via flickr user devoinregress (click for original)

• to gather evidence of my own learning and professional development
• to better market myself the next time I am looking for employment (although to be clear, this is not imminent)
• to have a better understanding of the tools available to individuals looking to build or support ePortfolios
• to gain experience in a skill many higher ed institutions are requiring or encouraging students to practice
• to document the process of building an ePortfolio for my future reference, and that of LLU community members
• to be more engaged in the LLU community

The plan is to finish this project before I go on vacation in a couple of months, so expect to see regular (hopefully weekly) posts from me over the next couple of months. My homework before the next post is to gather content I’ve created — documents, text descriptions, images, videos, links, etc — and to start thinking about ways to organize it. I’ll be looking to y’all to help with inspiration and to keep me honest, so don’t be shy about chiming in with comments, suggestions, criticisms, or questions!

Today’s question for all of you: have you created an ePortfolio for yourself? If so, post a link and contribute your best advice! If not, what’s stopping you?

What else does it take to be a not-good-but-great educational technologist, from your perspective? Inquiring minds want to know your thoughts …

For home users, the App Store is doing for desktop software what the iTunes store did for music: shortening the time it takes small-scale developers to make their products available to the masses, making physical media unnecessary, and providing immediate gratification to the consumer. Similar to the way mobile device app purchases work, all you need is an account with a credit card, and your new software is automatically and immediately downloaded and installed. Have multiple computers at home? Just attach each of the computers (up to five) to a single Apple account, purchase one license of your software, and install it (legally!) on all five computers. Awesome.

For large groups of users (i.e. those with more than 20 workstations), the App Store is not-quite-so-awesome. Business, non-profit, and education users aren’t allowed to take advantage of the “buy-once-install-five-times” rule; you have to purchase a single license for each and every workstation you want to have that software. This is a minor annoyance but not a change. To make the purchasing easier, Apple has an App Software Volume Licensing program, and educational institutions get a 50% discount on Apple software like OS X Lion, iLife, and Final Cut Pro X (although not on software from third-party developers). Importantly, you can still deploy App Store software purchased in bulk via mass-installation techniques. Set up one workstation exactly how you want it, clone that setup onto any number of other workstations, and you’re good to go. The catch? You have to purchase at least 20 licenses at a time. This usually isn’t a problem for the initial purchase — if you have 24 workstations, just buy 24 licenses and get them for the price of 12. Done. What happens later, though, when your lab expands and you need 6 more licenses? You’ll have to pay full price for those 6, which is a drag, but the real problem is you can’t use the Volume Licensing program at all unless you are making a purchase of at least 20 licenses, even if you have bought in bulk in the past.

So, how do you purchase more than 1 but fewer than 20 licenses in an educational, non-profit, or small business environment? This is where the nightmare really begins. Here’s the process:

1. Acquire one email address for every workstation you have. Each AppleID can be used to purchase only a single license of the software, and each AppleID needs a unique email address. I would recommend creating one address for each workstation you have, even if you don’t plan on buying that many licenses right now. Get these from your institution if you can, or just set up a number of accounts using free providers like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. (Quick tip: Gmail will only allow you to create 10 accounts from a single IP in a short period of time. If you need to create more, just switch computers, or use a different connection method. Also, if Gmail thinks you’re a bot, it’ll want to send you a verification code via SMS or voice call. Have a phone handy.) To keep your sanity, you’ll probably want to set these email addresses up to forward to a single location, which of course means verifying that your forwarding address actually belongs to you, once per email address.
2. Manually create AppleIDs using each of your new email addresses. If you have a departmental credit card that you can use to buy software and that you don’t mind entering into each and every account, just go to My AppleID and create the accounts. If you don’t have a departmental credit card, or don’t want to have it stored in a large number of accounts, the process is a little harder. Apple has done a good job of documenting the process of creating an AppleID without a credit card, so I won’t recreate those instructions here. Keep in mind that Apple will only allow you to create 3 AppleIDs from a single IP in a short period of time. If you need to create more, just switch computers, or use a different connection method.
3. Associate the new AppleIDs with your workstations. Log into your administrator account on the workstation (whichever one you use to install software), go to the Applications folder, open the App Store, and log in with one of the new AppleIDs. I’d recommend keeping track of which AppleID belongs to which workstation, just to make your life easier moving forward.
4. Purchase, download, and install applications on each workstation. If you have a departmental credit card that you can use for this purpose, go ahead and use the App Store on each workstation to purchase, download, and install your app. If you don’t have a departmental credit card to associate with each of your accounts … well, everybody’s situation is going to be different. If you have an institutionally-based Apple Store, you can probably use a purchase order to buy iTunes Gift Cards, which you can then redeem in the App Store. If you don’t have an institutionally-based Apple Store, you may need to use a personal credit card to buy iTunes gift cards and then submit the receipts for reimbursement, or check with your Purchasing office and see if they can use an institutional credit card to buy iTunes gift cards on your department’s behalf. Either way, you’ll want to purchase separate gift cards for each workstation, for the exact cost of the software you plan to purchase, and you’ll need to sit down to purchase/download/install the software separately on each workstation.

For a company that prides itself on making usable, elegant products, this is a complete and total failure. It seems like Apple didn’t think, or just didn’t care, about how the App Store woud negatively impact the medium-sized organizations that use its products. And when we talk about disruptive technologies … this is NOT what we mean.

My institution has been particularly hard-hit by this for a number of reasons, including the fact that we have no departmental credit card, and no longer have a campus-based technology store, but that’s a whole nuther story. I’m interested in hearing from the rest of you: how is this impacting your department or campus? Do you have ideas or information about how lab managers can make this process easier? Have I missed something really obvious? Leave a note in the comments!

And here’s one about riding public transportation in Korea, where seated people are not actually trying to steal your belongings:

Sadly there are no videos for visitors to Latin America, Africa, or the US and Canada (personally, I would be really interested to see what the rest of the world thinks is important information for visitors to the US to know) but this site could be a really valuable resource for students or professionals traveling to Europe or Asia. I also appreciate that Richard points out the value of this information even for those who are not going abroad; these videos can provide a great introduction to customs, practices, and cultures outside the US, and perhaps spark interest for students to seek out more information on their own.

These videos, by 43Films, are available on Vimeo, in the iPhone App Store, or via the Fasten Seat Belts website.

Everything has gone well so far (knock wood), and I’ve enjoyed the process; I started doing server and web administration while working at Oberlin and am appreciative of the continued opportunities to keep those skills sharp. I also like having time to find new or evolved tools that might enable me to do things more easily. At the end of 2009, for example, I started using the WP-Hive plugin to provide hosting for several websites with different themes and plugins while only having to maintain one copy of the WordPress backend. (WPMu didn’t provide quite what I needed in this respect, and anyway my host wasn’t particularly WPMu-friendly.)

This year my plans were twofold: moving from the soon-to-be-dead WP-Hive to WordPress 3.0 MultiSite, and finally moving the 24 LLU podcast audio files from my webspace to the cloud. The issue with this second goal wasn’t storage space, or even bandwidth, as even the most affordable webhosts nowadays offer more than enough of both for my needs. It was the principle of the matter; it’s 2011, and I should be able to find a quality host that allows me to 1) make audio files available for either download or streaming and 2) display some basic metadata (i.e. a title and description) for each file. When I say “quality” I mean “won’t disappear or start charging a crapton after a year or two” … and of course, free would be really nice.

Initial searching brought up several sites, but the “free” plans were teensy (100 MB storage space? really? i don’t even roll out of bed for 100 MB) and the paid plans offered similarly measly amounts of space at rates more expensive than my webhost. See for yourself:

My phone stores 16GB in a card smaller than my fingernail, but somebody’s charging $75 A MONTH for a gig and a half of storage. WTF. These rates haven’t changed much in the past two or three years, so at the beginning of this week I wasn’t particularly hopeful of finding a new solution.

HOWEVER! Earlier in the year a couple of retweets resulted in my following GOOD on Twitter, which led to me reading an article referring to the really brilliant “Ask culture / Guess culture” posting on MetaFilter. Since then I’ve come to rely on MeFites (as users of the site are called) when I want to gather information and advice on what shoes to buy, which webhost to use, or really any other question that Amazon.com reviews just don’t cover adequately. MeFites put a lot of time and effort into the site, and though it can sometimes be heavy on relationship, family, exercise, and diet questions, moderators are thoughtful and don’t hesitate to take down things down that are inappropriate, not helpful, or simply off-topic. It helps that registering for a MeFi account (which you need to ask or respond but not to read or search) requires a one-time $5 fee; this seems to keep ne’er-do-wells away.

