Using Blogs in Teaching

Laura Blankenship February 25th, 2008

Here is the presentation from our session on using blogs. It’s also available as a video from iTunes U.

WordPress company gets $29.5 million

Laura Blankenship February 7th, 2008

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has received a few million dollars in funding, according to CNET.  They’re holding to their open, small pieces loosely joined policy, and hope to tackle some of the sticky issues related to blogging, such as comment spam.  I’m personally looking forward to seeing more from them, especially in the blog platform area.

Wordpress Mu Dynamic frong page-BMC style

aharding January 6th, 2008

I’ve been working on getting Wordpress Mu up and running for Bryn Mawr.  It’s been up since the summer, running mostly on an experimental basis.  One thing that I wanted to get working was creating a dynamic front page that pulled posts from all the blogs.  Between not having the time and not being too good at coding, I just couldn’t make it happen.  I’ve had Jim Groom’s (of UMW fame) post on how he created his front page bookmarked forever.  I bucked some of his advice and still managed to get the front page working.  I still have some work to do, sprucing up the sidebar and whatnot, but at least I’m now pulling all the posts to the front page.

Here’s how I did it.  First, I took Jim’s advice and installed Userthemes, a plugin that I think will be useful all the way around. Instead of creating a separate front page and following his instructions there, I simply added the BDP RSS code to the main page template of my userthemes template.  It’s very important that you first copy the them to your userthemes folder using the admin panel for that.  Otherwise you’ll write over the main template page that everyone uses.  There are a couple of downsides to this method.  One, if you post to the main blog, it will appear after the feed posts.  Since I’m not planning to post, this isn’t a huge deal for me.  But I may move to Jim’s page method later.  Right now, I don’t think anyone’s going to pay much attention to the lone post at the bottom of the page.  The other downside is that you have to edit the main index page, which makes some people nervous.  But it is a quick way of doing things.

The next bit of advice I ignored was not to use the sitewide feed plugin with BDP RSS Aggregator.  Jim said it would choke.  It didn’t on mine, but I suppose it could at some point, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.

I’m very happy with the results for now and am looking forward to seeing more posts appear on the front page.

Social Software Talk Resources

Laura Blankenship September 26th, 2007

For those of you unable to attend last week’s presentation on social software, here are a few resources from the talk:

Click and Double-Click: Episode 19, A Student’s Perspective

Laura Blankenship September 8th, 2007

This week, Mark and I talk to Shannon Hauser, a Sophomore at University of Mary Washington who blogs at Loaded Learning. She participated in a Freshman Seminar that incorporated blogging and also works for the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology at UMW. She talks about how blogging has enhanced her education and taken it beyond the classroom. Enjoy! (21 mb file)

Click and Double-Click 18: Is Web 2.0 the end of Academe?

Laura Blankenship July 17th, 2007

Mark flies solo and breaks down the latest salvo from Michael Gorman, noted library curmudgeon, with guest Jon Mark Bolthouse of the University of Wisconsin Colleges.

References include Scott McLemee’s article summarizing the Gorman post on Inside Higher Ed, Steven Bell, and of course Michael Gorman

Enjoy!

Episode 18 (approx. 33 min., 35 Mb)