Hello friends, a big welcome back to my channel. I hope you're all doing really well. So let's talk about all of the books we've read this summer, shall we? We're going to be talking June, July and August reads. It's going to be a long one, we've got tons of books to talk about. I'm going to try and keep this to synopsis, what I liked, what I didn't like, rating. I read a ton of great books this summer, loads of five star reads. I also read a good few very disappointing reads that definitely surprised me. So we have quite the range of books to talk about many, many exciting proof copies of brand new books, which are mainly literary fiction.  It's been a wild reading time, so grab a drink, maybe some snacks, and let's cozy down and have some good book chat. First up, we have Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney. You probably don't need telling, but if you do, this is the highly anticipated new novel from the much-acclaimed, much-loved Sally Rooney. This is coming out on September 7th. It follows four characters, Alice, a novelist, and Felix, who works in a warehouse, who meets and travel to Rome together. And we also have Eileen and Simon in Dublin, two childhood best friends who slip back into flirting with one another. So I was overjoyed to receive this early proof copy from Faber and Faber. Of course I read it as soon as I got my hands on it. I actually vlogged the whole reading experience to share with you guys, so if you haven't checked that out yet, please go and watch it. I had so much fun filming it and sharing the whole thing with you. You probably won't be surprised to hear that I did absolutely love this novel. I can't give any kind of spoilers before publication, but rest assured that it is just the step up that I hoped it would be. This book feels slightly more mature than her other two novels. It focuses on slightly older characters and different types of relationships. It also feels a bit more bigger picture in terms of the world surrounding these characters. It feels a bit more high stakes. I loved these vibes. It felt like a very natural progression for Sally Rooney to me. I also loved the four central characters. They were all so interesting to me. The prose, as always, spot on. Sally Rooney just had me right where she wanted me while I was reading this book. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I don't think I loved this novel as much as I loved normal people, but that's okay. I really, really liked this for what it was, and I really do think other people are going to enjoy this as well. I cannot wait to hear all of your guys' thoughts on it soon, so in the end I gave this one 5 out of 5 stars. Next up we have The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigada. This is a YA romance novel set in Ireland. It tells the story of 16-year-old Bangladeshi Nishat, who is coming to terms with her sexuality. She has a crush on a girl in her class named Flavia. But when a school competition invites the students to open up businesses, both girls set up rival henna businesses. I picked this one up in celebration of Pride Month, but also just because I'd had it on my shelves for ages, it sounded adorable, and everyone says it's amazing. Very pleased to report that this was basically just what I hoped it would be. It was so sweet and touching and dramatic in places. I loved the whole setup. The central idea of the rival henna businesses was genius, so much fun. I really liked the characters in here as well, particularly Nishat and her sister. Some of the family dynamics in here were so great, totally believable. I just loved going along the ride with this one. It was totally enjoyable, but it had a bit of grit in there too. It had some things to say about cultural identity and appropriation. This is a really great contemporary YA. I would totally recommend if that's your thing, and in the end I gave it four stars. Next up I read Feminism for the 99% and Manifesto by Cynthia Arruzza, Tiffy Battacheria, and Nancy Fraser. This is a non-fiction book that I was kindly sent a copy of by the publisher Verso Books. It is a very short little book. This Manifesto views feminism as being necessarily anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, and also anti-racist. It is not something that works within and inspires a select class of women to climb to the top of our current Western capitalist structures. Inspired by the Argentinian and Polish strikes of 2016 Onward, this book explores inadequate health care as a part of feminism, as well as climate change and poverty and border policing and more. I really, really liked this book. It explores so many things that are all so necessarily and urgently connected in such a fresh and impactful yet easy to consume and easy to understand way. Feminism is just such a huge topic. There is so, so much to it. And this book clearly and succinctly explores liberal corporate feminism, a feminism that is only useful to the 1% and then this more creative and radical feminism on the other side. This was very clear, very informative, and very motivating. A great one to read if you're just getting into reading about feminism, but also a great reminder, a great top-up oppush if you have read about feminism before. Perhaps this one will offer you a slightly different perspective like it did for me. So in the end I gave this one four stars. Next up I picked up The Mismatch by Sara Jafari. This is a new adult novel that came out at the end of June. I was kindly sent this proof copy by the publisher. This one tells a story of 21 year old British Iranian Soria who has never been kissed, and also the popular confident Magnus who is basically the opposite of Soria in every way. It explores cultural identity and love and difficult family dynamics. So honestly I had pretty mixed feelings about this one when I read it. I gave it a pretty meh rating, and the more time that passes, the more I'm just forgetting about it. I liked the setup here, I liked the central idea, it's very contemporary feeling, very character focused, but it's also kind of lighter plot-wise and a bit pacier than I'm typically used to reading. I did enjoy all of those aspects, and the book did pleasantly surprise me in some places. It kind of went to a couple of places I wasn't really expecting. There was a lot of good stuff in here to explore, but I'm just not convinced that the execution was brilliant. Some of the characters were definitely better than others, some were totally un-fleshed out and just felt a bit lazy. The pacing was certainly a bit odd in places. This is actually quite a chunky book. Really this wasn't the worst thing I've ever read, but I didn't find it to be particularly special at all. So in the end I think I'm just going to put this rating down to 2.5 stars. Next up we have Modern Medicine by Lucy Hearst. This is a new poetry collection that just came out in June. It explores the weirdness and discomfort of bodily suffering through experiences of medicine and disability and illness. I was really excited when I heard about this collection. A big thank you to Fly on the Wall Press for sending me this copy. I love the themes explored in here. I am fascinated by the notion of pain, especially female pain and how we view it as a society and how we treat it. And I really did enjoy this collection. The poems feel very visceral and honest. The writing in here is quite playful, which worked really well with exploring these themes so piercingly. I also really appreciated that this collection felt totally consumable. I feel like a lot of people could read this and really enjoy it. A really unique and interesting little collection. I would definitely recommend it if it interests you. And in the end I gave this one 3.5 stars. Next up I read Animal by Lisa Tadeo. Another June release, another proof copy I was kindly sent. This one actually being a really, really highly anticipated release of mine. This is the first novel by Lisa Tadeo, the author of Three Women. It tells the story of a young woman who flees New York after witnessing a violent act, and she ends up unraveling some traumatic event that happened to her as a child. So unfortunately this book did not work for me. We did not get on. This was a massive shame for me because I really, really thought that I was going to love this, but honestly I just couldn't connect to it on basically any level. I will say that I do think the writing in here is pretty good. Lisa Tadeo's prose is definitely interesting. It's very dry and dark, and I did enjoy this at the beginning of the novel. I felt like it set the tone quite well. But this book was just too much in the end. It was too grim, it was too dark, it felt like I was just being repeatedly hit over the head with shocking things, and the book couldn't really justify why. I just don't really get what the point was here, to be honest. The characters also were not good. I did not like the protagonist at all. I didn't find her interesting or engaging, so I just didn't really care about her story in the slightest. This whole thing just felt a bit forced to me, a bit showy, and I just ended up feeling really disconnected to it, unfortunately, so I think I gave it like two stars. If any of you have read this one and had a different experience, by the way, I would absolutely love to hear about it, so please do let me know down below in the comments. Next up is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. This is a modern classic by the much-loved, glorious modernist writer Virginia Woolf. It tells the story of a family and their guests who are on holiday in the Isle of Skye, most prominently focusing on the character of the maternal serene Mrs Ramsey. I don't even know where to start with this one, really. This novel, this author, just brilliant. Pure pure gold. I'd read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf previously, and I really loved it. I knew that I loved her writing, and I was super keen to read more by her, but I could not have anticipated just how brilliant this book was going to be. This book centres around the