It’s been an eventful summer already, and the next big event is just around the corner: on 18th August the DS106 Radio Summer Camp returns! YES!
Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of all things audio and especially radio. So for the past few years it’s been a real pleasure for me to be working with folks who share my enthusiasm and are game to have radio based events, too. Two years ago we ran our first full-radio online event which turned out to be a real success and ever since we have been experimenting with the format.
This month we are running a 1 day event on the DS106 Radio airwaves, 12 hours of radio to listen to, join in with and blog along to. It’s online conferencing without a screen. All you need to do us tune in – and I very much hope you will as it’s promising to be a very fun day indeed.
There’s a mix of music, chat and interviews with special guests, a game session and campfire socials, too (check out the schedule).
One of the things I love about radio-based events like this is that it encourages different types of conversations, and allows for more informal, impromptu encounters and thinking out loud, that listening to someone go through a Powerpoint presentation just doesn’t.
Another great benefit is that folk who are listening don’t have to be at their desk or stare at a screen to participate. Instead, you can listen in live (and we usually make recordings available afterwards so you can catch up with session you’ve missed).
Having had the privilege of attending some conferences in person earlier in the summer, I feel this is the next best way to connect with colleagues at a distance, and because it’s free and on the radio, there’s no Zoom link to find or webinar software to make work.
Come along and join in the DS106 Radio Summer Camp.
From 6-8 March two of my favourite annual initiatives co-incide:
It’s Open Education Week, from 2-6 March, celebrating all things open in Education AND it’s also International Women’s Day on 8 March. Perfect timing to celebrate all things (and people!) inspiring in open education and beyond.
To celebrate in proper style, I am organising a schedule to jump on the DS106 Radio airwaves and bring you tunes over the weekend and I would love you to get involved. Here’s how:
Tune in and join in the conversation
It’s easy! Go to https://listen.ds106rad.io/ and listen 🙂 . Say hello, chat and enjoy the music. I will be monitoring the conversation via Bluesky and on Mastodon using the hashtag #ds106radio and I will be posting using the hashtags #ds106radio #oeweek26 and #IWD2026.
Dedicate a song
If you’d like to dedicate a song to something or someone who inspires you, in open education or beyond, then send me your request by responding to this post in the comments or reach out via Bluesky and on Mastodon.
Include the song title + artist, and who or what you’d like us to dedicate it to on air (including any links or tags you’d like us to post out). We won’t be tagging private accounts 🙂
Join me on air or DJ yourself
For any aspiring or established DS106 Radio DJs out there… get in touch if you fancy joining me on air OR if you are planning a broadcast that weekend, and are up for joining forces around a common theme.
Broadcastings schedule
There are some special guests waiting in the wings, and I will be adding to the schedule with more details soon. For now, my plan is to be on air each day as follows (subject to change and hopefully additions):
Organising conferences is my guilty professional pleasure… . I fell into doing it at various times throughout my career and I thoroughly enjoy it. I like the preparations, the run up and the excitement of delivering an event, whether it’s for several hundred people in a hushed auditorium or a buzzy online crowd with run-away chatter and endless DMs.
Last year I had an absolute blast working on the DS106 Summer Camp with Jim Groom and his team at Reclaim, and we had the MOST fun delivering a radio based conference. So when this year’s plans for Reclaim Open came along, I jumped at the chance to work together again to re-invent the conference yet again.
What’s in store
Reclaim Open’s theme this year, brought to life by the one and only Bryan Mathers is Rewilding the Network – Making New Connections and the conference will take place fully online, so there’s no travel required 🙂
The event covers three days, from 4-6th November, and registration is now open. Register to attend before September 1, 2025 and get a 33% ‘early bird’ discount, making the conference fee a very affordable $99.
Your Voice: how do educators and students find and amplify their voices on the open web? How do we make ourselves heard and what are the risks and opportunities in Higher Ed and beyond?
Your World: Maybe it’s a blog or a domain of one’s own that is your home in the digital realm. Whether it’s all business or rather hobbies, pets, creative projects, parenting or sports. Share what you care about on the open web.
The Tech: the technology that makes it all possible, from open source platforms like WordPress and Ghost, to open infrastructure hosted on ReclaimEDU, this theme is for sharing tech know-how and geeky pursuits.
The Connections: What brings us together in a world of fragmented social networks and how do you stay connected and find new connections? From self-hosted socials to federated networks, we want to hear about how you make connections.
The Wildcard: Share your inspiration and creativity. Wild is wonderful.
There will be radio!
One of the things I am most looking forward to is the Reclaim Open Blog-A-Thon, a wild mix of radio and blogging fun on the first day of the event. If you are curious what this is all about, read on:
How it all began
It all started at the beginning of this year when a few brave souls got together to found Bloggers Anonymous, Reclaim’s Community of Practice for Bloggers in Higher Ed. It started small, with a dedicated channel on Discord, and a monthly meeting. A few of us got to together to talk about blogging, and blog about blogging… and before we knew it the RSS feed that folk were adding their blogs to was pinging with the sound of fresh blog posts, hot off the press. If you’d like to find out more about this Community of Practice, check out the story so far over on the Reclaim Blog.
So what’s the Blog-A-Thon?
Now, the Blog-A-Thon is on November 4th, the first day of the conference, and the idea is that we’re going to take to our blogs to read, respond and connect. You’ll be able to find and navigate between the posts via the conference schedule, and post your comments
We’re also planning for some good old-fashioned radio coming to you live with bloggers chatting about blogging and playing the soundtrack to their stories.
If that’s made you curious, head over to the conference site to learn more, and make your submission!
It’s the time of year again… and as someone who works remotely with clients across different timezones, most of my ‘festive’ moments at work are unceremonious video calls that end abruptly as everyone rushes off to their next meeting. Meanwhile, across the various social media spaces I take part in, corporate messages of (apparent) goodwill mix uneasily with cheery commercial overload, making it hard to find the actual updates from actual people I care about. Jolly Holidays on the interwebs this isn’t!
Fortunately we can breathe a little easier, as there is still real fun to be head online for those of us working in education and edtech, in the form of Reclaim’s Rewind 2024 series of free and open events on the radio, tv and social activities! I am really excited to be part of this, and to have a group of wonderful people to share the run up to the holidays with.
It’s precious to me to take some time to celebrate community and have the opportunity to connect with colleagues, reflecting together on the highs (and lows!) of the year that’s been, and gather our strength and find some renewed inspiration before the new year starts.
Kicking off the whole series was a team outing on Reclaim TV, sharing some of the best bits of 2024, the drama that shook the (edtech) world (hello, WordPress bros) and how the team have come out fighting the “good fight for indie edtech” on the other side.Â
Next up was what we called a “Case Study Bonanza”, featuring special guests from a number of schools that work closely with the team and the one and only Bryan Mathers:
But… the best is yet to come! This week, there are the two biggest events coming up and I hope that you will join us, so here are all the details:
Community Chat: Rewind 2024
December 18th For this final community chat of the year we are inviting ALL our special guests from 2024 to come together. You will hear updates of the exciting work happening across our community and have a chance to share your own highs and lows of 2024. This is our time to come together to say thank you and acknowledge and appreciate everyone who works in open edtech in Higher Education. Event info
Reclaim Rewind 2024: Live on DS106 Radio. It’s the HOLIDAY SPECIAL
December 20th We are inviting you to join us for the one and only edtech radio holiday special, featuring guests from the legendary DS106 Radio Summer Camp. There is going to be story telling, holiday tunes and, if you are very lucky, even a bit of festive KaraOERke. The elves are working hard on that one. So listen in and play along as we ROCK the airwaves and ring in the holidays. Event info
There are also a couple of DS106 Radio hosts, myself included, who will be jumping on the airwaves to play music and chat, so follow the #ds106radio on Mastadon to find out what’s on, and tune in to DS106 Radio.
