In my spare time (ha), I’m going to play around with the Teaching with WordPress open course and hopefully learn a lot from the cohort! Since I have taught with WordPress before—and am doing it right now in the most direct and complete manner so far—I hope to learn a lot about what it is I’m trying to do and how to better do it…
Well, it seems that despite having been looking forward to participating in the UBC Teaching With WordPress open course for quite some weeks, I'm a few days late getting started. Ironically, the delay is due to participation at Miami WordCamp and the necessity to spend a day or so getting my summer session online macroeconomics … Continue reading Hello, Teaching With WordPress
I’ve had a half finished draft post about Blogging Bootcamp in the works since the bootcamp finished. I still hope to finish it but thought I used the excuse of the Teaching with WordPress course to post this shortish screencast.
I’ve also got a huge post about the 5Rs presentation I bungled at teachmeetGLA this week which will fit in nicely with #TWP15 too. Perhaps I’ll chop that up and post wee bit as it is getting out of control.
As part of the gen ed seminar I pulled the rampages.us user signup data for Kristina Anthony. It was just a straight export from the wp_users table and stripped of everything but the date. She pulled it into Excel and used a pivot table to make it manageable. Which is awesome. So I pulled it down and pushed it back up into Google Docs so that I could embed the chart in this post.
It makes me feel better to look at the growth over what amounts to around a year of actual use. I tend to focus on places for improvement (and there are many) but it’s worth looking at what ALT Lab has managed to achieve in a fairly short period of time.1 The July to February jump of about 6000 users is pretty insane. I have every expectation that we’ll add another 6000 or so users next year. Things will certainly only get more interesting.
This has been done without huge student training initiatives. For the most part faculty members are able to support their own students. We have some of that filter up and we deal with some troubleshooting online but there’s no dedicated person(s) to support WordPress issues or train students. That’s a testament to WordPress.
1 In the higher ed dimension a year is equivalent to 6 mins in other dimensions. So this was really, really fast.
Michael Hart reports on the Campus Technology website (campustechnology.com) on the massive student blogging project at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“What started with several online pilot courses in the summer of 2014 led to even more for incoming first-year students in the fall of 2014, and today, more than 7,000 blogs and Web sites have been created across courses in a wide number of academic disciplines — everything from biology and sociology to nursing, African-American studies and French.”
According to the report, this was all accomplished with a multisite WordPress installation. Initiator of the project, Vice-Provost Gardner Campbell is quoted as saying, “The technology will not only help students to make connections about what they’re learning, but will also function as an e-portfolio, documenting their work.”
We’re using a variety of tools for the web that are open and flexible to imagine new possibilities and theres a lot of comfort in being a part of that network.