seemingly trivial postponement of a trip to the nearby lighthouse, but Virginia Woolf uses this to explore tensions within the family, the passing of time, people's capacity for change, male and female conflict. This is a masterpiece example of a character-focused study of a specific time and place set within a wider world. No one sees things like Virginia Woolf does and manages to translate it into the most glorious, perceptive, beautiful prose. I just came away from this novel totally inspired, inspired to reflect on things myself, inspired to write myself. This novel had such an effect on me. I absolutely loved it. I cannot wait to explore all of the rest of her work in the future. Of course, I gave this one five stars. Next up, I read Reputation by Lex Croucher. This is another new book that I was kindly sent a copy of. This one came out at the beginning of July. This is a Regency-era rom-com following the story of a middle-class young woman named Georgiana who goes and stays with her aunt and uncle. There she meets the wealthy enigmatic Francis and falls into the debauched upper echelons of Regency-era society. Everything about this book was a pure delight. It is exactly what you'd imagine from Bridgerton meets Jane Austen meets Gossip Girl. I think that's what it's being marketed as. The setting here is delicious. If you love Regency-era books at all, this is lush. The characters here are brilliant. We have the quiet, sheltered, young heroine seeking adventure. We have the illicit, sexy, disgustingly rich folk. We have the dreary relatives. All of the relationships in here are so entertaining. The dialogue is brilliant. Tons of scandal and rumors and sex, but also dashes of real sobering emotion throughout as well with more serious topics coming up in just the right places. This whole thing was very well crafted, I have to say. Lex Croucher clearly knows how to write her editor, clearly knows how to edit, and their vision of what they wanted to achieve in here was very, very clear. It was just the engaging, entertaining, rollercoaster of a story that you'd hope it would be. Can you tell I liked this? Obviously I need you all to read it. Obviously I gave it five stars. Next up we have The Hierarchies by Ross Anderson. This is a relatively new novel by Dead Ink Books. It is set in the not too distant future exploring themes of artificial intelligence and synthetic humans.  I was really excited for this book. For those of you who don't know, I do have a philosophy degree. I am fascinated by the notion of personhood and the philosophy behind artificial intelligence. And this book did start off really strong. I loved the different characters, I was really interested in the different dynamics between them. The writing was very solid, the pacing was good, I was quite engaged as I read. Unfortunately though this book did kind of end up going in a direction that I wasn't really hoping for. I wanted to stay with the characters in the first half of the book. I really wanted to stay there and focus in on their relationships and the consequences of all of that. But the book kind of went elsewhere, it became a bit darker and a bit more plot driven. Ultimately I just wasn't as invested or engaged in the second half of the book as I was in the first. So this was a bit of a shame to be honest, but it wasn't bad by any stretch and there were definitely really good moments. So in the end I gave it three stars. Next up I read 100 lockdown sonnets by Jacqueline Safra. So this is described as a poetic journal and in it Jacqueline Safra writes a sonnet a day for 100 days during the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK. Each sonnet is dated and is inspired by some kind of quote from the news or social media or from literature from that day. Ball tracking the progress of COVID-19 and the lockdown and the state of the country and the world. This is such a special little book. It is such a great snapshot in time. What we've all been through is crazy. It is so so strange and I am so in awe of Jacqueline Safra for having the creativity and foresight to write a poem a day during the first lockdown. The poems in here are unique and insightful and hopeful and hopeless and totally intimate and weird. Anyone who experienced the first lockdown in the UK will be able to relate hard to what is going on in here. This is so well articulated, totally full of feeling. I would definitely recommend it and in the end I gave it four stars. Next up we have The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. This is a famous modern American classic written and set in the 1920s. Set in the Jazz Age, this one tells the story of the wealthy Jay Gatsby and his persistent love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. So this was technically a reread for me. I first read it years and years ago but recently Cameron and I were going on a trip. We had a lot of driving to do and so we listened to the audio of this one together. It was so much fun. I love this book. I love it even more now than I did when I first read it. Just the vibes. The vibes that F Scott Fitzgerald creates. This is a really short novel. It's only got like nine chapters but everything is so intentional. It packs a punch. The writing is stunning. So many lines are just perfection. The themes explored in here of desire and obsession and the American dream and how all of this is mirrored and heightened by the descriptions of colour and heat and the perceptive biting dialogue. This is a perfect little novel. It is so captivating and effective but totally consumable. Of course I gave it five stars. Next up we have Cinderella is Dead by Kaelin Bayron. This is a YA fantasy novel set 200 years after Cinderella found her prince. The world is far from a fairy tale and in it young girls are forced to attend an annual ball in which the young men get to choose their wives. Protagonist is 16 year old Sophia who would much rather marry her female best friend than play by any of these rules. She ends up fleeing and essentially plotting to take down the kingdom. So unfortunately I did not love this book as much as I wanted to. I was totally in the mood for it when I started.  I really liked the central idea and they did enjoy Sophia at the beginning of the book but really this book just did not go anywhere. Character development did not happen. The characters basically ended up with the same stances that they started the book with and plot wise it just wasn't that exciting. There was a whole world to be explored here but really everything just stayed so linear and predictable for me. Honestly I just ended up feeling like was that it? The central romance in here was also honestly so weak. I saw absolutely no evidence of the development of their relationship throughout. I didn't buy it for a second. So some good ideas in here perhaps you would enjoy it more than me if this is the kind of thing you typically like to read but for me I just found it to be quite disappointing. So in the end I gave this one 2.5 stars. Been going so long my lip gloss has literally disappeared. Next up I read To Kill a Mockingbird a graphic novel by Harper Lee and Fred Foreman. This is a graphic novel adaptation of the famous modern classic To Kill a Mockingbird exploring the childhood of young scout in a small southern town in America in the 1930s. Many of you will probably already know that To Kill a Mockingbird is my favorite novel of all time. I read it like six plus times at this point. I think it is so so perfect. I'd had this graphic novel adaptation on my shelves for a while. I suddenly felt the urge to be back in this story again and so I thought I would give this one a go and I loved it. Obviously I loved it. The 5 out of 5 stars that I'm giving this is kind of in virtue of the fact that I could never not give this story 5 stars. I didn't love this as much as I loved the original novel. I think all of Harper Lee's words are intentional and beautiful and obviously they had to miss some of them out in here but I do think this was done well. I think it was edited well, selected well. I think the art style was really beautiful. A really great way to experience the classic. I would definitely recommend it and of course I gave it 5 stars. Next up I read The Service by Frankie Mirren. This is a pretty new novel from Influx Press. It tells the story of three different women whose stories converge when brothels in London are raided. Laurie has a young daughter and is working illegally in a rented flat. Freya is a student and she makes money through being an escort and Paula is a journalist who is running a campaign against prostitution. This was such a great book. I know it is a big popular recommendation within the books about sex workers realm and I can totally see why. I loved the whole setup here. I am so interested in sex work and learning more about it and about all of the different stances people take on it and all of the nuance there. The author herself has been involved in sex work. She is also a journalist and a sex work activist so it was really great reading this novel knowing her experience within this area. I learned a lot through reading this. It definitely opened my eyes and made me think more actively about this topic. It definitely challenges notions of sex and women's bodies and entitlement. But this is also just a really great read. We get to know all of these different women and all about their different situations and positions. They're all so fascinating. It's obviously very character focused and deeply humane but it's also really exciting and tense and kind of plot driven. It all comes to a bit of a head. Honestly this is just such a great read all around. I will be recommending it to people left right and centre and in the end I gave it 4.5 stars. Believe it or not we are not nearly done. The next book I picked up was Honorifics by Cynthia Miller. This is a relatively new poetry collection kindly sent to me by the publisher. It primarily explores Malaysian, Chinese cultural identity, immigration and family. The best thing about this poetry collection