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
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
Sit-down with people who have implemented WPMU?
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)
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
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
- 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.