The Education Blogs

This Thursday I’ll be heading down to Longwood University to do a workshop on Web 2.0, blogging, and the like. Liz Kocevar-Weidinger of the Greenwood library at Longwood saw a few of us from UMW present last year on the work we’ve doing, and she invited us down. I caught up with her at the EDUCAUSE conference, and I inquired whether they have a blogging platform of any kind they are working from currently, and they don’t. So, as Gardner and I charged during our presentation, why can’t we do this together?! Why can’t UMW help Longwood?

A couple of months ago I promised I would take the flash videos (published as .swf files) and upload them to Blip.tv so that others could use them freely and embed them elsewhere at will.  I finally got around to doing this, and if you need some quick videos overviews for all of the tabs in the administrative backend of WordPress 2.6+ you can see all of them here. They are licensed as public domain, so rip and steal as needed.

Below is a list of the supported videos uploaded along with links to the video:

After reading this post by D’Arcy about how easy and free it is to get Akismet up and running for WordPress Multi-User, I finally decided to take the plunge and replace the developmentally languishing Spam Karma 2 with Akismet–I’ll miss you SK2!

Yet another trend I’ve noticed with UMW Blogs is that courses and random groups are consciously publishing their articles with a far greater audience in mind than their specific class. Not only are many sites aimed at the UMW community, but also at the wide world beyond it. A great example is Uncle Lumpy’s Down-Home Art Blog and Pancake Emporium.

One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

I have blogged regularly about mapping domains on WordPress Mulit-User for over a year now.  And it is with great pleasure that I announce the first instance of a mapped domain on UMW Blogs (which is actually a mapped subdomain).  UMW’s pioneering History department has decided to create a site on UMW Blogs to build an information/community site for their department which will provide the latest news, announcements, and events for current students, alumni, etc.

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application.

I am preparing to feature Dr Marie McAllister’s Eighteenth Century Audio site, which is an absolutely stellar example of a course created resource cum Google-indexed treasure trove of public domain poetry readings (I posted about the site earlier this year here).

photo credit: Criterion

Shawn Miller from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology re-published my post “The UMW Blogs Story” that chronicles the work we have been doing over the last several years at the University of Mary Washington. I am pretty excited that the approach of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is providing others with fodder for thought. The group here is second to none in my mind, and we play just as hard as we work.

The following questions come from an email conversation Shawn Miller and I had about the genesis and guiding logic of UMW Blogs. Shawn is a member of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology, and the group is interested in hearing more about the ways we are using blogs here at Mary Washington. If all goes well an edited version this post will also be published on the CIT blog as a way of introducing the means and methods behind UMW Blogs to the Duke campus. Pretty groovy!

Tell us about UMW blogs (brief overview) - when? what was the decision process?

Serena Epstein produced a magical mashup re-contextualizing Little Mermaid by setting it to the soundtrack of the Risky Business trailer for professor Anand Rao’s Visual Rhetoric course. Behold the magic of this brilliant mashup; Ariel is framed in a whole new light!

Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.

Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….

Well, I have been sucked into the UMW Blogs vortex. The first week or so just thrills me to no end, people start coming out of the woodwork, and I have fun commenting, reading, and getting a sense of what’s in store. it also makes me marvel just how much cool stuff is happening all around campus, and the syndication framework really bring that into sharp focus (but more on this in technical detail in my next post).

Today it really hit me that UMW Blogs is back and roaring. I rolled through the jungle filled with RSS and picked lovingly from the fruit of connected people thinking about wild stuff. And I knew it for sure when I read Jesse Kopp’s first blog post of the semester: