WPMu Ed

So the last two days have been a lot of fun, I have been mapping all the domains I currently have to one WordPress Multi-User installation, and I’m glad to say it has worked like a charm (you can find my previous discussions of the process here and here). I had problems at first because the latest version of FeedWordPress 0.993 creates some conflicts with WPMu 1.5.1 which prevent you from creating new blogs and also breaks the incoming dashboard feeds. After I deactivated FeedWordPress everything worked like a charm, and I now have ten different domains mapped to one WPMu install. What’s particularly cool about this, is that each domain acts like its own WPMu installation. In other words, you can create as many sub-blogs for each of the domains as you want. For example: http://movies.bavatuesdays.com or http://course.jimgroom.net or http://engl101f06.jimgroom.net/ , etc.

So here’s what I’m thinking, you have one install to update, one place to upload plugins, themes, hacks, etc., all of which affords you the possibility to have several domains mapped on to one WPMu installation. Say, for example, we want a separate domain for faculty and/or student websites using WordPress, get the umwfaculty.org domain and/or the umwstudents.org (for that much needed simple to use web space) and map them onto the UMW Blogs installation. This allows you to create a very specific set of parameters for this new mapped domain: only certain plugins, website-like themes, etc.

Now, think about personalizing it a bit more, what if some students, faculty and staff wanted their own domains to be mapped onto UMW Blogs, say http://blog.astudent.net or http://blog.aprofessor.net, why couldn’t we make that just as easy as it is on WordPress.com, while at the same time providing them with the ability to use a wide range of plugins, hack their themes, and generally benefit from this smaller sandbox we can offer them (it is by no means mandatory, and using outside tools like WordPress.com and Blogger, etc. would work just as well in the syndication orientated scheme of UMW Blogs).

But this is really just the tip of the iceberg, the real push would ultimately be for an experiment with a service like RackSpace that provided DTLT with a dedicated server that is externally hosted and that can manage up to 100+ different shared server spaces so that we can enable anyone who is interested to experiment with installing their own tools, and controlling their own digital environment via CPanel, Plesk, or something like it–this is Gardner and Martha’s Odyssey project, and it is an important one. There’s a new way of thinking about institutional webspace, let them manage and govern their own work, and we’ll work on how to make it both visible, appropriately contextualized, and easy to find. More than that, it is all happening within a focused community, allowing people to share their work and build on the knowledge and experience of others.

A real DIY teaching environment, one that would provide an incubator for playing, communal conversations, and an unending series of experimentations and innovations, shouldn’t be confused with some slick “web 2.0″ learning pod that presents you with a pre-fabricated topic. The true future of the web and thinking about teaching and learning at its best remains a space for individualized innovation and experimentation that incorporates a healthy struggle over ideas, and an ongoing community focus—it’s not something that happens externally to the learning process, which upon the completion of the “learning object” we simply consume for a price, however nominal. It is about creation, and putting that power in the hands of the teacher and the learner simultaneously. Affording an space to imagine, and building an infrastructure that is loose enough to enable and promote experimentation and creativity.

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Photo thanks to Bern@t’s Flickr stream.

Cole Camplese recently had a provocative post about open design that has me thinking about a few things that might frame some of the ideas that I think are key to imagining a loosely joined, open, and mashable community for teaching and learning.

I am thinking more about how openness should be built into the design process. Not really instructional design per say, but design in general … in my mind learning design is looking at the notion of building learning opportunities in a more broad sense than more strict instructional systems design.

I think this idea of building openness into the design is at the heart of re-imagining how we think about the ways in which we learn. It’s a great idea, and re-kindles for me the importance of imagining an aesthetic for the distributed model, allowing people to conceptualize the space visually (which moves back towards thinking about an open instructional systems design). In fact, Ernst Jünger’s novel The Glass Bees has been useful in this regard:

At first glance, the glass hives were distinguished from the old pattern by a large number of entrances. They resembled less a hive than an automatic telephone exchange…what if what I have been observing was not so much a new medium as a new dimension, opened up by an inventive brain; it was a key which unlocked many rooms. For instance, what if these creatures could be used—as they are used in the world of flowers—as messengers of love between human beings….? (129, 140)

This description of the hives as a loosely joined dimension of exchange that is decentralized and automatic, yet potentially capable of connecting humans through messengers of love is a fascinating image that frames the imaginative space of Jünger’s novel as remarkably prescient in its subtle elegance. He frames a kind of proto-naturalistic system of exchange premised on nature. As Bruce Sterling suggests in the introduction to this novel, such a sentence describing the glass bees as less a beehive than an automated telephone exchange “uncannily anticipates the scattered structure of the internet” (ix).