So this year when I sat down to look once again for podcast storage, I turned to AskMeFi, and hallelujah! Even way back in 2006, the Internet Archive (best known for its WayBack Machine) was providing unlimited free media file storage, integrated Creative Commons licensing, auto-generation of the HTML needed to embed your files into your website for streaming playback, and the ability to upload multiple files (audio, video, text, PPT, whatever) for each episode.

I’m proud to say that all of LLU’s podcasts are now hosted on Archive.org; if you’d like to see this in action, check out this LLU post, the page for an individual podcast episode (with podcast chat log attached), or our public bookmark page (complete with RSS feed). Also check out OurMedia, a project supported by the Internet Archive — either of these sites would be a GREAT location for multimedia projects that wouldn’t otherwise have a permanent home (including work your students have done for class projects), or that you just want to make publicly available with the license terms of your choosing. If you’re wondering about quality? Well, the Internet Archive “is officially recognized by the state of California as a library,” and Ourmedia has on its Advisory Board such big-hitters as Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold, and the one and only Bryan Alexander. I’m not sure how much more quality you can get.

So, if you do one thing in the new year? Create something, anything. If you do two things? Create something and share it with other people. Three? Create, share, and patronize the places that help you connect with others who create and share. You never know when your little 140-character message on a social networking site is going to lead months later to someone finding exactly what they needed. My resolution for this year is to do just that, whether here on LLU, over at my newly-established personal blog, via DS106, or through the 250-words-a-day project that Barbara and I have both decided to try.

What’s your new year’s resolution?

I’m going to give a lecture today that basically is the toughest one I’ve ever had to give, and for some of you it’s the toughest one you’ve ever had to hear.

Last month, Jonathan Turley posted an entry about Richard Quinn, an instructor at the University of Central Florida who confronted his class after discovering one-third of them had apparently cheated on their midterm exam. Mr. Quinn used a test bank provided by a textbook manufacturer to produce the exam; the students allegedly acquired said test bank and used it during the course of the exam, although it’s not clear exactly how that happened. Here’s the video — it’s a little on the long side but I do recommend watching the entire thing:

While watching this, I found myself slack-jawed at several moments — not at the audacity these students had shown, or the amount of statistical analysis the instructor and his TAs had done to determine who had cheated, but at how perfectly this situation encapsulates everything that is wrong with American higher education right now.

With 600-some-odd students and basically a course that I’ve taught fundamentally the same way for the past 4-5 years, you don’t see [a class-wide grade and a half] improvement by chance.

Mr. Quinn makes his style of teaching clear from the beginning; he has been “delivering course content” for more than two decades, and relies heavily on statistical patterns to determine whether the course is on track or not. I understand that it’s just not possible for one instructor to give personal attention to 600 students, even with the help of teaching assistants … but if his focus here on statistics, data, and grades is any indication, that’s how he he likes it. Other choice quotes:

[11:11] The days of being able to find a new way to cheat the system …. are over. They’re over. Not just for this course, but for this university. This kind of behavior cannot, will not, be tolerated. You know who you are.

[12:20] For those of you who took the shortcut: don’t call me. Don’t ask me to do anything for you, ever … again.

[13:10] [The midterm exam will] be open for 51 hours. That’s it. [...] I don’t care what’s on your schedule, I don’t care what you have planned. If you have to give birth, you’re gonna give birth in the exam room. Because it’s gonna have to take a signed, hand-delivered note from God for you to get out of taking this midterm exam. So adjust your schedules, blow off whatever it is you have to blow off to be there. [...] It is mandatory for everybody.

I’m most surprised by how personally Mr Quinn takes the entire situation … especially considering he didn’t personally write ANY of the questions on the original exam (he just cobbled them together from a publisher-provided test bank). While the comments on Turley’s blog turn snarky pretty quickly (these are the intarwebs, after all), there is some pretty interesting point / counterpoint action, and one commentor posted this brilliant video from The Onion (NSFW due to profanity):

The comment thread on the original post is dead at this point (this is what happens when you start writing a post and don’t finish it until a month later) … but feel free to leave a comment below!