by a mile was its strange and beautiful and experimental imagery. We have jellyfish and Greek gods and outer space. This whole collection felt very mesmerizing while also exploring these really contemporary and grounding issues. There were of course poems in here that I loved more than others. I will say that I didn't personally connect to many of these poems so I'm not sure that it's going to leave too much of a lasting impression on me. That being said I do just think this is personal experience and personal taste. There was a lot that I really enjoyed in here and really admired. As such definitely give this one a go if it sounds like something you're interested in. In the end I gave it 3 stars. Next up we have The Women of Troy by Pat Barker. This is the highly anticipated sequel to The Silence of the Girls, the popular Iliad retelling from a couple of years ago. Still focusing in on the same protagonist, Briseus. This one takes place after Troy has fallen when the Greeks are trying to return home victorious. So unfortunately this book was a massive disappointment to me. Honestly I just don't think it was that good. Obviously Pat Barker can write. She definitely knows her craft. The central idea here is interesting. I do like a Trojan War retelling. It's interesting that we get to see the aftermath of the war but it just didn't feel like the book ran with any of this. I found Briseus as a character to honestly be quite dull. I didn't get the sense of any kind of development from her throughout. The pacing wasn't there for me. I wasn't engaged in the storyline at all. There was the odd side character that I was quite interested in because there are a lot of interesting characters in this story but it just felt like the book didn't work with them. We could have spent so much time exploring all of the different female characters around this camp and really getting to know them and their stories and it could have been great. I don't know, this one just didn't work for me. It was a massive, massive shame. I'd be really interested to hear if other people had similar experiences especially if you really enjoyed the silence of the girls but in the end I had to give this one 2.5 stars. Next up I read Gilead by Marilyn Robinson. This is a backlist book that I've been meaning to read for ages now and I'm so pleased that I finally picked it up. Set in a small town in America in the 1950s this book is told through one long letter that an old reverend is writing to his son as he nears the end of his life. Among many other things this novel explores themes of the relationship between fathers and sons and an individual and their religion. So I loved a lot about this book. The small town setting, the character, focused nature, the ins and outs of local politics and different people's relationships are all something that I love. Pair this with the more life reflective nature of the book, the fact that it's very personal but also looks a lot of wider philosophical musings. This book is just me all over. I loved the slow pace of this novel, the ambling feel, the kind of piecing together nature of it, and I do have to give a special mention to the pros in this novel because my god Marilyn Robinson is a stunning writer. All the way through this book I just wanted to underline things and read sentences aloud to Cameron. I could just eat these words. I will say that this book didn't finish up quite as strong as it started for me. I lost interest a little bit in where the story went and what became the central focus. That being said I still think it's brilliant. I will definitely be reading the later novels in this series at some point and in the end I gave it four stars. Next up I read The Country of Others by Lila Slamani. This is Lila Slamani's latest novel. It was translated from French by Sam Taylor. It came out last month and I was kindly sent this gorgeous copy by Faber. This novel is set in the 10 years leading up to Morocco's independence in 1956. It tells the story of a young French woman, her Moroccan husband, who fought for France in the war and the family that they create. So unfortunately this was another one of my disappointing reads and I really really didn't think it was going to be. I love Lila Slamani. She is one of my all-time favorite translated authors. I adore her prose and her characters. I have always found her novels to be so intelligent and distinctive. Granted this is a divergence from her earlier novels. This is her first foray into historical fiction. It feels much more plot-driven and outside influences driven than her earlier novels. But yeah for me unfortunately that just didn't work as well. This isn't a bad book. Don't get me wrong, there are some beautiful moments in here. The prose is truly stunning. The setting is lush. The political and geographical context was very interesting. She did manage to kind of work in this sense of ever building tension throughout. But for me I just couldn't really connect to the characters. I never really built up a full clear picture of the protagonist in my head and so I never really cared about her. I just wasn't invested as I read for whatever reason. If this sounds like your thing then it's probably worth giving a go. But if you are just reading this because it's Lila Slamani then do bear in mind that it is quite different from her earlier novels. Not my favorite so in the end I gave this one 2.5 stars. Next up is All the Names Given by Raymond Antrobus. This is an upcoming new poetry collection releasing later this month. I was kindly sent a copy by the publisher. This collection explores so much. We have poems about family and cultural identity and belonging, conflicting social and cultural identities, childhood and memories, and also adolescence and marriage. This collection is also punctuated with captions throughout to describe the transitions and the silences inspired by a deaf sound artist. So I read Raymond Antrobus' first collection last year and fell in love. I was so excited to read this new collection by him and this didn't let me down at all. This is stunning. I love how Raymond Antrobus always explores such a vast range of themes all with such vulnerability and insight. This collection is totally engaging and startling from start to finish. The craftsmanship here is impeccable. This was definitely an emotional read, just so tender and aching with feeling. As always I loved the insight into deafness in here. I also really loved the addition of the marriage poems. This is just full of humanity. Raymond Antrobus is such a talent and in the end I gave this one 4.5 stars. Next up I read Dinner Party A Tragedy by Sarah Gilmartin. This is another upcoming new release, this one from the indie Pushkin Press. Thank you so much for sending me this copy set between the 1990s and present day both in Rural Island and in Dublin. This one tells the story of a family who gathers for the anniversary of a death. This ultimately uncovers old tensions and sends the host Kate spinning completely out of control. This is such a good novel. I loved this. Firstly big, big and on-right vibes from this book. The rural Irish setting, the suffocating family, the exploration of childhood and memories and loss. I love all of this stuff and I do think it was executed really well in here. This book definitely has that kind of tense, painful atmosphere. It had me sat on the edge of my seat, it had me turning the pages. I loved the setting, it worked really well. All of the different characters and their dynamics were really interesting. I will say that I did enjoy the first half of this book slightly more than the second half of the book. I kind of wanted to spend more time at the dinner party and to learn things bit by bit to compliment and give insight into this overarching scene and kind of piece things together little by little. I think that structuring would have worked a bit better but nevertheless a really interesting and engaging read. I think Sarah Gilmartin is going to be a fab author and in the end I gave this one four stars. Camera just died before talking about the last book. Bloody typical. So the final book that I read recently was The Poppy War by R. F. Quang. Ending on a big one, this is the first book in a very dark, historical military fantasy series inspired by 20th century China. It tells a story of war orphan Rin who despite all the odds passes the test to attend the most elite military training school in the empire. Here Rin discovers her unearthly lethal power for shamanism, accessing the gods. All the while the piece of the Nican empire is looking more and more fragile. So this fantasy trilogy was insanely popular at the end of last year, especially here on booktube. I've been meaning to read it ever since just waiting until I was in the mood and I was really in the mood recently. So I have very mixed feelings about this one. It started off brilliantly. I loved the dark, gritty setting in here, totally unique, totally fascinating. The book also had tons of traditional fantasy tropes which I absolutely loved. I was here for the whole ride but this book wasn't great all of the way through. The plot takes a turn around halfway through and I'm not afraid to say that it was badly done, completely cutting you off from everything that the book has taught you to care about up until that point. There are pacing issues throughout, there are certainly character development issues, the writing isn't amazing. That being said, I do think this book ultimately ended up where it needed to be. I have heard that the series only gets better after this book and that this is a good foundation block for the second and third books. But boy, we have taken a rocky road to get there. So overall, not the best fantasy book I've ever read. I really really really liked some aspects of it. I really disliked some of the execution. I do think this has huge potential. I do believe that the next two books are going to get better so I will be carrying on with this series.  In the end I gave this one a three stars. So there we go, we're finally done. Those are all the books that I read in June and July and August.  Thank you so much. I really hope you've enjoyed hearing me chat about all these books I've read recently there. Really was quite the range, I told no lies. Please let me know if you've read any of these books, how did you find them. Please also let me know what you've been reading recently. Tell me about something amazing you've read down below in the comments. Thanks again for watching everyone. I hope you're doing really well and I look forward to seeing you in my next one. Bye.