And this image of the beehive (or nest given the natural state I am thinking of) is sticking with me because it offers a powerful way to think about how we might design these spaces that are premised more upon a vision of openness with no one center—a distorted, naturalistic sphere with innumerable entrances and exits. This is the metaphor I have been looking for to explain why I think an application like WPMu might be understood as an example of open design, and Drupal not so much.

I’m almost sorry to open up this old can of worms (well not really ), but it’s something I have been trying to explain for a while now, and I can finally articulate what I was trying to say at Northern Voice this past February during some application banter. Unlike Drupal, WPMu is like a huge beehive with no center, it’s scattered and unruly like the internet. And that is one of its greatest strengths. Think about it, anyone with a blog on the system has their own unique sub-domain that they can enter through, not unlike a cell in a beehive.

This model of a system that is both porously open and de-centered suggests a different, almost naturalistic, element of design, loosely joining a series of cells into a honeycomb, not with wax but with RSS glue. So someone using a WPMu blog has the ability to be part of a community, yet at the same time have their own unique space that they control entirely. It strikes me as very different from the nodal logic of most CMSs, which are very much pointed to a center, and driven by the logic of representing information in structured boxes. This design is more about efficiency than effect and in many ways it is not a natural organization of information, rather it is rigid, with angled corners that smack of a man-made apiary.

Image used thanks to pintxomoruno’s flickr photostream.

I know this may seem needlessly polemical and hard on an open source CMS like Drupal, but I think there’s a larger point here. In fact, I am trying to think about why a much more de-centered design that is scattered and affords the individual user far more control over their own cell may be more akin to the internet than a centralized node of control/entry that characterizes most CMSs and LMSs—they can’t help it, it ’s in their DNA.

De-centered, distributed publishing is a flow of information we are not used to, it’s anarchic, somewhat confusing, and difficult to follow unless you are in the “natural” flow of things. Yet, that is the key here, once in the stream (and the idea of a stream here is a much larger aesthetic and design shift that the internet has been undergoing and reflecting more broadly for a number of years now) the trace of the arguments, discussion, and ideas become that much more naturalized to the flow of information in a community while at the same time keeping the power of design (think themes and widgets here) as well as the overall control of the space in the hands of the individual.

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Today I got to thinking about something while talking about building a community site: where is my community right now? Well, Twitter, and at this very moment I can see all kinds of cool things happening. I’m currently following two of my favorite people, Shannon Hauser and Brian Lamb, exchange ideas about music. They’re both excited about what thy are sharing and it is cool to watch and learn from. In fact, I can partake by tracking the dialog and following their links. Not to mention that at any moment I could jump in, even if after the fact. The coolest tool yet for distributed conversation, and a powerful way to form a community.

That’s where I go to see the stream of thought in my community, it is where I go to play, and it is where I go to share what I am thinking. So, folks have talked about how to use Twitter for teaching and learning, but I am not too interested in that. I’m sure it can be done well, and I think it is a fun project, but at the moment it’s really unreliable, difficult to filter the tweet stream according to a certain groups of users, and it doesn’t really feel “schooly” –something I like about it.

Thing is, the stream idea for a course wherein everyone is sharing what they are thinking, blogging, and reading in one steady flow about a particular course might be a very compelling model. Moreover, the Twitter interface is important because it makes it really simple to both scan and write quickly. A couple of clicks and you could post your thoughts and catch up on the everyone else’s quickly. That’s a key element to Twitter’s unique design.

So, I got to thinking why couldn’t a course using the distributed model of blogs we’re already pushing at UMW harness the power of this model, while still allowing students the choice to post from their own blog (which is then fed into a twitter-like course page) and/or the ability to hop on the course homepage and post a reponse to a stream, just like on Twitter. This is when I returned to thinking about the Prologue theme for WordPress Multi-User, why can’t a professor just set up a blog with this theme, and have the blogs posts, comments, announcements, research, and informal conversations —even reading notes—captured within the stream?