This evening while browsing YouTube, I stumbled across a veritable treasure trove of Disney videos in other languages, and the vast majority of them are TV themes or scenes from movie musicals that anyone born in the appropriate era can probably sing by heart (in English), or at the very least find them familiar. These videos incredibly easy to find; just search YouTube for “disney [language]” or “disney [country]” and you’ll find gobs of official channels (e.g. disneyportugal, WaltDisneyStudiosES, DisneyChannelactu) and unofficial playlists created by YouTubers (e.g. Japanese, two Chinese playlists, Arabic, songs from many languages with subtitles). If you or your students are particularly fond of a particular movie or TV show, you can also run a search on its title plus the language you’re looking for, and you’ll probably get some pretty good results.

Once you’ve found a video or twelve, there’s a wide range of possible activities, depending on what level you are (or are working with). Beginners might pick a song to learn and sing as an audio-recording, in a music video, or live at a karaoke night; intermediates might compare the original and target language lyrics and discuss the differences from a cultural perspective; and more advanced students might take the melody and write their own lyrics, or compare versions recorded in different dialects (e.g. the Austrian German version of “Part of Your World” vs the standard German, as noted in this post). There can also be lots of logistical flexibility; each student can pick their own song, small or large groups can be formed, or the whole class can focus on one video in particular.

Here are a few videos to get you started; if you have any YouTube videos you rely upon in your classroom, or ideas for other activities, please leave a comment!

Gummi Bears, Part 1:

starting timecode for each language:

0:03 – english (original)

1:05 – german

2:00 – polish

2:59 – russian

3:58 – hungarian

4:58 – portugese

5:59 – dutch

6:58 – spanish

Gummi Bears, Part 2:

starting timecode for each language:

0:01 – japanese

1:00 – swedish

1:57 – danish

2:56 – bulgarian

3:54 – norwegian

4:49 – italian

5:46 – french

Duck Tales:

starting timecode for each language:

0:04 – english

1:07 – hindi

2:04 – arabic (egyptian)

3:04 – dutch

4:04 – swedish

5:02 – finnish

5:59 – japanese

6:47 – icelandic

7:46 – hungarian

Aladdin, in Portuguese:

via haikus

I absolutely dread calling tech support, and will do just about anything to avoid it, including spend three days with no intarwebs at home, hoping that my modem will magically return from the dead. (Stubborn, me? Surely you jest.) Working my way through a phone tree; waiting on hold “for the next available representative;” explaining my problem in great detail; having the support rep walk me through a series of steps that I’ve already tried (and that haven’t worked) on several occasions; being notified after 30 minutes that the department I actually need to speak with is currently closed; and having the rep advise me to call back “during normal business hours” to start the process all over again from the beginning? Just the thought can be totally overwhelming.

As a 10-year veteran of front-line tech support, I can say with confidence that it’s just as much fun for the people on the other end of the phone. Remaining polite and helpful when your job is to answer the Same Flipping Questions every day is incredibly difficult, and taxing, for the employee. It’s often more efficient for an organization to hire relatively inexperienced part-time folks for the front-line positions, and quickly train them to either provide very basic assistance or “escalate” issues to someone more experienced. Theoretically, this creates a winning situation for everyone: those who need basic help get it quickly (and cheaply), those who need something more are quickly identified and transferred to the right person, inexperienced workers gain valuable experience in a variety of contexts, and experienced (i.e. more expensive) workers can focus on the problems that require greater knowledge or creativity.

In the real world, though, this model is much more complicated. Perhaps the person asking for help doesn’t have the vocabulary to accurately describe the problem, or is overwhelmed from struggling for who knows how long. Maybe the support technician doesn’t recognize when a problem needs to be escalated, or has plenty of technical knowledge but lacks customer service skills. Throw cultural or generational differences into the mix, and instead of efficiency you end up with the illusion of support, where nobody gets what they need and everybody ends up frustrated. It’s not just large technology corporations with overseas call centers that do this. It happens in small and medium organizations, for-profits and non-profits, IT departments and classrooms.

via clarkkampfe

I’d like to believe, as Bryan Alexander tweeted (quoting an article on Forbes.com about the rising cost of college), that “higher ed. remains essentially an artisanal industry.” Education –  and the various services associated with educational institutions — SHOULD be artisanal, a craft that is honed and refined over a long period of time, undertaken by those who care about what they do, and who strive for quality over quantity. But all too often it’s too much of an industry. To avoid spending time creating new tests or grading written answers, a high school teacher re-uses the same multiple choice tests for more than a decade. Instead of searching for new, updated resources or exploring ways in which other systems might provide a more engaging experience for students, a college professor copies last year’s files into this year’s course shell in the content management system.

