• Notes from WordCamp Ed: DC

    Nov 23.08 | Lifestyle   

    WordCamp Ed: DC was great!  Nice facilities, good food, engaging speakers and an exciting group of colleagues eager to share and learn from each other.  On the train, enroute to New Haven, I have some quiet time to reflect on the experience.  Cut off from the internet, I can’t pepper this post with links to external references, as per my normal practice.  But those references are best found at the event blog anyhow:  http://dc2008.wordcamped.org .  It was an energizing and exhausting day, but an experience that I look forward to building on at WordCamp ED: Northeast in February.  Here are thoughts on things learned and to explore further direct from my notes (with plenty of misspellings and partial references):

    From Jeff McClurken, University of Mary Washington – questions /thoughts on using a class blog:

    • Student writing in the public space
    • How to grade?
    • Rules for substantive comments?
    • Use one-blog per student, or all post to one master class blog?
    • How to allocate faculty time? Can be time consuming over standard in-class experience
    • How handle rollover to next class of students? Build on past work, or start fresh?
    • How sustain student project blogs in future? How archive?

    Rob Pongsajapan,  Georgetown University, WordPress MU

    • Running WordPress MU with the blessing of on campus info security office is possible – careful review of approved plug-ins – running in https causes some problems, especially with RSS readers – PHP5 running in safe mode? – apccache to speed up performance – no Google indexing – new blogs requested, no self-service.
    • Find value in all blog content – many pieces loosely joined – use RSS to build aggregations to meet various needs.
    • Can be run with small staff – one or two even.

    Jim Groom, University of Mary Washington, keynote session

    • Radical reuse; More conceptual thinking, less programming thinking; change idea of what publishing is; stop managing IT at the expense of teaching and learning
    • Why pay lots of money for stuff that sucks and is difficult to manage – i.e. BlackBoard vs. WordPress MU.
    • Example of rapid deployment – offered to host MU for Longwood on their behalf – took 45 minutes to set up – repurposed help documents from UMWblogs – no charge – help them end-run restrictive local IT policies

    Plugins/themes/tools to explore further:  Courseware and WP-book from CHNM;  user roles; bdprss; buddypress (for MU, ‘facebook in a box’; wiki inc plugin (pull mediawiki – like Wikipedie – entries into a blog post); bbpress; prologue (project mgmt. theme); Microsoft live writer (off-line blog entry tool.); Amazon S3; flutter cms; divShare; WordPress static plugin/script (to convert a wp blog to static HTML pages for archival purposes);  site manager plug-in; print page plug-in (implements print stylesheet); backuppc open source program

    Sites to look at: clioweb.org, umwblogs.org, CNDLS, sitesucker.us, MAENGL, fernsebner299.umwblogs.edu, longwood blogs, www.im-web-gefurden.de plugin;  Henry Jenkins post on universities why not create own youtube

    Related Posts

    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    • Author: Randy

    In my day job I serve as Information Technology Director for the Yale School of Drama. Otherwise I garden, play guitar, build stuff out of wood, take photos, play around with technology and have been blogging since 2003.

    Share on: LinkedIn

    Stay Informed!

    Did you enjoy this post? Then subscribe to my email newsletter and have the daily posts delivered directly to your inbox. Enter your email address here:

    ADD YOUR COMMENT
    Comments are moderated.

    Adjacent Posts

Welcome to RodeWorks

Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!

  • Recent Comments

    • Coming Soon

    New articles are normally posted on Mondays and Wednesdays. Subscribe to the RSS feed or the email update to keep current on the latest posts.

    Site Topics