It would be really easy, just put Andre Malan’s Add User widget into the sidebar so that each student could add their e-mail, then we would just need one more field for a student to add their blog’s RSS feed (Andre already has this for BDP RSS -but I think this would need to link up directly with FeedWordPress).  After that, it’s done! Anything a student posts from their blog will show up in the stream (and we control how many characters it is, and the permalink will lead back to the student’s blog).  And when on the course blog they could even more easily, given the Twitter-like interface, post ideas in the stream right from the top of the course homepage.

I think it would be an interesting experiment in thinking about the trace of a class as a stream, and professors might experiment with it a bit, like sharing research links, outside resources, video clips, etc.  All made simpler by the frictionless postings.  Even better, the Prelude theme has a feed for every user, so anything student posted directly in the course blog can be fed right back out to their own blog.

That is a far more powerful than a ghost blog (see Andre’s definition of that here) because it actually affords immediate interaction, as well as a single RSS feed for all the activity of one class. Hmm, I want to experiment with this.

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photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, it took us over a year, and with several iterations along the way, but I think UMW Blogs will now be able to provide dead simple aggregation of posts from numerous, distributed blogs with very little work, but a little bit of money for the plugin extension ($50 to be exact). Henri Simeon’s MuTags plugin and the $50 extension we bought from him gave UMW Blogs a RSS feed for each and every site wide tag.

Once sitewide tags have an RSS feed, the whole problem of grabbing each student’s RSS feed, and making sure you have the right URIs becomes irrelevant. The only thing that needs to be done is that the class has to decide upon a unique tag for their posts. After that, any post a student wants to be fed into that course blog must be tagged appropriately. So, for example, if I am teaching a pirate class and I want students to tag posts in their blogs with “pirategroom” (no quotes), then all they have to do is tag the post correctly. On the course blog I just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and put in one very simple URI:

http://umwblogs.org/tag/pirategroom/rss

That’s it (you can see the test here). The only caveat being that this site wide tag feed only works for UMW Blogs (or your local WPMu installation). If students are using other services to host their own blogs then this solution won’t work. However, you can throw in a little BDP RSS coupled with Andre Malan’s Add Feed plugin which will provide a quick and elegant solution for solving this—read more about this here.

Wow, we are getting closer and closer, and while the MuTags RSS feeds is choking on images and video (annoying!), we are going to get that straight over the next month and have a full fledged, scalable solution for aggregating posts from numerous student blogs into one, central course blog with no overhead. Yeeeeeeees!!!

BTW: This is my first post on the bava using WPMu 1.5.1—so I can finally get used to   and document the new WordPress backend interface.

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So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field  (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.

An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project

All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.

During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.

The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).

UMW Lablogs

UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.

In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.

What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.

The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu

Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology.  And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.

It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic

So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).

Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.

OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.

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† We got the feed for this tag by first using sitewide categories feeds for WPMu where all the posts were categorized as “final paper,” but the MuTags RSS feed extension—which you have to pay $50 for—will prove the better option, for students can just tag their posts as final paper (or what ever) and you get a sitewide feed for the tag without the sitewide categories feed hack which can get ugly. Once you have the sitewide RSS feed for this tag, just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and it will automatically re-publish any post within the WPMu environment tagged “final paper.” What’s nice about the FeedWordPress plugin is that it will sync all changes to a previously published post. Also, you have options to not include post author, you can prevent a linkback to original post, as well as the ability to place all feeds for a certain tag into a specific category of the assessment blog (so all of Sarah’s class papers will be placed in the category “Writing Process”). Groovy! —or should I say Groomy?

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So, in an attempt to galvanize my mania to its most chaotically productive for Faculty Academy 2008, I’ll go on with this e-portfolio madness, as promised. However, the comments on part 1 are already making me wonder whether this post shouldn’t be written by D’Arcy, Chris, Phaedral, or Cole (or perhaps all of them)?

That acknowledged, I want to particularly note Chris and Phaedral’s comments about the importance of each individual controlling the sequential nature of their portfolio, giving them full control over this nuanced space for extensive creativity, expression, and order. I couldn’t agree with either of them more, and hopefully some of what I suggest below will point in that direction, but by no means put to rest the challenges and demands of such important caveats, and one can only hope for meaningful serendipity.

Ok, no more backsliding, avanti! The examples below will be centered around the work we have been doing at UMW with WordPress Multi-User (much of what I discus below can surely be done with Drupal and Movable Type —and probably several other applications I don’t know about), but this is my blog and I ain’t going to talk about those hippie applications anymore, ya hear?

Good.

An Example of a blogfolio?