I hope we all had a nice time last night and enjoyed the dinner at TV at house and the delights of Edinburgh. So it falls to me to introduce our first keynote of the morning at Jim Groom. Now although I've known Jim as one of these guys on the internet for years, this is actually the first time I've ever met him. So I wasn't really very sure how to introduce him. So rather than try and write something myself, I thought well I'll ask a mutual acquaintance if he could provide a little background detail about Jim just so we know where he's coming from. So David Kernahan was very happy to oblige. So Reverend Jim The Bavar Groom, alias Snake Plisken, is a charlatan and a fraud. A self-confessed used car salesman clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit. The monster behind educational time sink DS106 and notorious cult and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with edgypunk. Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap web hosting to gullible undergraduates and deluded colleagues and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy. Jim has recently fled North America and is thought to be holed up in his mountain fortress in the Italian Alps. If seen, nobody should approach this man as he is believed to be creative and dangerous. Of course Jim is also one of the most inspiring and amazing individuals you're going to meet. So please a big round of applause for the Reverend Jim Groom. I just wanted to know a little cultural point. How is it a prize to get a book from Martin Weller? I'm Jim Groom, big fan. This is my first time ever in the UK. This is my first time presenting in the UK and I promised myself. I said, you know what Jim, you've been cashing in on DS106 for years. It's five years old this semester. I'm not going to talk about DS106. I told myself I'm not. I realized last night I don't have a presentation if I don't talk about DS106.  So I decided to think about what DS106 means as a longer kind of narrative of the work I've done for the last ten years. And I'll start by saying this with a confession. You know, I feel bad about this, but don't hate me. I don't really, not, I don't do OER in any kind of important way. In fact, a lot of my work has been directly against the idea of institutionalizing it as a resource that lives on as a licensed good. In fact, the way in which OER is imagined in America for me is far more like a factory of textbooks which politically, I believe, is being used to undermine state funding for higher ed. You put an idea of the OER, we'll fund the OER, look how much money we're saving students, and with the left hand what they're doing is they're cutting budgets across the states for higher ed. So it's tricky for me. And the idea that OER is so directly linked to the financial nature of higher ed in the US at least takes any amount of sacredness from what we're doing in relationship to teaching and learning away from me. It becomes a financial equation. And I'm not interested in that. I don't necessarily mean that it's wrong or that other people can't or that maybe some people are getting things they can't afford because once I start saying, I don't want to give people textbooks for free, I look rotten, right? That's not my idea. So I'm not going to be talking about OER in any kind of formalized way. In fact, I'm going to be talking about something I think isn't being talked about but might be very interesting. It's this notion of open educational infrastructure. It's kind of what I'm interested in because if I don't, I'm not a fan of the OER system as it exists now, at least in the US, the idea of open educational resources become equated with textbooks, well then it's time to look at what an alternative model would be. And one of the kind of frames I've been thinking about this is if you don't like the existing system, and this comes from Black Flag guitarist Greg In, well then build your own. And this got me thinking about my presentation. In fact, there's been a couple of signposts along the last ten years that have really informed some of the work I've been a part of. One of them is this comment which was actually left on my blog September 7, 2007 by Brian Lamb quoting George Siemens, if that isn't complicated enough, I don't know. But that's what it is. What George Siemens said was this, and it's one of those moments in my career when I was like, that is absolutely a vision that we should be trying to imagine and build. And the key point is this. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS would go, or VLE for you all, would go into creating flexible and easy to use syndication buses or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using small pieces approach. Things like student management tools, grade books. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools? The idea that IT might reimagine itself entirely to become a series of hubs that would aggregate and bring data that students and faculty use together. Really remarkable thought for me. Well, that led me on a kind of a long process with many other people of actually having an LMS or a VLE at our institution but actively building systems outside of it or apart from it. Not always in direct conflict with them, but things like alternatives. And you'll see some of them here, right? I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those projects. Wordpress, which I'm sure many people in the room now have used in some way or another. Drupal, I hope you don't, only kidding. Joomla. So in 2007, after a lot of experimentation with the group at the University of Mary Washington and I was not alone, there were many of us. Jerry Sleizac, Martha Burtis, Andy Rush, Gardner Campbell, Patrick Asetti-Murray-John, Jerry Sleizac, if I really didn't say him. And we started building stuff. One of the early things we built was a WordPress multi-site. WordPress multi-site is like a WordPress instance, but you can have innumerable blogs as part of it. So every student at Mary Washington, at least this is how we imagined it, we'd get their own publishing space. And in 2006, 2007, to have a place to publish on the web as part of your university was not trivial, right? Did you have the whole tilde space experience here, right? Where you would get a tilde space and you'd upload files and it would take you like three hours to figure out how to FTP and you'd change some HTML. Well, when these systems came along, it changed things. It allowed us to actually give our entire community a publishing platform. And again, UMW was not alone. The University of British Columbia was doing the same thing as was Penn State. They were building infrastructure for their community to share the work they were doing as part of their teaching learning. And then John Beasley Murray and Brian Land did what I still think is probably the purest, most beautiful example of open education I've yet to see. They said, you know what? We spent thousands of dollars on infrastructure, servers, right? When we have probably the single greatest open educational tool the world has ever known, Wikipedia. Why don't we have students working together as part of a semester-long class on Latin American literature, building and shaping and researching various articles. John Beasley Murray did this. He had three of his students' articles were featured as part of Wikipedia. They were featured articles during the semester. Tens of thousands of students saw it a month, hundreds of thousands saw it a year. This became a model. The infrastructure was being supported by Wikipedia and you had this kind of brilliant model. The students, I think, at the end of the semester were bedraggled and beat up and intensely worked. But think about this sense of reward to know that your work and your research was informing and helping hundreds of thousands of people find information about the stuff you were researching. A remarkable model. Purely open infrastructure, open technology supported by faculty and students. Now, this is a model that didn't go away. 2013, you have a group, FemTechNet, who's a distributed group within the states of feminists who are thinking radically about how technology shapes the way in which we think about questions of gender, sexuality, identity, race. And they started building frames around this, what they call wiki storming. And so they'll go into Wikipedia articles and they'll kind of intervene and start kind of reframing some of those narratives that maybe are so specifically framed around questions of masculinity and challenging some of those. And this has got all sorts of press in the states, you know, whether this is a good or a bad thing. It has a kind of radical intervention of technology and infrastructure that was free and open and available to anybody. The other thing that was remarkable for me, and this is 2008, so the work we did with WordPress Multisite at Mer-Washington, UBC, Penn State, other places, I thought it was amazing. I thought it was going to catch on. I've always feel that. I'm very polyam. I always feel like, where are there people? It's just about to explode. Everyone says, you know, no, it's not, but I still believe that today. You'll see, I still believe that. I said, hey, you know what, let me do a little experiment. There's this new plug-in for WordPress Multisite that allows you to entirely clone your instance, plug-ins, themes, everything on the same box for any school that wanted it. So I tried it. Longwood College, which was another public school in Virginia, or Longwood University, was interested.   