WordCampNotes
One problem:
- Making the case that these tools can thrive in admin
Big picture: thinking in terms of functionality, adjusted as easily as look and feel (ie course, personal portfolio, bulletin board)
- Understanding limitations of tool
- using wikis as back-end composition tools
- sets of functionalities that would enhance course management (archiving comments by semesters, etc...)
- mapping learning opportunities to functionality
Tech needs:
- Need for improved student admin tools
- Pre-populating accounts
- mass creation of accounts (DD Import Users?)
The schism between what happens in the classroom, and in the world
- student ownership
How to manage to keep the "subversive" character of these platforms, yet doing enough to preserve their viability within institutional contexts...
- WP as student-run platforms?
- How to encourage student engagement?
- sharing resources
- Portfolios
- Buddypress
- WordPress as CMS
Sit-down with people who have implemented WPMU?
- sclaing
Discussion/practice - how to frame openness/privacy issues
- Power dynamic when faculty compels student use on open web
Patterns
Class Blogs
- account management + provisioning (groups, etc...)
- class-wide categories and tags
Individual Blogs
- batch creating individual blogs - support issues
- how to tie "course content" together
- tags? aggregation? wtf?
- RSS --> netvibes / pageflakes etc...
- del.icio.us
- tagging
- developing basic network literacies by modeling tagging/publishing/etc...
- site-wide tag clouds (booleans? class tags, topic tags...)
- prepopulated categories and tags for student to use - defined tag vocabulary
- core set of categories used by students in a course.
Blog as Content Management System
General
- inviting "outsiders" into the course - give accounts separate from campus systems
- extending the classroom - "blogging invitationals"
- how to track threads and discussions? comments across different posts on a single blogsite, and comments/posts on different sites on same (or related) topics?
- how best to manage this? should we manage this? literacy issue? tech issue?
- archive of learning over student's career - storing term papers etc... as content in a blog
- personal content management system
- preserving authenticity of student ownership of the content/site
- while also being effective as part of a course?
- digital identity? does it "belong" as part of an institution? should it?
- do students want to _own_ it? to what degree? how? where?
- if student owns their blog, hosted somewhere else, how does that fit with archiving/assessment? (see below)
- do students want to _own_ it? to what degree? how? where?
Assignments / Assessment
- how to track work? where is it?
- how to archive? (appeals, records, challenges...) - document retention?
- export each blog into an über-aggregate blog for storage purposes
- "export this site" button - archive exported dump?
- revisions - who edited what? when? where?
- how to demonstrate effectiveness/properties of discourse in blogs? is it "good"? is it qualitatively different/better than "traditional" publishing? vs. Word docs as term papers?
- nature of writing?
- individual vs. collaborative?
- reflection?
Afternoon
Demos
D'Arcy Norman ucalgaryblogs.ca
- http://ucalgaryblogs.ca/
- now uses the WP Carrington Theme (http://carringtontheme.com/), a free WPMU GPL'd theme for use in general content management scenarios
- using the More Privacy Options plugin (http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-Options) to give the students the option of making it private/only available to ucalgaryblogs users/only that blog's users
- just implemented WPSentry plugin (http://code.google.com/p/wpsentry/) as a way to further granularly control access control on a post by post basis
- converted the ucalgary sitewide content mgmt drupal theme into a Wordpress theme so that individual groups can get a wp-powered blog that still conforms to the institutions
- http://timeline.ucalgaryblogs.ca - WP Monotone theme
- Prologue theme used for http://tlcupdates.ucalgaryblogs.ca/
Brian Lamb blogs.ubc.ca
- http://blogs.ubc.ca/
- digitaltatoo.ubc.ca - site for students to document themselves issues with privacy, online safety etc
- http://blogs.ubc.ca/etec522/ - lists 'static' course content in a left-hand sidebar w/ links
- use the BlogActivity plugin to aggregate discussions across the site
- michellechua.com - example of a former UBC student who "took her blog with her" when she left
- supernovak.com - wordpress as front-end to flickr
- show enej's work with http://enej.test.olt.ubc.ca/ink/ink feed combiner; hooked it up to s5 for presentations
- wiki inc - http://blogs.ubc.ca/blog/2008/11/19/append-wiki-page-plugin/
- Andre Malan plugins - AddUsers and AddRSS feeds - allow new people to add content or themselves as authors to a blog, can be password protected if needed; simple way to help people create group blogs
- feedwordpress (http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/) used to aggregate course blog feeds into a single blog - could be used as the archival tool too!