Robert Lynne, a graduating Art major at UMW, will be my example for this post. I hope he can forgive me constantly harassing him, but his blogfolio (to quote D’Arcy) is a model of at least one way you can imagine the portfolio logic working. Rob has used his blog for several classes, an Art History course, an Art Studio course, a Sculpture course, as well as a Poetry Workshop course. He has had his blog for the 2007/2008 academic year, and the space demonstrates some of the questions of creative control, sequence, and serendipity that I mentioned earlier in regards to Chris and Phaedral’s concerns.

In his blogfolio he chronicled his trip to NYC, helped shape a manifesto, blogged for classes, sang songs, and even had time to heckle yours truly. All of this was an on-going stream of ideas and thoughts that framed a process, being an art major he also had a lot of completed work to present to his audience, and this is where the use of pages on his blog became the space for what many might understand as a more traditional portfolio. He has a page dedicated to his paintings, sculptures, final thesis presentation, as well as a more focused about page. In these pages he controls the sequence, presentation, and obviously decides what goes in and what is left out. The space captures a fascinating part of both his creative process and experience throughout the year, but italso quickly became a space for him to represent the products of that process. He controls his space, he can delete my comments, delete his blog, or export the contents and take them somewhere else. In fact, there is no reason why he couldn’t have done all of this on Blogger or WordPress.com. That said, I think the major reason he started it (but it probably was not the logic that ultimately drove it) was the fact that he was asked to blog for at least three different courses this academic year. Not all of which were in his discipline. I think the major reason his work branched out beyond the classes was that there was an audience, the UMW culture encouraged it, and he found it useful (at least to some degree) to frame his work and experience.

The Name of the Game is Spam-like Aggregation

The reason why blogs can be understood as more powerful, dynamic, and complex portfolio system is because of their Houdini like RSS ability. It really all revolves around the syndication infrastructure which makes all the difference, it affords flexibility, dispels the myth of a monolithic system, and allow for the more complex levels of filtering of content I will outline below. But for a portfolio system to work (and I think I feel the term portfolio falling apart right about now but bear with me) it has to be more than that. It has to be a space where people post there ideas for class, react to topics more informally, add resources about various issues they are thinking through (course related or not), and frame the academic work that they are amassing through their career as learners more generally. This is not a technological issue at all, this is a cultural one, and we have begun to see the beginnings of this at UMW (Roblog being an excellent example), but it is by no means ubiquitous, and there is much, much work to be done in terms of fostering the community to think about these elements together in a more orchestrated fashion.

One of the things about blogs more generally that have made this cultural leap a bit easier is that they are excellent at pulling together all the various online spaces a person may occupy and they are inherently open. Both of which allow for updates from Twitter or Facebook; embedding videos from YouTube or images from Flickr; providing extensibility for a wide range of multimedia and traditional site design. All of which forms a platform that is inviting for its protean ability to incorporate various media and one’s distributed presence into one, simple space. This is key, and it is beautifully illustrated by an imagie engineered by Tom Woodward, which once I am able to annoy him enough to post it will be below as a big, beautiful illustration of this profound point, but geared to all you visual learners.
[ Imagine an image of an Octopus here with many loosely joined Web 2.0 tools ]

So, while Roblog is an excellent example, how does this make sense across a larger campus, and can you create both a culture and harness a simple enough technology process so that Roblog (and hundreds of other students) can easily blog for three or even six different courses during the year, while at the same keep it all on spaces they control yet share it as need be with the appropriate class. That is where the questions of filtering, aggregation, and a little bit of spam-blogging emerge.

Let me outline how this might at our current stage of development.

Thanks To Andre Malan’s widgets BDP RSS Add Feed and Add Sidebar User, it is getting simpler all the time, but we still have to make a couple of more jumps. I’ll outline them all below.