It took us basically two years to build in 45 minutes. This was the first example for me of this notion of virtualized infrastructure. Why couldn't every university around Virginia have something like this, easily kind of framed and cloned so that we could share our resources? Right? And for me, it just seemed logical. Longwood took it up. Eventually it fell by the wayside, no one cared. I understand, I still believed. 2010, 2011, this thing happened. This beautiful, glorious, crazy thing. DS106. DS stands for digital storytelling. 106 was the actual course number. So it was actually officially CPSC 106. And that's important because as this class started to gain a notoriety and infamy, my university insisted that I don't call it DS106, that I call it CPSC 106, to distinguish what was happening online from the institutional course, which I think is pretty interesting. DS106 was kind of a refuge for many of us. We had played, we had built these infrastructure, and one of the things that was still kind of, for us, I think a question is, we did this where we built a WordPress multi-site that other people could host and build on, but we haven't yet proved that other faculty and students could manage their own space, their own domains, their own applications. That's the ultimate vision. It's not that I manage your application that you manage it. So we started playing with that. This is DS106 the site as it looked in 2011, right? You'll notice these are posts. That's a post from Orgy Waters, which is interesting. There's Alavine, there's myself. If you were to click on this link, you wouldn't stay on the DS106 site. Like George Siemens referred to, you would go out to the post that's on my domain in my site. But what's interesting here is everything that's pulled in here is archived in DS106. Right now this WordPress site has over 65,000 posts from the last five years archived of everything everybody did. This still lives in my own personal namespace, right? Or anyone else's. So that was one piece of infrastructure. Have all the students who take DS106 get their own domain in web hosting and build their spaces and syndicate it through simple RSS into the frame. Right? It's still a community. People are still juxtaposed next to each other, but you have these individual spaces. The next bit that was designed by Martha Burdus, I think it's brilliant. It's still one of my favorite elements of DS106. And you'll notice now we're using WordPress to build infrastructure for a course. WordPress open source, highly hackable. This is what is called the DS106 assignment bank. And Martha and I fight about this a little bit, but she designed it, so she has to find a word. But my mind was this was inspired to some great degree by Ravelry. And I'll talk about that in a second. And Frances Bell and I talked a little bit about Ravelry already. But let's talk about DS106 as an open educational quote unquote repository. As of yesterday, there were 983 student, faculty, open web participants who created 983 assignments. And 11,304 examples of people who did those assignments. Many of which are tutorials for other people to show them how to do it. All done on the open web. Using the DS106 assignment bank to aggregate it. Now, this is what it would look like. I'm going to use this example because I'm fascinated by it and I discovered this last night. You'll know it's hard to read. So far 39 people did a read poster. Now, I don't know if the read posters made it over here. In the 80s, they would have celebrities and political figures in the US have like a read. So it would say read and it would have a political figure or a celebrity with their favorite book. And it was a campaign to get people to read again. Because we stopped reading in America. I don't know if you knew this for like 10 years, no one read. I'm kidding. Anyways, so this actual assignment alone has 2,712 visits, just this assignment. And it was done 39 times. So I found that kind of interesting. So I went to it last night. And this is obviously the assignment. There's a little description of what to do. And there's two tags here. The sign assignments and design assignments 1089. You tag your blog with those and wherever you blog that assignment, it will feed into this space. And Alan Levine, who is with Martha Burtis, another architect of this entire infrastructure, added a little line here. If your blog is not connected to DS106, you can add your example directly. What we call drive by assignments. People come, they do an assignment, bam. They drop it off. It could be on Inger, it could be on Flickr, wherever. And that happened a ton with this. So I'm going to go to this assignment right now. I'm going to jump onto the web. Scary place, but I'm going to do it. Now watch. Here are the people who did this assignment. And I started clicking on some of them. And many of these right here are primary school kids. When your class can be taken by primary school kids as a higher ed, something's happening weird, right? They all created these great read posters. And I said, you know, this is wild. And a student at Mary Washington did it too. So if I click here, and this is great, this student has her own site. You get to see how it works. I made a Donald Trump read poster. It separates us from the animals assuming this is the animal, I guess. I don't know. It's a very complex interpretation. But actually what you start to get now is an infrastructure framed by this notion of syndication that George Seaman has talked about in a comment that Brian Lam left in 2007. So by the time we got to DS 106, it was raucous and amazing and all of that. And the infrastructure was people, absolutely. But we found a way to start linking some of those people in intelligent, thoughtful ways that gave them their content to take with them over the course of time. If I can get back into this presentation seamlessly. I must be a professional. Okay, now. See, I am a little cocky. Is that how you say it? So look, DS 106. We'll talk about Grand Potter in a second. But I need a second. Because it's actually cool. I did this all last night. Click on this button. DS 106 was not only an infrastructure, although we'll talk about the infrastructure. DS 106 radio, which we're on right now, was actually built as an alternative to Blackboard Illuminate. The idea was you can't teach DS 106 and then go in Blackboard Illuminate. So what happened is every course event that happened was framed through the radio. But that was just the beginning of it. One of the things that was cool, and I want to take a side here, is the actual visual was created by a student. So the student got into it. Students were into DS 106 radio for a while. And Andrew Olingham built or designed the logo that is still used. But that doesn't end there, right? And I'm going to take a little bit of an aside about one of the network effects of DS 106. So here's my small side. It goes back to Andrew Olingham. Andrew Olingham still has his website from DS 106. I remember a couple of years after the course, because he did this in 2011, he had done this infographic as part of the class. And it's really interesting. It compares the idea of boatload versus buttload versus shitload. It's an infographic. This is a boatload. It's a lot of whiskey, right? 54 million gallons of whiskey. A buttload is 126 gallons, and a shitload is not even .26 gallons. So when we say shitload, what he's trying to say is, it has no real meaning. You really want to say boatload. This got picked up on Reddit. He had 70,000 views in a day. People love this. You might hate it and say, why did we ask this guy to come talk, and you're right. But this network effect of this simple infographic that a student did was really part of the power of this infrastructure. It was porous. It went all over the web. It imagined itself not as part of a unilateral system. But let's go back to Grant Potter. I digress. I looked for a picture of Grant Potter as I was about to talk about DS106 radio, which he designed while he was in British Columbia. And I remember coming into the class that was in Virginia at the time and saying, you know what, someone in British Columbia built us a radio station. What a bizarre thing to say. And the students were like, yep, that sounds good. I was like, don't you think that's crazy? Well, I did. Image I found on the web. And I was like, oh great, and I was just going to use it and not attribute it because I hate the whole attribute thing, but I know you should do it. But anyway, I got interested.  So I went to the next page and it brought me to this, which was the DS106 Daily Create. The DS106 Daily Create was an idea that spawned from something that Alan Levine turned us on to in DS106 when it first started. And the idea was the Daily Shoot. I don't know if any of you remember it. The Daily Shoot was a site where you had one, basically two photographers who gave a prop make a picture of orange or take a picture with lines or do something from an X angle. And you would do it, people would tag it on Flickr and it would all go to that site until you could see what you had done but also in kind of juxtaposition to what everything else had done and you kind of learned by osmosis. So three years after DS106 was created, there was a prompt on the Daily Create because we created the Daily Create because the Daily Shoot went away. And so here was the prompt. Here were all the people who did it and I found this. So wait, I might actually be able to find who did it. And lo and behold, it was David Cernagham, right? But think about the infrastructure here. Google has indexed all of these resources that point back to sites like Flickr or Twitter or YouTube but we also still have archive in DS106. DS106 mimics the architecture of the web. It's why it's powerful, it's why it worked. It's why most of the content and work students have done from five years ago is still there. I think that's a powerful notion not only of teaching and learning and participatory culture but also of archiving. Now here's where I think it's the architecture of DS106 for me goes to another level. Alan Levine