The Education Blogs

I will be posting at length about WordCampEd soon (which was a great event), but I want to throw a link to an absolutely amazing video I saw this afternoon at the Hirshhorn Museum called Magnetic Movie, created by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor. Remarkable, but not surprising, that artists are leading the way for thinking about visualizing unrepresentable concepts such as magnetic fields through digital art.

I have been moonlighting around campus this semester as a Dog, CogDog, introducing students and faculty to Alan’s 50 Ways to Tell a Digital Story.  Well, there have been a number of good projects that I promise I will add to his wiki and tag in delicious accordingly. But one in particular for Judith Parker’s Psycholinguistics class is pretty wild. Justin Toney created his science poster for the class with Glogster, and I think he did so to some great effect—I dig the aesthetics of it. Imagine that, a web-based science poster that isn’t a progeny of PowerPoint!

I have recently posted about a WordPress education email list I joined and was pretty excited about. Well, less than two weeks later I am a bit confused by what exactly Automattic is thinking with this list. It’s moderated by Douglass Hanna, and he just sent out the following message to the list talking about creating an “Implementation Guide” for using WordPress in education. I’ll reproduce it below:

Hi everyone,

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Martha Burtis is back in action at UMW, and she returns to us with a project that I am following with great anticipation: blogging WordPress as a CMS. As she notes in her introductory post on the topic:

It often seemed…that when push came to shove, there was always something that prevented WP from being the right CMS solution. Although I think I’ve always suspected that with the right mix of plugins and the right theme, the problems could be surmounted.

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Image Credit: “Sometimes pictures just compose themselves” by phxpma.

Re-visiting my overflowing WFMU feed is always a pleasure, and last night I actually spent some time listening to The J’s with Jamie’s “Hey, Look Us Over!”, and while I wasn’t a huge fan of the whole album–the first song, “Hey Look Me Over,” seemed like a perfect, upbeat anthem for these tough times.

Hats off to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematèk once again for their upcoming Punk ‘n’ Pie film series, which looks to be an amazing retrospective focusing predominantly on the UK Punk/New Wave scene (a majority of them I haven’t yet seen, and I’m particularly interested in the November 23rd double-feature).

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!

This is classic, and it’s so bad it’s almost good, which is what scares me about it.  But the misinformation campaign being run here about openness is dangerous, and the portrayal of  Bb NG as “a hip stud” who gets all the hot girls because he is so Web 2.0 just tells you how much Bb mocks you, abuses you, and insults your intelligence. Looks like everything I remarked on in The Glass Bees post is playing itself out quite well, “BlackBoard Can Haz All Ur Web 2.0z!”

Download BlackBoard on openness

I actually parachuted in and out of EDUCAUSE, and I was my usual strange self at conferences. I really can’t seem to bring it together when I go to these things, my head space gets a bit confused and I withdraw a bit. I’m going to have to work on this. The session Gardner and I co-presented on Educational Publishing Platforms went pretty well, and that was all Gardner’s doing, He was in his best impromptu mode and he carried me beautifully through the presentation, for I was admittedly not on my game at all. The highlight, however, was a recorded conversation Gardner and I had later on Wednesday with Gerry Bayne about EDUPUNK.

“And the haunting distribution of a million light particles from an edupunkin shall lead the way.”

Image Credit: Tom Woodward flexing his creaivity as usual with his wordpress edupunkin photo.

Dave Lester did a fine job of compiling a long list of Universities that are using WPMu in one capacity or another. It’s a great list, and there are at least 40 institutions on there I had no idea about.

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.

Well, I guess I gotta get going on my formative 10 because what has taken me almost eight months, has taken D’Arcy Norman all of three days.