Leap of faith, I’m a professor and I ask my 25 student to get blogs (whether on UMW Blogs or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter) and once the do to come back to my course blog and add their RSS feeds. This is made easy with Andre’s Add Feed widget, for I can easily limit who adds a feed by the blogging community. So, once the student set up their space they can drop the feed in in the text field on the sidebar. Easy enough. But wha if they are using their blog for three diferent classes, a film hobby, and to document their Buffy the Vampire Slayer obsession? Well, then they could do one of two things, create a category for my class on their blog, lets call it bmoviemania, and if they are using WordPress (not sure how other blogging platforms handle category feeds) they can just add the RSS feed for that category like so:

http://myblog.com/category/bmoviemania/feed

Thereafter, everything they category as bmoviemania will be fed out to the course blog, keeping their Buffy posts and biology labs out of the b movie class blog (thanks goodness!). They could also do the same thing with a tag on wordpress, it would look like this:

http://myblog.com/tag/bmoviemania/feed

Now, we have a pretty straightforward method of taking these student blogs post for a specific course category or tag, and feeding them into an aggregated course blog. Now how does the aggregated course blog work? Well, it is much easier than it was a semester ago, but there is a little more automation that we need. (Warning: It gets a bit technical for the next few lines! But this information is not essential to the overall logic, so don’t let it throw you off, it is me calling or help ) The feed, once entered by the student, is immediately fed into the BDPRSS aggregator, this would need to be activated and the widget in the sidebar as soon as the professor creates this blog (any ideas Andre?).

Moreover, all the feeds that are fed into the BDP RSS aggregator would then have to be treated as an overall OPML which in turn is placed in the FeedWordPress plugin which actually taking all the posts from the respective student blogs and post them on this course blog (with the permalink pointing back to the students blog). Another automation needs to occur here, FeedWordPress needs to be automatically populated with the OPML feed from BDP RSS: http://bmoviecourse.com?bdprssfeed=1 The suffix will always be the same for this code, but the log domain, depending on the course will change.

So, save for two small bits of automation, we have a self-service aggregated course blog for aggregation, that allows all of the students responses, interaction, and posts to remain within their own space, while still capturing the logic of the course. A beautiful example of this is Gardner Campbell’s Rock/Soul Progressive course from Spring 2008. One additional benefit would be an automatically generated blogroll from the list of students who entered their feed, possibly drawn from the URLs in BDP RSS.

Sorry for the programmistan talk, I hope feedistan isn’t reading, but the larger point is that individuals now have their own space that they can grab the feed for, and even drill down and determine a feed for any given class with tags or categories, and then add it to a course aggregated blog.

But why all the talk about course blogs and aggregated such and such when this is about portfilios? Well, because I believe that this process is part and parcel of the archive/raw material that will ultimately populate this portolio. And as we saw with Roblog, the process is often just as relevant and important as the “product.” This is also where the importance of community and the push for students to have their own space and create within their own Personal Learning Environment (their I said it), but alow it to be fed and captured within an aggregated course blog navigates liminal space between the increasingly irrelevant LMSs, and the free-for-all hippie PLEs

Also, think about what just happened with the course blog for a second. What was outlined there is now the basis of a publishing framework for an individual’s portfolio that pulls from his/her blog archive of posts and class materials in a way that, like the course blog, they have the option to further tag or categorize the work in their personal archives that deal with all sorts of subjects, topics, experiences, and projects from their experience, and allow them to feed it into a site that reflects them in some way outside of the more conventional ideas of a blog (this would be available for UMW Bloggers and those who self-hosted—not free, hosted solutions like wp.com, Blogger, etc.). Now some might be saying but why? The blog is them? And Roblog is an excellent example of this, so I don’t necessarily disagree, yet the overarching archie blog may not be where they want to frame their work as a photographer, present lab work, field work, films, music, poetry, or business case study. The idea here is that anyone can choose how the fed out the relevant categories, that let’s say are tagged with portfolio, and these spaces become more elegant and malleable presentation spaces for for particalar elements of their work wherein they control the sequence, aestheitc, and in many ways the experience of the visitor.

In many ways the is the aggregation/syndication infrastructure brought down to the human scale. yet, if you have students adding feeds to course blogs, why couldn’t they do the same to directories, aggregated discipline channels, a Blogging platform hompage, or what have you. The fact that the syndication architecture is brought down to the atomic level of the individual, makes for the power of the site to scale more globally. More than that, the community will have a good sense of what it is they are doing and why!

I’ll end here because it’s three am, and a man’s gotta sleep, but sometime tomorrow look for part 3 of This ain’t yo mama’s e-portfolio

Featuring: Biology Lab portfolios at UMW & an experiment with an English course using portfolios for anonymous assessment? Who knew?

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It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.

This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of e-portfolios. Or Helen Barrett’s ongoing discussion of all things e-portfolio. Or Gardner’s vision of the feedbook back in the day. Or Stephen Downes’s on the subject of the space of RSS, aggregation, and distributed student and course content way, way back in the day. The conversation has been one that has unfurled over time for a long while and I enter it very late and only capture a snippet of its history. It’s by no means new, in fact it has held a pretty steady space in the imagination of educational technology for well over a decade, if not longer. In fact, many have moved away from the idea of an e-portfolio altogether, re-framing it as a Personal Learning Environment that can take into account the dynamic, distributed personalized spaces wherein we network, interact, create, commune and by extension learn.

All this said, I want to return to one simple and very unrevelatory idea, how might we imagine a campus cyber-infrastructure for managing a cheap, flexible, and dynamic e-portfolio system? And with that, I’m off…

Barbara Ganley’s 21st century proverb, “Twitter to connect, the blog to reflect,” will lay the groundwork of how we might think about the blog as e-portfolio and much more (I’ll ask many of you to forgive the limitations of my terminology as we get started). This blog/e-portfolio creature might be better understood as a digital frame for experiences or a personal archive of one’s thinking over time (an idea laid out nicely here by Martin Weller as he articulates our collective wondering whether the blogosphere is moribund). I like the idea of understanding a student blog/portfolio as an archive of their throught over the course of their time as a member of an academic community. A space that they can share, interact in, take with them, and build upon as they move onwards and upwards with their lives.

But a portfolio isn’t an archive, right? Well, yes, you’re right smart guy, but we need to spend a bit more time here to move to the idea of featuring and presenting one’s best work as a portfolio so often connotes. An archive becomes the raw material of thought that can be categorized, tagged, fed out, and re-worked in whole series of different and exciting ways. I have said it before, and I’ll say it a gain. With a blogging platform like WordPress and Drupal† you can feed off of categories or tags, which makes the work students file under a particular tag or category easily syndicated to an aggregated course blog –I talk at length about this here, here, here, and here and see Andre Malan’s frighteningly lucid post on the subject of different kinds of course blogs). And by extension, students can use categories and tags to filter specific work for a course blog, a group blog, or even a separate portfolio blog that they feed in only the things they want to feature (keep in mind that students, faculty and staff can have as many blogs as they want, wither on the campus system or elsewhere–more on this soon).

Cole Camplese had brought up the point of using the PSU network drive, or storage space, as a private repository for files that students wanted to keep separate from the blog. I think this is a great feature, and given that PSU has the infrastructure to integrate it with their blogging system it is a bonus. Fore those who don’t have it, I’m not sure you would require a locally supported infrastructure for the job. Might this be better provided by services like divShare, Google Docs, Blip.tv, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. The more I think about it, the shear simplicity of integrating selected Google Docs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, divShare files, etc. into a blog often makes these services easier to work with then a centralized campus storage/file sharing network. The small pieces loosely joined approach guarantees that everyone takes ownership of their work, takes responsibility for the services they choose, and defines their own digital management plan which isn’t premised on the outdated notion of a central network/storage backbone provided by colleges and universities. Universities can make recommendations, and IT departments and/or libraries might make recommendations, but the choice rests with the individual. Jon Udell outlines the logic of a syndication oriented infrastructure which makes far more sense for universities and colleges than the current practices of continually trying to maintain and host everything locally. As Brian Lamb put it (and I shamefully keep quoting this, sorry Brian!):

Schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?

In my mind, the key to such syndication driven architecture has everything to do with tweaking a few tools (like Andre Malan’s Add BDP RSS and Add User widgets) and perhaps a hack or two to make this work so that the the campus community is sharing their work with one another in a way that is visible and open, while at the same time as simple as a tool like Facebook (which qualifies under Ganley’s notion of connect), but unlike Facebook this system would be open and students, faculty, and staff would control their data (see Justin Ball’s post here).

This is the key, we cannot build a monolithic system that will represent the new breed of “Learning Management Systems” on campus, rather we need to provide possibilities for a community to come into conversation with itself and the rest of the world by making it easy for everyone to share their feeds, filter their work to appropriate spaces, and become part of larger community that is not dictated by an overarching logic of management, control, and isolation–those are the tools of nefarious capital D’Arcy Norman and Bill Fitzgerald have come up with an excellent prototype of such a system for Drupal both here and here, respectively.

So, with that, I’ll end the overview, albeit a brief and idiosyncratic context, and move into some specific examples and how blogs (and in my case WPMu specifically) might be used for e-portfolios. I just wanted to stop here and pace myself a bit because my posts are becoming ever-longer, and Jerry reminded me I should break this stuff up so that someone will actually read it.

