{"id":2585,"date":"2015-06-12T21:52:35","date_gmt":"2015-06-13T04:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/?p=2585"},"modified":"2015-06-12T21:52:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T04:52:35","slug":"i-made-discussions-on-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/2015\/06\/12\/i-made-discussions-on-wordpress\/","title":{"rendered":"I made discussions on WordPress!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, so it’s not that fancy, but I’m pretty excited that I got the following to work.<\/p>\n

So in my PHIL 102 (Introduction to Philosophy) course this summer, I took one of the sections of the course and did a little bit of a “flip” of it, where I asked students to watch some videos ahead of class, in addition to doing the reading, so I wouldn’t have to do all the lecture in class and we could spend more time face-to-face on what F2F is good at: discussion, interaction.<\/p>\n

But I wanted them to also do some kind of activity with the videos so the material sinks in a bit better, and to connect the work outside of class with the videos to the work inside class with the activities. So I decided to ask them to post comments on one of two discussion questions, and I would bring their answers into class to share, and talk about them a bit. \"noun_17047_cc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But I didn’t know how to do that on WordPress until I became part of a team of designers and facilitators for a course on Teaching with WordPress<\/a>. One of the people designing the site set up our front page so that we could show announcements on it, using a shortcode. I copied this idea for the PHIL 102 class. You can see the page where I embedded the discussions, here.<\/a><\/p>\n

I made each of the two discussion questions a post under the category “discussions.” Then I used the following shortcode on the page linked above to get them onto the page: [loop query=”posts_per_page=3&category_name=discussions” view=”archive”] That requires a plugin that allows for the “loop” shortcode: loop shortcode plugin<\/a>, made by people at UBC. That’s the same code we use on the front page of the Teaching with WordPress site<\/a> to get the “latest updates” to show up.<\/p>\n

Then, I just asked students to comment on those posts. I told them they could make up a fake name, or use their initials, or use their real name if they wanted. I always want to give them the option of not posting publicly if they choose.<\/p>\n

I think it worked pretty well. There was good discussion on the two pages. I’m not sure how well it would work if I had a big class, though–this one is only 40 students, so the discussion didn’t get overwhelming where you have to scroll for days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, so it’s not that fancy, but I’m pretty excited that I got the following to work. So in my PHIL 102 (Introduction to Philosophy) course this summer, I took one of the sections of the course and did a little bit of a “flip” of it, where I asked students to watch some videos […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":665,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1198263],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teachwordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2585"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2588,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2585\/revisions\/2588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/chendricks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}