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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Mario A. Núñez Molina just posted about the virtual component of a photo art exhibit for an art class happening at the library of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Now, there are a number of remarkable photographs (I’ll reproduce a few below withou permission, slap my wrist if this proves bad), and the virtual installment of this exhibit is well worth your time.

photo credit: Criterion

Jon Udell has mentioned the idea of Syndication-Oriented Architecture a couple of times over the the last year of so. One of the things I’ve been trying to spell outabout UMW Blog is how it in many ways is trying to approximate a Syndication-Oriented Architechture using a very hodgepodge collection of plugins and widgets.

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.