and I were teaching this course at Meriwashington in 2012. So this is the second full year of the course or the third but the second it was online. And we had two students who said, you know what, there's so much work in this community that inspires me. I want to feature some of it. So Alan was like, well, you can. Just build a site, we'll put it as part of DS106. They did, that was their final project, they called it Inspire and they had built part of the infrastructure for the class. This was done by Rachel McGurk and Eileen McKenna. It was really kind of for us a kind of astounding moment. One of the things that people did was sign this, I hope this works because I think this is a fascinating moment. They would go in, they would share the thing that inspired them, they would write about it and then they would link. This particular, this was a silent video trailer and this was in 2013, 2012 and you'll know here it got picked up from what I understand is an extremely reputable news source, the mail online. And we got, picked up basically by a tabloid the work the students were doing. So think about coming in to class and students actually going through and seeing that folks in English. Now it doesn't matter whether it's the Guardian of the Daily Mail to us, our ATMs have a British accent. That's got cachet. So if it's a British publication it's got cachet, students are like they love us, we're big in Britain. A lot of places of big in Japan, DS106 was big in Britain. So we got featured in the Daily Mail and I'm sorry Josie, I don't mean that, I apologize, but this was kind of another crazy network effect of being out there online. And what's so cool about it is it's infrastructure that was built and designed by students. So the students were officially building the course at this point. We could do this because we were using open source simple tools like WordPress. But it wasn't all open source simple tools. Some of it was Twitter. We did the kind of, what I thought was radical but again, no one seemed to care. We had a tweet built by a student of everything that we ever put on DS106 radio. All the music, all the life because what happened is Grant Potter not only built this but then he built a drop box where anyone could upload whatever they wanted. So DS106 radio became an actual cultural hub where people were sharing the music and the stuff that they loved. Some of it they created. I remember one of the remarkable moments on DS106 radio for me was hearing the crickets in Melbourne, Australia thanks to Rowan Peter, Peter Rowan who was going through his summer while we were in our winter. And he would go and narrate the sounds of Australia from where he was. And it didn't stop there. Infrastructure was one of our first moments where as a group at UMW we started to play with live video using Amazon Web Services. We built an entire infrastructure where the students built an entire infrastructure in Minecraft at the time. Right? We didn't regulate this at all. We also did a kind of alternative reality game called The Summer of Oblivion and I won't go into this here because it's kind of weird but it was this whole framework around the idea of using the online infrastructure and the online frame to completely rethink what a course could be. What happens if your faculty member is not only made up but goes missing and your students take over the class. And all of this in terms of infrastructure we're kind of still I know that Martin Hoxley is using Wirecast which we used during DS106 to stream this out online. Hi mom. I know that John Johnston a DS106 is right now using not only edge of talk radio but DS106 radio to broadcast this out. To a raucous million people. There's millions. There's one or two or three. There was a joke with DS106 radio and Brian Lamb and I kind of while we were doing this at first were like nobody's listening and that was kind of the idea that nobody is listening but we are as a community and so the infrastructure as much as it was built on some of these open source tools and it was it started to become a community and some would argue a cult. Right? And that's DS106 as a model to say hey wait students and faculty can manage their own spaces and aggregate them in and the syndication hub that George Siemens is talking about is not crazy. I revisited a talk in 2013 given by John Newdell in 2007 called the disruptive nature of technology if you have an hour I highly recommend you listen to it. It's on the web you can find it and it was given at edge of cause in Denver or in Colorado somewhere and what he argues here is really interesting he argues the idea that infrastructure as we know it right now will change and how it will change is that more and more of the digital bits as people produce we will have an own within our own repository what he calls a digital token but it's not just going to be our grades or our registration information it's going to be our medical records it's going to be our police records it's going to be the finger painting we did in third grade but it's also going to be the graduation picture it's going to be a digital repository of all the artifacts we have as individuals and he used this individual Gordon Bell who's a Microsoft researcher who kind of framed this idea of digital life bits and what Gordon Bell has done and has been doing for decades as he's been digitizing all of the data connected with his life all of his emails he's been storing all of his images all of his documents everything for easy access right? and he saw it as the kind of the realization of the Vannevere Bush Memex where you can have all these documents at your fingertips at any time and I was really taken by this idea because the extension of everything we did in DS106 was infrastructure was to give that infrastructure to students and faculty at Mary Washington and so we did in 2012 DS106 which allowed me to meet Tim Owens who came on to work with us at Mary Washington who built Domain of One's Own it was basically our in-house hosting we built web hosting and gave everyone who was interested at Mary Washington their own domain in web hosting and we said you know what? don't use WordPress multi-site and have our domain like JimGroom.Umblogs.org get your own space and when we pitched it it went like this this is really innovative but I'm afraid we can't consider it because it's never been done before and we did the research it hadn't but in fact we had a really cool interim CIO we said you know what? call it a pilot, here's $10,000 see what you can do 2012 we piloted 400 faculty and students to do this very thing and it was a success it worked the technology and the infrastructure had been simple enough that people could build and manage their own spaces they couldn't have done that maybe in 2005 some good examples are Sue Fernsebner, a history professor built one of the definitive resources on the Chinese typing civil war if you search for this on Google this becomes the third hit after Wikipedia and another site and it's interesting she used all open tools but the students created the resource and they all can point to it as part of the research the other thing that was really compelling to me was a librarian who was basically in the process of writing it's a life's work a magnum opus the history of the early history of the Cubs which is a baseball team from Chicago and he did all this work on paper he started using his site called WrigleyIvy.com to share it and he has gotten not only invites to speak all over the world he's gotten places to publish he's become a kind of phenom as a result of the work he's simply putting on the web and is searchable through his own domain which I'm just struck by and he's a completely humble, cool, awesome person whose work should be out there now we start to move into this moment of reclaim and I'm going to talk a little bit about what reclaim might mean but I got to give a nod during the whole DS-106 time 2011-2014 there was an individual at CUNY Boon Gorgas who became one of the most important word press developers for buddy press on the web who started talking about reclaiming all of his stuff from these various third party institutions and organizations and services and he called it project reclaim and he did this for about three or four years got himself a Twitter, got himself a Gmail got himself everything and blogged it Darcy Norman and Doug Belchaw also did that alongside him but 2013 was a really enjoy him, he was there he was there MIT Hackathon I met these two characters in my life in some ways and I mean that in a very good way Ken Lane and Audrey Waters came in talking about the work we were doing with the main of one's own talking about the work they were doing about rethinking notions of data and privacy and APIs talking about the new oil being data and the way in which Audrey framed this as a very pointed thoughtful articulation of a criticism of Silicon Valley and the hype and hysteria and the way in which Ken framed an alternative vision using these application application interfaces which actually led us to a very different point and I think it's the trajectory we find ourselves on now and I'm really excited about it because again it's reinforced by this notion of infrastructure this notion of the personal API Tom Woodward who's an instructional technologist at Virginia Commonwealth University took the advice of Ken and Audrey and he started to go through all of his different applications and spaces online everything he had and he started to inventory it and the idea of the personal API was it's a very simple thing make a spreadsheet of all the different applications you're a part of and articulate them like what do you use where is your data and the point is to try and bring everything back into your own frame that doesn't mean avoid these applications but that means understand an inventory where your digital life bits are around the web and so this is a post from yesterday that Tom Woodward is starting to go on this process so you had this idea of the personal but then you had Alan Levine and Brian Lamb at TRU