It’s such a joy to be able to have some actual time together with folk without the clock ticking on yet another meeting, and to be able to dip in and out of the festive fun as I sit at my desk finishing off my work for the year.
During the pandemic edtech folk became an educational emergency service, and everyone suddenly wanted to learn about how to use technology at scale, fast. Those days are fortunately behind us, and these days hype headlines about AI are more likely to pull focus. But for me, it’s definitely the human beings (not the technology) that made this year, and it’s all the unsung (edtech) heroes, grinding away at keeping the open web a possibility for future generations of students and educators, that I’ll be celebrating with this year!
Wishing you, and yours, Jolly Holidays on the Open Web!
A few years ago the OERxDomains21 Conference, a conference of firsts in 2021, fired up the world of online conferencing against the dark backdrop of the pandemic. It was an amazing event, and, as I wrote at the time:
…it’s been a career highlight for me, to lead my team on a rollercoaster ride which ended in an event we are all proud of. WE WILL DO IT AGAIN.
I wrote that in April 2021 and as it turns out, WE DID IT AGAIN. This week in fact as another event, another conference of firsts, rocked the radio: DS106RadioSummerCamp.
When I pitched the idea to Jim and the team at Reclaim, I tried to go all in:
Imagine summer camp, on the radio, connecting with friends old and new as you tell stories around the campfire, reflecting on the year that’s been and learning a whole lot along the way.
At the time, I had no idea whether it would be possible for us to pull this off at all and indeed whether anyone would turn up in the middle of August for a week of radio on DS106Radio… and how we would somehow pull this all together into a coherent schedule for folk to follow.
Making it open
One of the things we all agreed one from the outset is that the event would be completely free and open to all, and that all the resources would similarly open and easy to access, download and share again. We get open and we do open, and to round it off you ALSO have broadcasts and documentation of how it works behind the scenes from how to create the podcast recordings to how to host your very own radio station. Reclaim rocks open!
Making it more inclusive and accessible
The other thing we wanted to make happen was to make the event more accessible. Radio has some limitations from the outset, and so we started to experiment with recordings and transcripts as a way to help folk access the event in different formats and across time zones. Thanks to a phenomenal response to our open call, we had a lot of speakers and guest DJs join us on air over the course of the week.
Making it fun
My favourite thing about the Summer Camp was that is was FUN. Having fun on the internet, with friends, it was amazing. The schedule looked incredible once it all came together… and the reality lived up to the hype. There were so many creative sessions making the most of the medium. Kudos to everyone who gave this a go! We salute you.
Making it golden
It’s no coincidence that both of these events were made possible with the incredible team at Reclaim. There is so much gold dust sprinkled around in this space where experimenting is the order of the day and curiosity is prized so highly! That’s what makes it possible to make events like this happen… and to give us the golden moments that we remember in years to come.
I am super excited that we are now not even two weeks away from THE most highly anticipated event of the summer. Forget Paris, it’s all happening on the airwaves this August (and it definitely won’t be raining during summer camp on the radio!). Camp Leader in Chief, Jim Groom, has been blogging about what’s in store… featuring some very cool remixed artwork from Bryan Mathers (who I recently got chatting with on my podcast) – and so I want to jump in and share a preview of what’s in store come August 12th.
DS106 Radio Summer Camp is designed to free you from your screen and enjoy your summer whilst listening to inspiring stories around our virtual campfire.Â
You will have an interactive online programme which shows the full schedule for each day, starting Monday, August 12th and ending on Friday, August 16th. For each session you will be able to click on the link to the live stream from the radio. You can listen to the shows live or catch the recordings (and transcripts, too!) and there’ll be links to resources and references in the programme description for each session. To listen, all you need is a web browser.
This is the schedule for the camp as it stands at the moment, but keep in mind that some sessions may still move around as we co-ordinate with speakers and DJs from across different time zones.
Register for free and join us at camp
To take part, simply register and look out for the joining instructions the week before the event. During camp week, tune in to DS106 Radio and enjoy.Â
