and comment, it has also re-connected me with creating a course site premised on the venerable RSS syndication bus. Last year when I was supposed to do some of this stuff for AI 106, I couldn’t look at the innards of a WordPress site. I ultimately reached out to Martha Burtis with a pleading email on a Friday evening last January to re-design the ds106.ai site and get the assignment bank back up and running. On Monday she had re-built the entire assignment bank in Elementor and re-designed AI 106—you shall know your friends by their awesome.

This year I’ve been going to the well yet again, but not with the same desperation, thankfully. I have no idea how to work intelligently with Elementor,  and for various reasons I refuse to learn. So I’ve reverted the ds106.ai site back to the TwentyTwelve theme which represents an era when I could actually try and hack WordPress.* Both Tom Woodward and Alan Levine have been helping me wrangle FeedWordPress (still alive and well!) to get the desired effect, and that’s part of the magic. Figuring out how to design the space wherein you live, work, and learn remains crucial and remains at the core of the ds106 experience. It continues to be the reason why each student gets their own domain and cPanel hosting and spends the better part of a semester building out a home on the web that’s as much about owning the design of the space as it is about shaping the tenor of their voice. Some folks might think of this as a harkening back to the “good old days,” but for me it’s a simple reminder that the web is what we make it. A bag a gold in, a bag of gold out.

Open Media Ecosystem GIF from the Reclaim Edtech series

Another sign I’m feeling the ds106 bug is that I spent the morning migrating the ds106 multisite and daily.ds106.us sites back to Reclaim Cloud so I can ensure they have more than enough resources. There was nary a glitch, which is always nice. The other sundry pieces of the ds106 environment are ds106radio (Azuracast), social.ds106.us (Mastodon), and ds106.tv (PeerTube), all of which are open source and we self-host which means we can provide an exploratory, yet safe, space that can act as a buffer from some of the insanity playing out presently in the world of social media. Thinking through how to integrate the various parts of this Open Media Ecosystem to create a multi-faceted view of the course experience is going to be the major focus of my work this semester.

Get Your Kicks with ds106

So anyway, I guess it’s time to rev up that blog engine and take to the road on the web less traveled. Get your kicks with ds106! #4life

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*It is also a symbolic return to an era when the idea of working collaboratively online with others using one’s blog as the starting point and source of an online identity was not as crazy as it seems thirteen years later. Some of us are still believers.