Part deux out at 3 am tomorrow morning

† I imagine applications like Movable Type and Blogger can do something like this with tag/category feeds, I’m just not familiar enough with them, so I haven’t been able to find such features on blogs that are using these applications.

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About two weeks ago I asked our kick ass student aids Joe and Shannon to start a wiki page outlining ten possible ways to use UMW Blogs. Soon after I went in and re-arranged, added, edited, etc. Last week DTLT’s newest ITS star for the Social Sciences, Michael Willits (who now gets a link back because he has finally announced he is moving off TypePad to WordPress ), gave some feedback on the list in the wiki page.

So, given that the list won’t ever really be done, and in the interest of making it available sooner than later you can find the wiki page here, and keep in mind that it is open for anyone to edit. So, if you are inclined to comment, edit, add another example, or re-use the list, please do. I have borrowed liberally from Andre Malan’s post here when doing the course blogs section, and the general idea is based on James Farmer’s 10 ways to use your edublog to teach.
Here is a quick breakdown of the ten uses:

* 1 Ten ways to use UMW Blogs
o 1.1 Personal Blogging
o 1.2 Courses
+ 1.2.1 A Group Blog
+ 1.2.2 A Ghost Blog
+ 1.2.3 An Aggregated Course Blog
o 1.3 E-Portfolios
o 1.4 Websites
o 1.5 News
o 1.6 Collaboration
o 1.7 Publications
o 1.8 Multimedia
o 1.9 Creating New Web Applications
o 1.10 Presentations

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This is kinda fun, the for-profit online college Pickering Institute is using WordPress Multi-User to spread the good word about consolidating student loans, Vegas deals, and domain parking. Now I have championed WordPress Multi-User for a while now because it is what I am comfortable with, and I find it can be pretty effective for creating an online community for teaching and learning. But I wasn’t imaginative enough to think about puttin one of these installations on a .edu domain at charging advertisers $50 a month “to reach an education-minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass-market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot.”

Martha pointed me to this Chronicle article that reports on the incident and the subsequent concerns it rasies about the “abuse” of .edu domains. What’s interesting is, according to the Chronicle, “renting blog space on an .edu address may not violate the rules of the educational Internet domain, which is overseen by Educause.” (As a sidenote, I love that Harvard and Stanford blogs are the blogging systems on the Pickering Institute blogroll.)

What seems to be the concern is the threat to the legitimacy of the .edu domain such an instance poses. Yet, the larger question for me seems to be how much value should we invest in a domain in the first place. As Martha suggests, is it fair to assume that the .edu has the same “cachè” that  it once did? For this seems to be something that the Chronicle and others are assuming here. For example, UMW has  been hosting UMW Blogs on a .org for almost a year now, and well before that several departments had their own .org addresses using Bluehost accounts. I think people got over the fact that it wasn’t a .edu domain pretty quickly.

What’s in a domain? Does the .edu make it somehow more official? It seems absurd that the advertisers who signup for the Pickering Institute blogging service believe it will give them some kind of authority beyond perhaps a quick glance at the site. Maybe an incident like this will open up some questions about what makes one domain more reliable and authentic than another? I see that Canadian schools use the .ca domain, which seems to be far less restrictive than .edu, and it appears they seem to be making out all right. Which begs the largest question, could I host the bava on a .ca address despite my being a red-blooded American? What do you think, bavatuesdays.ca? If so, I could then compete with universities like ubc.ca or ucalgary.ca? Hmmm, there’s a project.

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If you haven’t tried out the Simple Tags plugin yet, I promise you it will never be too soon. This plugin is extremely powerful, and strikes me more as a full blown application within WP than a simple extension of WordPress. I haven’t even begun to play with all the features it offers, but here are a number I have noticed already:

• Customizable Tag Cloud within pages, posts, and the sidebar
• Customized list of related posts based on tags
• Customized list of related tags
• Auto link feature for tags which will search posts and automatically “discover” tags
• Suggested tags based on both external and internal database comparison
• Display tags in RSS feeds
• Embedded tags
• Meta tags in header for search engines optimization

This plugin makes about three or four others I use redundant, and more than that it works just as well in WPMu, and has a nice interface for management complete with widgets and the whole nine yards. I hope Simple Tags marks the the future of WP plugins, for this is a very powerful tool that brings the functionality, ease, and possibilities of tagging within WordPress to the next level. A must have in my opinion.

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