A large part of the problem with our educational system, I would argue, is the result of poor support outside of the classroom walls. Secondary teachers aren’t going to have time to rethink tests when they have to go to endless department meetings, chair after-school clubs and activities, and spend their summers attending classes to renew their certification. College profs aren’t going to explore new technologies if their IT or ed tech departments refuse to provide information, advice, or support on systems they don’t officially manage. Providing responsible support, like being a responsible learner, means sometimes reaching outside of what’s comfortable. It means taking risks, pushing through fear, and accepting short-term failures on the way to long-term success.

via cogdog

Identifying how support should work is the easy part; figuring out how to get there is a much bigger question. So help me, LLU readers. If you teach, what concrete steps can your institution take to allow you to focus more on your students? If you provide support, what would help you do a better job? Comments welcome from all (as always), but I’m especially intrigued to hear from those folks with experience in both worlds. I know you’re out there, teaching staff!

Our unofficial (self-assigned) task was to blow stuff up.

courtesy ChrisIrmo, via Flickr

It’s technically true that you CAN get most or all of the items listed above via a course management system. But. My day job is to provide support and training for one such CMS, and while it’s not the most evil or least flexible of the bunch, for most people it’s still a blocky, clunky system where PPTs go to die. By its very nature, a CMS imposes limits on what you, either as an instructor or as a student, can do. It’s about managing content, managing grades, managing access. It’s NOT about creating an environment conducive to learning. (Don’t even get me started on the idea of a “learning management system.”) We wanted to give the participants in this program more.

What we came up with was, I think, a really awesome proof-of-concept for what an online learning community, whether standalone or in addition to in-person class meetings, could look like. It’s flexible: each individual can have their own space, separate from the main course or group space, and if a member has content hosted externally (Tumblr, Flickr, or anything with an RSS feed) that they want to incorporate, they can do so — not just on the sidebar, but in the main content area. It’s powerful: built on WordPress and Buddypress, there are thousands of plugins and themes to choose from if you have a specific need. After only two days of work, I’m really quite proud of it.

Even though the program decided this model wasn’t the direction they wanted to go, it was a blast to make, and sparked a lot of fresh new ideas for the three of us. It was so much fun, in fact, that we hope you’ll take a look at the site, even create an account if you want, and poke around. Drop us a line in the comments if you have suggestions or feedback of any kind — I’m particularly interested in ways that we might expand this into a fully-fledged CMS-killer, but for some this model could be interesting as a Ning replacement (see Lisa M. Lane’s recent attempts to do just that).

We look forward to hearing what you think!

To be clear: I’m not taking aim at the organizers of this particular conference, who I think deserve a hearty round of applause for all the incredibly hard work that went into making this event possible. My thanks and appreciation go to all involved, including presenters and my fellow attendees. I do think, however, that although some really wonderful alternatives have emerged in the last few years, we continue to use the same lecture-driven system that we’re trying to abolish from our classrooms. And I don’t get it.

Why can’t we create the same kinds of learning environments for ourselves that we strive to create for our students? We can, and should, do better, as educators, as technologists, as people who have a basic level of respect for each other.

Abolish keynotes. I understand the idea of a keynote is to focus attendees onto a single point of reference, or theme, in a way that doesn’t happen once everyone scatters to different meeting rooms. I also recognize that having a big name can draw additional registrants and help make a conference financially viable. However, keynotes set a really poor example; they encourage passive thought (“I will sit here and ingest my caffeine and wait for my brain to respond”) on the part of the audience, and sound bites that lack context or substance (“I need to give them something easy to remember for the next 2-3 days!”) on the part of the speaker.

Even when you find someone who can deliver a timely, engaging, inspiring, thought-provoking keynote (and they do exist — I am humbled to share this space with at least one person who can and routinely does), the format, with one person onstage and hundreds of audience members listening, creates an imbalance of preparation (“readiness,” if you must). By the time a keynote speaker steps on stage to begin, they have already written the abstract for the conference program, prepared and fleshed out an outline for the topics they want to cover, and put together a slideshow or other presentation to display to the audience. Experienced keynoters who have given similar presentations in the past can sometimes do this in an hour or two; others who have major revisions to make, or are nervous or inexperienced, can easily spend dozens of hours planning and writing.

