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?

Less than a week after blogging my wish for a widget that would allow people to add links to their sites (no matter where they are hosted, they just need a valid feed), which in turn would be automatically entered into FeedWordPress and make the population of an aggregation site simple…it has arrived in the form of the Add Links Widget. Disco!!!

Thanks to Andre Malan and Vince Ng, who conceptualized and executed this widget beautifully, the widget works fine and I have included it three places so far:

The whole syndication-oriented architecture (feed-frenzied learning) many have been playing with using WordPress Multi-User has been moving along pretty well for us at UMW. With the help of just a couple of plugins we have been able to generate a single feed for tags and/or categories throughout UMW Blogs (using the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin for WPMu), and we are then able to republish these sitewide feeds in any blog using FeedWordPress. Moreover, it provides us with the ability to incorporate and re-publish sites with RSS feeds that are outside the UMW Blogs environment.

James farmer has posted a great tutorial over at WPMu.org that takes you through the steps of setting up a WordPress Multi-User installation on a cheap, external webhosting service. He focuses on one webhosting service in particular for the demonstration, but most use CPanel and his instructions work pretty much across the board. That said, it is a good idea, no matter who you use, to find out whether they are cool with WPMu and dynamic subdomains–which I strongly recommend.

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.

This is a re-blog of Mario Núñez-Molina’s post that points to a plugin called cets_EmbedRSS that allows you to embed an RSS feed into a post or page in WordPress (and WPMu) easily (and easily is the key here because the aggr plugin does something like this already).  It puts an RSS icon in the TinyMCE editor, and from there it’s simply copy, paste and configure a feed. I have it loaded on the bava, so let’s give it a whirl:

Well, after some grovelling to my special lady friend and some unveiled threats from the Bionic Teacher, I decided it might be in the interest of my personal health to attend WordCamp Ed DC, which David Lester has brilliantly conceived and organized (kudos). Such an event holds some powerful possibilities for the educational community using WordPress, and it may very well be the shot heard around the world from a growing red tide of EDUPUNK revolutionaries. I’m fired up to think and share with so many fellow travellers.

photo credit: Criterion

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?

I have to give some love to the work Esther White is doing with WPMu at Smith College Blogs, it is well worth a look. She has shared her process for customizing the front page, which details some very cool hacks. Moreover, today she posted about using WPMu as a space for faculty bio pages and personal blogs/sites.

I stumbled upon a bizarre WPMu comments bug today (it may also effect single WP installs, but I’m not sure). Here’s the skinny, if you include to: with two trailing spaces, you will not be able to post a comment on UMW Blogs or bavatuesdays. I’m not sure this is true for all WPMu sites, and I guess others would have to test it for certainty, but it is definitely the case on the two WPMu installs I have tested it on. As soon as you try and post the comment containing the to: with two trailing spaces it will throw a 404 error. Think I’m kidding? Try and comment here with a to: and two spaces, I dare you, hippie. Heck, I’ll even give you 100 bucks if it gets through.

Update: it seems this issue is only happening on Firefox 3 with Mac Intels.  Anarchy Media player is apparently working fine on Firefox 3 for PCs. Go figure

When putting a series of videos in a post or page with Anarchy Media Player, I get the following bug when viewed in Firefox 3:

Anarchy Media Player, Firefox 3 bug

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….

OK, I’m officially in full blown UMW Blogs blogging mode, I will most likely prove insufferable for the next month or so, and that’s just the way it is, suckas!

Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

I have been mentioning DSader a lot lately on this blog, and that’s mainly because I have been deep into WordPress Multi-User mode for a couple of weeks now. And between the upgrade to 2.6 and the general overhaul of plugins, themes, etc., I find I’ve devoted no insignificant amount of time to plugin hunting –a truly enjoyable activity. For many of my most valuable WPMu plugins, I continually find I am utilizing DSader’s work.