Grant Potter blogs.unbc.ca
- http://blogs.unbca.ca/
- had a dozen or so courses run through WPMU
- biology course - started to elicit responses from original researchers (who found them through web stats log); this was not a welcome thing from the students who felt 'outed' (but were talked through it by the professors
- obvious but often overlooked point - you can tell wordpress not to reveal blogs to search engines, technorati, etc
Enej from UBC (sorry I didn't get his last name
- showed wpmu stats package (nice! but specific to UBC campus wide login)
- showed resume and eportfolio plugins
Duncan McHugh, UBC Land & Food
sorry, I didn't capture many of the urls
Closing
- scott leslie
- problem: openID provisioning via WPMU site - can a blog be an openID? needs to extend the community of campus folks playing with this stuff (blogging etc..)
- offers: WordPress as Content Management Platform using constrained search engine - "Include It" plugin to include PHP code on any blog page by referencing a file. any page becomes able to embed functionality
- Barbara Ganley
- problem: how to make sure the work does not go toward enabling/enforcing bad pedagogy
- offers: experimenting with how to move out of the walls of academia - how to get students working out in The World™ - relating school to every day life, to do great things in the world
- Gerry Paille
- problem: using HTML and extermal content to bring it into a blog post - including regular HTML
- offers: wordpres as content management system - PageMash - an Ajax page ordering plugin
- Grant
- problem: how to get wider adoption? how to celebrate the early adoptors while convincing others to play?
- offers: experience with buildign on success with faculty members
- katy
- problem: administration to look at blogs w/o concern with security/confidentiality.
- offers: community free lectures through continuing studies - using blogs as a way to get people involved in the content before/after lectures. http://blog.uvcs.uvic.ca/foodsecurity
-
- problem: wtf with blogs? scaling?
- offers: standalone wordpress use - how to manage multiple standalone sites
- felix
- problem: hiding that it's wordpress running things. smells like wordpress. see http://www.o-vert.com
- offers: how to hide that it's wordpress running things. see http://www.o-vert.com
- michael
- problem: administration, scalability, refining access levels
- offers: remember that content is key, not code
- leslie
- problem: how to use wordpress to collaborate with faculty. how to create a non-wordpress workflow that winds up with content being stored in wordpress? separate custom forms/apps?
- offers: encouragement. non geeks can do this. http://trc.ucdavis.edu
- Grant
- problem: finding a community of practice around wpmu. needing a good platform for students to host/present their work.
- offers: ease of use - faculty blogs - how to incorporate media (streaming etc... from other central server)
- joe
- problem: how to keep it all interesting and fresh. Feels like things are slowing down, less visible progress
- offers: time. team involvement
- jason
- problem: yet another thing for faculty to learn. again. - overcoming faculty resistance
- offers: success stories with faculty and students. give them the tools and support them. digital storytelling without need for IT involvement
- duncan
- problem: needs to know more WP tech stuff. also creating learning outcomes to make sure it's a meaningful experience for students. getting faculty to blog. modeling good behaviour
- offers: aggregation...
- mandy ?
- problem: to keep the learning activities valuable and relevant for students. blogging as eportfolio
- offers: optimism. success stories with students and the learnig curve. building networks of teachers - reading each other's blogs - learning community. reflection etc.
- ron
- problem: what IT services can provide?
- offers: better approach community
- novak
- problem: more structure with blogs.ubc.ca - easier to get up and running. looks too ad-hoc now. best practices? need to simplify. needs better support/documentation.
- offers: how to bring wordpress to wider audiences. gaining acceptance. templates vs. themes - functionality not themes.
- alan levine
- problem: constant struggle to get people to actually post stuff. spam. not the good kind.
- offers: templates to do kickass stuff. editing templates to add custom functionality. separating code from theme so stuff can be reused w/o rebuilding it.
- Byron
- problem: supporting lots of instructors who don't want to learn how to build websites.
- offers: case sensitivity of URLs in wordpress - has solution for that. unfocus.com
- Brian Lamb
- problem: THE CLOCK IS TICKING! how to solidify the tech to make it more solid while preserving the sense of adventure and subversion.
- offers: subversion. syndication and content reuse. mashing stuff up.
- Scott
- problem: wordpress don't get no respect. blogging platform looked down upon.
- offers: tribeca of caching - supercache + php opcode caching + database query caching
- ahmed
- problem: needs to learn about wp to support it. how to promote wordpress? it's going to involve some guidelines - don't try to do everything for everyone
- enej
- would like to work on: creation of courses using wordpress - automating the process/structure? Creating a repository of wordpress courses, making them open and easy to access. Like MIT OpenCourseWare, but not at MIT. Course directory. How to find courses...
- Dale
- observation: what you're doing is real cool. don't be discouraged.
- D'Arcy
- problem: fostering community of faculty/students
- offers: will explore for plugins/solutions, and document what works and doesn't.