What a week!

I started by meeting with my new coach Maren Deepwell. I met Maren in the Association for Learning Technology where she was CEO for a decade, and now, she has joined Reclaim Hosting, my domains and hosting provider. Reclaim was started by Jim Groom and Tim Owens based on their work on ds106 (digital storytelling) and the Domain of One’s Own project, both at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Reclaim has grown into an educational technology training provider and is growing an online Reclaim Community. In recent community chats I learned Maren has an arts (and craft) background and recently became certified as an ACC (Associate Certified Coach) by the International Coaching Federation (ICF). I look forward to consolidating my many digital interests and projects into a self-sustaining lifelong learning consultancy.

I then participated in the ePortfolio Australia conference for two days, spent three days in my first FediForum unconference, and attended an early (founding?) meeting of the Educational AI Collaborative (EAIC) created at Penn State by Dr. Tiffany Petricini and her husband Richard Kreider. I was pleased to find the original members already discussing Kate Crawford’s “Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence” and Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”. My suggestion to add non-profits to the types of institutions to reach out to for input and to try to influence, and, to move from Slack to Discord were accepted.

From across the international date line, I listened to the usual discussions about institutional challenges of promoting and adopting eportfolios in academia at the ePortfolio Australia conference. In academic settings, I always add ideas about third spaces and open access, and remind the faculty and admins to center the student experience. Kristina Hoeppner shared her “Transmitting ePortfolio Content for (AI) Analysis” and Candyce Reynolds and Melissa Pirie’s “Folio thinking and digital literacy: Integrating social media and ePortfolios.” I know them all from AAEEBL conferences in Portland and North Vancouver, and online eportfolio groups.

I discovered the FediForum unconference on Mastodon the night before it started, after the 10 pm finish of ePortfolio Australia, California time. I waited until the morning to register and spent the next three days learning about ActivityPub, web fingers and hooks, and the history and politics of federated social media from some of the originators. I had imagined my instances of Ghost, PeerTube, Castopod, Omeka S, and Hugo could be federated and distributed into Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and X. It turns out to be complicated, I should not have been surprised to discover, and I’ll have to level up my technical skills, again. I spent a few hours finding, learning about, and following folks across Mastodon instances and then closing scores of tabs.