University in Canada starting to play with what I thought was a really fascinating idea inspired in some ways by Tom Woodward this idea of the splot and I'm not sure what splot means could mean the smallest possible learning online tool it could mean several other things but what it is is it's a very simple tool that does one thing allows faculty to use a form to post images to post a writing prompt to post x to post y to post z and the idea is it's not a system it's a one singular tool using something like WordPress to create and using a clone tool in an infrastructure like cPanel you can create it for as many faculty as you want seamlessly and Brian Lamb has talked about this we had a discussion about this just the other day about the power of this to get people thinking about these tools without worrying about once you get to a WordPress do I use tags, do I use categories what's a post, what's a page sometimes technologists like me assume too much the other thing that I think is really compelling is the work Grant Potter and Brian Lamb are doing right now with open infrastructure in relationship to virtualization this right here is part of British Columbia's open educator network and what they're using is they're using an application called sandstorm and sandstorm using various sign-in tools like your Google account I think you can do github your email but they're also trying to single sign-on through Shibboleth right now allows you to access to a wide range of applications right whether it be WordPress Ghost which is another blogging platform Davros et cetera you can do all of these things as you see fit and this is also happening with people like Tony Hearst who's experimenting with this notion of the cloud and containers and I know I'm running out of time so I will stop shortly but I want to think for a second we're in the moment where what web publishing was in 2005 we could be with infrastructure right now we could actually be in a space where as easy it was to get people a blog and rethink how they can publish online it may be as easy to give people control and power over their own spaces and that's for me the kind of I was talking about this with Tony Hearst yesterday and I was like is that a crazy concept to use things like containers to use things like sandstorm to reimagine how we personally manage our own data and I'm really in the mindset that it's not a crazy idea at all sorry about that that's it, thank you I didn't want to stop I think we've got things just far apart from the questions something like that something like this for us who need the door to help it's such a wonderful position to have that so what you're talking about is very scary to a lot of people in institutions but you know it's got huge potential and you know how many like talk tips that we did maybe no I do, I think that's a good question and I think to be clear we didn't always have CIO support for many years we did this on the outskirts of the actual I think the IT organisation was happy that we weren't bothering them with the support but we got an 895 a month account from Bluehost to start building out some of these infrastructures and I think it's my belief and I kind of I messed it up there at the end but with some of these tools right now like digital ocean or docker and the ability to imagine infrastructure that could scale for fairly affordable is kind of the next wave of web hosting right, I mean what we had with Cpanel in 2003 2004, 2005 we're starting to see it's becoming more user friendly and accessible and it's not limited just to PHP applications you have a whole range of applications you can choose from so I think if I was going to give anyone advice I mean the 10 bucks a month it might cost for experimenting with a digital ocean account and seeing what some of that hits and what some of that does it now note I'm speaking from the perspective of a technologist right I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who spends their time thinking about building infrastructure for faculty and students to learn on and to experiment with so if you're in that situation and even if you don't have support centrally I don't think there's anything stopping you from going on one of these services and start imagining what that infrastructure would build just the other day I played with this resource Linode which is a virtual server to build with a predefined script a WordPress multi-site that could scale for thousands of people and someone had built that it was just a couple of clicks to actually make that possible so at this point I think doing that would be just finding the people on the place to have space to experiment I don't think financially it would be ruinous whether or not someone's watching you so closely that they would just stop it is another question that's a bigger cultural problem that you probably would still have to work around and like I said yesterday maybe get yelled at or ask for forgiveness is it still the right thing to be encouraging students to get onto the web and start sharing parts themselves on the web and at the stage I wouldn't recommend that people actually went on Twitter at all because it's horrible and I'm just actually wondering where the next step that kind of interaction is if those platforms are different than the expected the other second question is west socks the socks I will not answer I'll pretend I never heard that I'll tell you this is part of a really good question and I think it gets to again to that point that Seaman's made and that Udell makes in that video in that podcast is I would rather be in a situation and known which is an open source application that plays with this idea that when you're working for my class or you're doing something and I'm like I need you to publish X, Y and Z to this I'm not telling you what tools to use I'm not telling you to use Twitter I'm not telling you to use Facebook I'm not telling you to use YouTube I'm telling you to log into your domain and those tools you use would be buttons like you do use Facebook you do use Twitter even if I didn't tell you to you do use delicious no one uses delicious anymore but you get the idea right and you would post into that and you would send it to the places you wanted it to live as well as to maybe a course aggregation hub so it wouldn't be me actually defining where that those tools that you used and the two studies that I wasn't able to talk about one from ELI and one from surf here in the Netherlands was about rethinking this infrastructure that would allow that very thing to happen using APIs and using an interface that would disaggregate and abstract any one tool from the process of publishing which I think gets a lot closer to John Udell's vision of what it means for us to have a kind of series of digital life bits that we manage and take with us over time at the point where I'm not telling someone to use Twitter or someone to use X, Y and Z as the point where I think we've become post system for how we teach and learn and I'm excited for that moment but I really I didn't talk about it extensively but Twitter was an amazing platform for DS106 amazing the hashtag DS106 is still as strong as it's ever been and it's a way for me and for students to fold time and space back upon each other so that you might have taken this course in 2011 but still be a part of it in 2016 that's powerful so whatever happens in this new space I hope it imagines some of the affordances that social media still provides and Alavine says this and he says it really, really well I want to be able to manage and archive my own spaces but I also still want to go to those dance halls whether it's Facebook or Twitter and be with people and hang out and be part of a social frame so I can see what happens but also thinking and so for me the idea I know you want me to stop talking, I'm sorry but the idea is the only thing that will scale on the web is the individual and our idea of our work that we take with us that we decide and have power over and share out broadly but still we ultimately become the long term maintainer of our archive and of our teaching and of our learning and of our process and so that's for me why the blog still has so much power and why I still have struggles with people like my call field who imagine the garden and the wiki as a kind of clean better alternative to the web I don't necessarily think he's wrong but I have a very hard time feeling as passionate about that as I do about my own narrative over time Great Thank you very much Thank you Thank you It's a great privilege to have you and please take this as well and if we could all thank Jim please Thank you very much


