Category Archives: Blog Hub

Blogging Bootcamp Video Review

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.

Rampages Growth Plotted

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.

Teaching with WordPress via Curated Readings on Open Learning

While I have not finished processing my experiences with #rhizo15, I seem to have fallen into the clutches of another fascinating, open course, Teaching with WordPress. For those who may be interested in checking it out, the Twitter tag and conversations occur here #TWP15. Now, I have been using WordPress for years for my blog, … Continue reading "Teaching with WordPress via Curated Readings on Open Learning"

Blogging could be key to the future of higher education

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.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE…

WordPress Comment Subscriptions by Category


flickr photo shared by duncan under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC ) license

It’s particularly helpful in a rather specific situation- i.e. one where you’re doing a mother blog and want to see all the student comments (like Allen did with the #thoughtvectors reader) but since we have students using their blogs for more than one class things get messy fast.

Enter me asking smarter people on Twitter, almost going to the forsaken land of Yahoo Pipes,1 and being saved by Google liking Mark more than me.

So anyway, here’s the structure to get the comments for specific categories/tags.

  • by name – http://bionicteaching.com/comments/feed/?category_name=apple
  • by category ID – http://bionicteaching.com/comments/feed/?cat=18
  • by tag name – http://bionicteaching.com/comments/feed/?tag=tutorial-2

This is one of those things that barely rates a post but given I didn’t know how to do it maybe it’ll help some other wanderer and for people who want this it’ll be really useful. Thanks to Mark, Alan, and Martin for helping me out.

1 I like Yahoo Pipes but one has to assume Yahoo will kill it dead very soon . . . although I’ve been hearing that for several years.

Getting Started With Open Pedagogy

So my summer course, “How the Web Works: Building Your Digital Identity, Literacy, and Network,” starts next week for a seven-week run at Austin College. Strictly speaking, it’s not an “online” course…we don’t do those at Austin College. And we don’t really do “hybrid” or “blended” courses, either. We’re a small liberal arts college, and one of our signature themes is a high-touch interactive relationship among faculty and students. So while I’m working with the new initiative in digital pedagogy, it’s not a matter of trading class time for screen time, but rather of augmenting f2f with digital resources. Right ... Read more

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