At the End of My Summer of Ontario Extend

The beaches have emptied, the life guards off duty back to their “real jobs”, and I’m just the lone guy on the shore walking around with a metal detector.

Today marks the end of my stint sitting in for Terry Greene in facilitating what I could for the eCampus Ontario Extend project. This is what’s gone in while I’ve been sitting in the DJ booth of CBEX.

Terry is not back until September 12, so I left a queue of Daily Extends set up through the 15th, with one that day a special one designed to welcome him back. Think of the school room show from the 1970s (no laughing, Horshack!)

The mandate was largely left to me to coordinate what I could for faculty who are on their summer break. While we did not necessarily fill the beach, we had a good number of people who engaged with activities, often at different parts, and levels. So might as well do this in listicle format.

Publish 88 Daily Extends And See What It Does For Your Energy Levels It’s a battle as to who might enjoy creating Daily Extend challenges more, me or Terry. Let’s call it a tie. Put me down for all the ones from #oxtend208 (June 1) to #oxtend296 (September 15). We ran a July special run as a 31 Day Challenge and we had a few participants earn strips with perfect scores. The ones for August had a theme of Back to School.
When the Cohorts Got Their Modules On Things Went Wild. After Terry ran the orientation sessions (I was remote while on a road trip north to Canada), I facilitated the folks in the western cohort who worked toward getting their full badge set for completing the Ontario Extend Modules. To add to the collection I published the following new activities in the bank:
Lunches Were Zoomed and Extended; Do This Every Week And See What Happens I saw some value in setting up meeting times that were wide open to discussion, not with my own agenda. These were set up in early June as avery Thursday drop in sessions hosted in Zoom during the Ontario Lunch hour. These were among my favorite activities, everything shaped by who showed up. We usually had a handful of people, and they shifted during the summer. These were help as public, and we had a few people from outside drop in too. I tried to stay diligent about blogging each one, but I fell of the bus in August. See the archive https://extend-domains.ecampusontario.ca/category/lunch/
They Opened The Doors at Domain Camp and You Would Not Believe What Happened Next For July I planned a series of activities for people who had just got (or had a whole) a Domain of Their Own. A number of project participants got one via eCampusOntario, but it was open to anyone interested in learning more how to navigate and use their domain. The structure was set up with an intro/demo video on Tuesdays, open office hours Wednesdays (and Thursdays during the Extended Lunch) and a series of things to do organized in the Activity Bank, as of this writing, that means 23 domain camp activities. The other thing I tried to encourage is for people to gather, ask/answer questions in the Newbies Corner in the Reclaim Hosting community. Domain Camp was designed to be free standing, so there is no reason one could there at any time. “Last summer in domain camp there was this cpanel and…”
Camp Never Ends As You Can Continue to Grow Smarter in the WordPress Retreat In Domain Camp I aimed to encourage for people to consider a domain as more than a place for WordPress blogs, but since WordPress is so prevalent and useful, I added on a few more weeks of WordPress specific camp activities, using the same structure, and another 8 activities.
People Still Blog, Don’t They? Don’t They? Over the summer I added 29 posts to the Ontario Extend Domains of Our Own site (my own archive link), a combination of ones authored on site and others syndicated in from this blog.
What Can Happen From Birthing 10,000 Tweets Well I have no idea if I posted that many to @ontarioextend this summer. I can find them via Twitter Search (well it stops at June 5) but it never gives me a number. The Twitter TAGs worksheet we have set up for the project shows my squiggle graph under Twitter Activity with a big bump marking this summer period:

As well as a link to my tweets that landed in the archive. I love to tweet.

Anyhow, I had a heck of a time doing my Summer of Extend. Thanks to David, terry, Lena, and the whole eCampus Ontario crew for giving me the keys to the car. And thanks to everyone who joined in to the summer fray.

It’s not only safe to swim on this beach, you will stretch your abilities extending with us.

Hmmm, I am getting some strong static on my metal detector, gotta go dig…

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