Contrast this with the audience member, whose only advance interaction with the presentation is reading the title and description, a 250-word summary that often fails to accurately frame the topic, especially considering how far in advance it must be submitted. As the keynoter proceeds, their thoughts whiz by so quickly that many audience members (including yours truly) find it difficult to engage with or fully process them, and even harder to take the next step and formulate thoughtful questions during the 5 or 10 minutes available for Q&A, if the audience is lucky.

If we recognize that this model doesn’t work in the classroom, why are we so intent on replicating it during the few and far-between opportunities we have to gather in person, en masse?

Bring the backchannel to the forefront. SLOAN-C organized contests involving Twitter: follow the conference’s official Twitter account, send at least one tweet using the designated conference hashtag, and get yourself a chance to win prizes (including memberships to sponsoring organizations, free registrations to upcoming events, and other swag). In addition, at each session, a moderator was responsible for bringing comments and questions submitted from the virtual audience watching via the web, and also from those attending in-person and using the Twitter hashtag, into the general discussion in the room. This was BRILLIANT: it helped the backchannel organize quickly (no jostling over what the hashtag should be), let people who may not have realized otherwise that there WAS a backchannel that was open to all, and it helped those who chose to engage in the backchannel and the virtual proceedings to participate more fully (as opposed to coasting along in a parallel universe).

The best part of how this particular conference handled the backchannel, however, was that they did so in a respctful way to everyone involved. We weren’t directed into a closed “social networking” space designed to exist only for the length of the conference. Instead, they figured out where we were likely to be anyway and made a concerted effort to engage us while encouraging us to use the tools we felt comfortable with already. At every step, we had choices: if we wanted to fly under the radar we could simply opt not to use the hashtag, or we could make our tweets viewable only to those we had authorized. If we wanted to participate, all we had to do was make our tweets public, and use the hashtag. At the same time, we weren’t given privilege over the presenters, which can lead to really unfortunate consequences even when the presenter is experienced with and knowledgeable about how backchannels work. The point here is to level the playing field and to make it easier for all involved to participate in the way that makes the most sense for them.

Make session evaluations meaningful — for everyone. I’m willing to accept that my total lack of patience for the standard set of evaluation questions (e.g. “Please rate how well this session’s learning objectives were met”) is a personality flaw … but given the number of people I see either failing to complete the evaluation forms, or just giving every presenter top scores and not responding to any open-ended questions, I don’t think it’s just me. Part of the problem with session evaluations is that most conferences only provide a few minutes in between sessions, time in which attendees must also find and use the restroom, grab more caffeine, and navigate their way to the next session, which could be in another building, or on the other side of the hotel.

A larger part of the problem is that, although we know that evaluation forms could theoretically be really useful to the presenter, especially if they’re new to presenting, or are being reviewed for tenure / a promotion, they’re neither interesting to fill out, nor do we as attendees have any real stake in doing so. Even if we do forgo the bathroom stop or networking opportunity to write down some meaningful comments, off they go into a manila envelope, and we have no idea if they ever see the light of day again.

Why not raise the stakes a bit, while also making things fun? Pass out BINGO cards at the beginning of each session, and encourage attendees to both keep track of unnecessary jargon, and also to (respectfully!) ask the presenter to clarify when it does pop up. Include one or two free-response questions on the back, to be chosen by the presenter, so they can get the feedback most useful to them. Set up a series of “People’s Choice” awards (including some fun categories, like “Most Edupunk,” in addition to more traditional categories, like “Most Promising Research”) to be decided by attendees and awarded to presenters at the closing party — but make it so that you don’t get your ticket to the closing party unless / until you register your votes. Basically: give attendees a reason to evaluate presenters, make sure presenters get the feedback that actually matters to them, and most of all, do something to make the whole process less boring for everyone involved.

Other ideas? What do YOU think needs to be changed about the way conferences work? If we come up with good ideas and concrete ways to implement them, we might even be able to convince IALLT ’11 host @judifranz to use some of them. Contribute to the underconference wiki set up by friend of LLU and fellow troublemaker, @tripst3r, or leave a comment below!