I showed pills in this. I obviously was taking pills for the pain of my knee. I only take one pain pill now a night before I go to bed. So I don't feel, don't like get worried for me or anything. I mean, I was worried for me. Like I was like, I don't want to take any more pain pills but I just take one pain pill before bed and I'd be profiting in the morning to reduce swelling. So I do take pills. I feel like I'm in a good head space enough to not abuse them. So that's good. So yeah, as you saw from that clip, Trisha Paytas is back on Pain Killers and I received quite a few messages about this. So I wanted to discuss what is up everybody. This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, what I try to do is take different topics going on in the YouTube community, try to see what lessons we can learn from them to improve our own mental and emotional well-being. And two things that I'm really passionate about are mental health and addiction recovery. So if you're into any of that stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. So real quick, I get a lot of messages about people who have a loved one who is struggling with an addiction and they ask me questions and don't know what to do. Well, I wrote a book. It's right here. It's called Caught in the Crossfire. It's only $3, short e-book but I go through different intervention strategies but my main goal of that book is how to stay mentally well, whether or not your loved one gets clean. So I'm gonna link that down in the description and in the pinned comment below. So real quick, before I jump into this, why am I talking about this? For those of you who don't know me, just a quick rundown of my qualifications. First one is, back on June 23rd, I celebrated seven years clean and sober. I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. My primary drug of choice was prescription painkillers. Aside from that, I worked in a drug and alcohol treatment center for a little over three years. We specialized in dual diagnosis treatment. So not only did we treat addiction, we also treated mental health issues. Also, I am halfway done with my CADC which is a certified alcohol and drug counselor license. All right, so that's why I'm gonna be discussing this but big fat disclaimer, I do not personally know Tricia Payness. Okay, I'm going to be sharing my opinions on what I can see and what everybody else can see which is public knowledge, all right? And I'm gonna explain why if I was Tricia Payness's friend or I loved one of hers, I would be worried, okay? Because my main goal with these videos is to use this topic just to get a conversation going because you might have someone in your life who is clean and now because of an injury, they're back on pain meds. And this doesn't always mean that it's gonna lead to a relapse but we're gonna discuss it in this video, all right? So those of you who aren't caught up to speed earlier this year, Tricia Payness, she got clean. Her drug of choice, like me, was prescription painkillers, all right? She got clean, she was talking a lot about recovery and therapy and everything like that since her breakup with Jason Nash. And yeah, she posted a video about withdrawal and everything, right? Well, she's been on tour recently and she's doing all this dancing and stuff like that and she hurt her knee. And this is one of the biggest fears of anybody who is a recovering opioid addict, all right? Like, I remember when I first got clean, I'm like, well, well, well, what if I get hurt? What if I get hurt? I need pain medications, right? So it's one of the biggest fears and I actually eventually did get injured quite a bit. It's happened a few times in my seven years clean but I'll talk about that. So yeah, Tricia Payness, she recently opened up about how she's back on pills but I'll play that clip again for you. I showed pills in this. I obviously was taking pills for the pain of my knee. I only take one pain pill now a night before I go to bed. So I don't feel, don't like get worried for me or anything. I mean, I was worried for me. Like I was like, I don't want to take any more pain pills but I just take one pain pill for a bed and I'd be profiting in the morning to reduce swelling. So I do take pills. I feel like I'm in a good head space enough to not abuse them, so that's good. So again, I do not know Tricia Payness. She might be 1,000% honest right now. I am just sharing if this was somebody in my life or one of the clients I was working with at a treatment center, I'm going to explain why I'd be worried, okay? So one of the main reasons why I'd be worried is because Tricia Payness after she got clean, she didn't completely get sober. It was within that first month of her quitting painkillers that she was still drinking, all right? So like I said, I'm recovering drug addict and alcoholic. Like I had to get to a place where I realized that if I put any type of mind-altering substance, like an addictive substance in my body, I lose control, all right? One of the things that led to my last relapse eight years ago was I thought I could still smoke pot as long as I wasn't doing the pills or drinking, but it just slowly led me back into my addiction. And this is why we often teach people complete abstinence, all right? We try to get down to the root cause of why are you turning to alcohol or drugs in the first place? So that's one of my concerns is that she was still drinking that whole time. The next thing is, Tricia Payness says, don't worry, she's in a really good head space right now. And again, this is just public knowledge, what we've all seen. It doesn't seem like she's been in a good head space, all right? It's been just within the last few weeks that she had her public blow-ups about Jeff Whittock and David Dobrik and the vlog squad and she made those videos saying that she was gonna expose all of them and everything like that.  And this is something that we do, like the disease of addiction, it minimizes, right? And it justifies what we're going through, right? Like, oh yeah, no, I'm totally fine. Don't worry about me. But when you look at it like, no, I'm not in a great head space. Like, listen, I'm seven years clean and sober. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am surrounded by drugs and alcohol and everything like that. And I have to keep in check like where I'm at mentally because if I'm in a bad head space, I won't even go places that are serving alcohol. You know what I mean? Because I love going to concerts and things like that. Or I live, like I said, in Las Vegas. It's freaking everywhere. But I have to be honest with myself about where I'm at with my own mental and emotional well-being. But the last thing is like, kind of to piggyback off the good head space is she's been hanging out with Aaron Carter, okay? And if any of you have been watching Aaron Carter, like, dude's not doing well. And I was thinking about doing a video on him because there's a lot that we can discuss when it comes to if you have a family member who's dealing with mental illness and things like that. So if you want me to make a video on that, like, let me know down in the comments below. But anyway, Trisha Payness has been hanging out with him. So I just don't, you know, in my opinion, I don't feel like she's in that good head space. Now, like I said, is it possible, is it possible that Trisha is being completely honest and she's only taking one pain med before she goes to bed and then taking ibuprofen? Yes, all right? So when I first got sober, I had a friend who got sober with me and basically how his addiction started was he broke his neck, okay? Like, he had to have screws in his neck and everything like that. So they gave him the pain meds and that progressed to heroin, all right? And he was clean for, I think a year or two and his neck just started hurting out of nowhere. And he went back to the doctor and was like, yo, what's going on? They did an x-ray and the screws in his neck actually broke, all right? So they had to go back in there and redo the surgery. This dude had two years clean off of prescription opioids, drugs, alcohol, everything, right? So what he did was because like, nobody would expect him to have people go into his neck and screw into his bones and not take anything but he had his meds and he gave them to his sponsor. So that way he had some additional accountability. And again, without knowing Trisha Payness, like that's just one of my concerns is it doesn't seem like she's involved in any type of program. She talks about therapy every now and then but typically for us in recovery, if we have to, have to, have to take these medications, we'll have somebody else dispense them to us because that's one of the issues with addiction. We can't even trust ourselves. But my friend is still clean and sober and this happened, you know, we had to have that surgery read done. It was five years ago. So it is possible, all right? But lastly, I just wanna talk about like, do we need these medications? All right? Pain is a very tricky thing. And I can go on for another hour about this because in the United States, we over prescribe for pain. We prescribe more pain medications than anywhere else on earth. Like you can combine like the next 10 places and we still prescribe more than them. So we treat pain with medications rather than trying to help fix that pain. But anyways, like I said, when I first got sober, I'm like, well, well, what if I get hurt? Well, my mom, she is also in recovery. She is celebrating 14 years in a month or two. And when I first got sober, similar to Trisha Paytas, she tore some ligaments in her knee. And I'm like, oh, sweet. Like, I'm like, mom, cool. You get to take some pain meds, nice, right? Well, my mom, at the time, she was like 50. She didn't take any pain medications at all.   I'm like, dang. Well, if my mom can get through that, then maybe I can get through some pain too. And yeah, when I was two or three years sober, I got in my very first car accident, which is crazy because I used to drive intoxicated quite a bit and I got in my first car accident sober. It was a head-on car crash and thank God I was wearing my seatbelt and it messed me up.  They sent me home with a prescription for Norco and even though I kept denying the pills, they kept trying to give them to me and I didn't take a single pill even though I got into a car wreck, all right? Because the way I live my recovery is in my active addiction, I would do anything to get high, right? So today, the way I live my sobriety is I do anything to avoid getting high.  Maybe, but today I don't. So I choose not to worry about that, all right? Like many of us in sobriety, we take this thing one thing at a time, all right? So at the end of the day, I hope Trisha Paytas is being honest and she is not abusing these medications. This video was just sharing my opinion if this was somebody in my life, I'd have some concerns. All right, but if you have a loved one who is struggling with addiction, don't forget down in the description and in the pinned comment, you can check out my book, Caught in the Crossfire. It's only three bucks. It's a quick read, has some intervention strategies in there and everything like that. All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon as well as everybody who supports the channel in other ways like buying merch like this shirt with a picture of my adorable cat or my books that all helps the channel out. All right, thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.