Pardon the shaky hand held, but the Rev. does keep moving a lot.

Plus my batteries died about 8 min and 22sec into the talk. I had new ones in within a min. I needed an Indy 500 pit crew to do a 15 sec swap or should have started with fresh batteries. Next time, Jim, I promise.

Thanks for great event!
– George / @ghbrett

* Digital Identity orientation given to all incoming freshman – could be done as peer-to-peer training
* Formal required blogging as a part of class
* Informal blogging as a part of a class
* Students telling other students how blogs are helping them – be it dealing with research challenges or connecting with those of similar interest
* ‘Private’ blogging in which students get a chance to practice and experiment with their online voice in a safe space (such as a group blog password protected with access to the class)
* Success stories and real world connections
* Clearly communicate that blogging does not have to mean writing – can mean video or images too

We hit lots of conceptual approaches to how we do or could find and discover things.  The ’similar posts’ plugin, expanded to MU scale, got lots of discussion as an option.  Some of the nuances of how it works and its settings led to some interesting thoughts about how this also relates to digital literacy — reflecting on your writing to get the settings optimized.

Tags bad.  Fun discussion about the weaknesses of tags for discovery and organization.  That led us into examples of how searching/discovery works well, and we discovered that a triangulation of tags sometimes works.  From there, we got to different types of info  could be part of the triangulation — Jeremy’s post hits a list of that content.

A fantastic thing for me was that in that list we saw that these were different facets around which we define our communities.

Jeremy and I will have it all done and ready to present at next year’s wordcamped here if there is one, with guidance from Rob’s important point about the importance of a very good UI.  Easy.

Aggregating by:

* Studies
** Topic
** Person
** Time Period
** Language
** Place
** Question

* Studies with
** Text
** Device
** Blog
** Instructure

* Sort By:
** By Course
** By Instructor
** By Student
** By Organization (Campus,
** By Campus

If I had made it down for the camp, focussed on using WordPress for educational and academic communities,  I had hoped to talk about the experience of building and designing the SUNY Stony Brook History Department website. This was my first attempt at a multi-user blog system for an academic department, and the template was based on work by Jeremy Boggs for the GMU Art History Department. The site went live in September, and has been developing iteratively for the past one year through the inputs of historians Chris Sellers, Eric Lewis Beverley, Larry Frohman, and Nancy Tomes.

With help from Jeremy to cut my teeth on css, I built on his core design to incorporate sidebar widgets and extensively furnished author profile pages and dashboard where faculty can upload their own photos, bibliographies, and run their own mini-blogs inside one Wordpress site, posting to their own home pages, front page department news, and thematic blogs for different research areas within the department. As faculty participation in the site grows, these categories and areas will be easily extended to represent the strengths of the departments’ historians in such areas as Latin America and fields such as gender and the environment.

For this site, the open source ecology came to my aid in designing a new feature for faculty profile pages, where I extensively relied on Marco Cimmino’s excellent plugin Cimy Extended User Fields to manage custom fields and tags on the member pages for the historians at Stony Brook. These pages are easily the most important for any faculty, and I wanted them each to have a blog and feed which could be used for communicating their work, sharing ideas, and as a classroom tool. I paid for the developer to create a new feature for rich text fields for their bibliographies — this feature will hopefully appear in the next version of the plugin.

WIth faculty, staff, and graduate students, well over four hundred registered members in the Stony Brook History Department, using Wordpress presented significant challenges due to its individual blogger orientation. Some significant limitations remain in Wordpress’s user management and security functions, which plugins such as Role Manager help to address, such as custom user groups and controlling permissions — but not resetting passwords — for each group. Some other plugins at work on the site are Sidebar Login and COinS Metadata Exposer which embeds citations for each post as microformats.

Zotero can grab these embedded citations, and with the rich textarea fields on their profiles, faculty can simply drag and drop reading lists, a class syllabus, or their own publications into their home page or blog posts and have them slurped back into Zotero for later reference. This is something which I have done with another site called Bombayology in Wordpress, where every post is for a meeting of our workshop on urban history and culture in India. The citations to assigned texts are embedded with OpenURL COiNS — which Zotero does in a simple drag and drop in your browser — and also linked to password-protected PDFs of the fully digitized text of the readings for that meeting.

If only I could have been at this special WordCamp, I would have also liked to talk about the other Wordpress sites which I have developed and maintained over the past several years, including the personal archive and teaching blog of social anthropologist Keith Hart, the Memory Bank; the site of urban research and design group CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust); the Writing Cities network between MIT, Harvard and LSE; the Urban South Asia workshop.

I have no doubt that the expert minds and hands of Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs have created another excellent peer-learning experience at WordCampEd. I hope I’ll be there next year.

(Cross-posted from my blog Heptanesian Archives)

- The web has a long tail, and students should be introduced to methods for crafting their web presence before they get to college

- A web presence is ultimately the responsibility of the user, but schools providing access to online tools should provide granular control for their users and work to inform them of how to manage their presence through each software

- The biggest impediment to exploring these questions in an educational environment is an unconsidered fear; the best way to address that fear to engage the fearful in a discourse

Curiously, this article appeared in the NYT today about slowblogging…and there she is!

As we try to “sell” our institutions on the importance of supporting/not shutting down/celebrating our explorations in teaching and learning with these tools, we need to have concrete examples of how blogs can enrich scholarship, stimulate learning, and something I am really interested in exploring… how blogging can stimulate the face to face learning.

So, in the context of your course, how do you define “learning” and how did a blog help to make that so?

Comment away!