Yet another trend I’ve noticed with UMW Blogs is that courses and random groups are consciously publishing their articles with a far greater audience in mind than their specific class. Not only are many sites aimed at the UMW community, but also at the wide world beyond it. A great example is Uncle Lumpy’s Down-Home Art Blog and Pancake Emporium. This is a wild class experiment that has emerged on UMW Blogs wherein all the authors are blogging under personae (check out the very entertaining contributors page for a few examples). It’s a healthy mix of local art news, pancake recipes, and a Q & A column with Uncle Lumpy himself—which I think is awesome. I’m just patiently waiting for the actual arrival of the blabberized version of the Uncle Lumpy Q&A. What becomes immediately apparent is that the unknown souls behind this project are marking another trend, the conscious move of creating a news and entertainment space that moves well beyond the classroom and out to the community more generally. I love Uncle Lumpy!

One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.

I have blogged regularly about mapping domains on WordPress Mulit-User for over a year now.  And it is with great pleasure that I announce the first instance of a mapped domain on UMW Blogs (which is actually a mapped subdomain).  UMW’s pioneering History department has decided to create a site on UMW Blogs to build an information/community site for their department which will provide the latest news, announcements, and events for current students, alumni, etc. They have a Bluehost account where they do a lot of their own departmental experimentation  http://umwhistory.org), and they—more specifically Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken—wanted to know if we could map a domain to their UMW Blogs site in order to have a URL that is in line with the logic of this space and that doesn’t have that pesky word “blogs” in it. Well, if we will it, it is no dream!

In fact, we really didn’t want to map the entire domain umwhistory.org to UMW Blogs because that would throw off all the other sites they have on various subdirectories and subdomains already. So, what we did is created a subdomain ( http://home.umwhistory.org) and just mapped that, which left all the other subdomains and subdirectories on their Bluehost account unaffected. And voila, UMW Blogs can allow people to buy (or is it lease?) their own domains and map them to their own blog space.

For me, this realizes one of the most powerful elements of a publishing platform like UMW Blogs: it re-enforces that this space is the wide-open web, not some insular, monolithic campus CMS or LMS. This feature opens up the conception and perception of UMW Blogs as the open web to some great degree; it makes people feel like the space is truly their own and that they are out there framing their own work. On top of that, they can take advantage of all of UMW Blogs’s innumerable plugins and themes, while allowing them to capitalize on our first rate service And all this without having to worry about doing their own upgrades or backups. And with their own domain name they can frame their own professional portfolio, website or blog on UMW Blogs, and should they ever need or want to export their site to another service (or even get their own web hosting account) the transition would prove that much more seamless. Mapping domains is the acknowledgment that the work people are doing in this community is their own, and the technological infrastructure should be flexible, robust, and easy enough to enable anyone who wants to control their online identities do it in the most effective and intelligent way possible. We are affording them one way to both build and preserve their personal archive of intellectual work, and we need to see the technology we choose as an extension of such an act of good faith!

OK, so how do you do it? It’s remarkably easy, first go download and install Donncha’s Domain Mapping plugin on your WPMu setup. (For server admins: to make it easy on yourself, change the documentroot line in httpd.conf to the directory where you have WPMu installed, that way any domain that points to your IP address will by default point to your WPMu installation, making the sign up process for your users seamless, and any work on your end minimal at best.) After that, I simply called up Bluehost and asked them to add a CNAME for the subdomain http://home.umwhistory.org and point it at the IP address for UMW Blogs. They had it done in less than a minute, the whole thing was really a cinch. (For more about this read the FAQ on Domain Mapping at WordPress.com.)

The following questions come from an email conversation Shawn Miller and I had about the genesis and guiding logic of UMW Blogs. Shawn is a member of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology, and the group is interested in hearing more about the ways we are using blogs here at Mary Washington. If all goes well an edited version this post will also be published on the CIT blog as a way of introducing the means and methods behind UMW Blogs to the Duke campus. Pretty groovy!

Tell us about UMW blogs (brief overview) - when? what was the decision process?

First and foremost, I don’t do brief very well

UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see here for a number of examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.

The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. The defining experiment was Gardner Campbell’s choice to get all the instructional technologists external web hosting accounts so they could rapidly test and develop several different emerging open source applications such as MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, etc. In short, a sandbox approach to exploring educational technologies (you can hear Gardner explain this in three minutes here or a more lengthy presentation by the DTLT group here). Moreover, this approach embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).

I think the driving logic behind the experiment—and Gardner, Martha Burtis, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, and Patrick Murray-John can all correct me if I am wrong—was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not external to what was happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. Moreover, by exploring this avenue more fully the experience in the classroom could only be augmented by the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web. The move towards openness with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily–kind of like what Emmanuel Wallerstein says about the impossibility of being a communist in world system controlled and dominated by capitalism.

UMW Blogs is one of many project to come out of the process outlined above, and it certainly is not the end of the road. The group vision was, and still is, to enable the UMW community to take control of and manage their own work, identities and spaces online. One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs os it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import to their own space or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moroever, the syndicated framwork we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s appraoch to instructional technologies (and approach not unique to us in fact, but that was heavily influenced early on by many, many others around the internet such as Alan Levine, Bryan Alexander, Barbara Ganley, Stephen Downes, Brian Lamb, Laura Blankenship, D’Arcy Norman, to name just a few). One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been Ume Blogs’s ability to integrate all the individual threads into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a way to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.

-Does UMW blogs take the place of a standard LMS for UMW?

No, it doesn’t replace our standard Learning Management System (LMS) which is BlackBoard Basic. UMW Blogs is not a mandate from the administration. In fact, we’re still trying to make sure everyone knows it’s very much an experimental space. Despite this fact, the interest has been so great that it has become a de facto enterprise system simply based on numbers: we currently have 1954 users on campus (out of a population of roughly 4,000), and more than 1800 blogs. Those numbers are far more than the 100 or 200 blogs we were hoping for last fall.

The growth has been phenomenal and much of that might be because the system is not mandated, nor is it cordoned off for a special few. Such facts have no small impact on the community that uses UMW Blogs. It’s active, variegated, experimental, and highly entertaining. Over the last 12 months over 75 UMW faculty have signed up for UMW Blogs, and almost 100 courses have used (or are currently using) this publishing platform in some fashion. And I stress some fashion for often no two courses use it the same exact way, much like the fact that no two professors teach in the same exact way.

For example, Dr. Gardner Campbell’s Milton Seminar this Summer has pushed the limits for his class by pushing them to use their own blogs, and pulling (or feeding) their work into a central aggregated course blog. Professor Steve Greenlaw’s freshman seminar on Globalization is an excellent example of a distributed course sites using all kinds of tools like WordPress.com, Flickr, delicious, and YouTube. Professor Mara Scanlon Asian American Literature course blog used the space as a space where students could choose where they did the work, and built the course resources (such as a syllabus, assignments, etc.) around the active blog space. Professor Sue Fernsebner’s Cultural History of Late 20th Century China provides a centralized course space for the professor to publish announcements and reading questions while at the same time providing pages for tracking all the students’ research blogs. Professor John Morello has used the space for his speech course to allow his class to share and comment on each others video-taped speeches. Our provost, Nina Mikhalevsky, has been using UMW Blogs for two of her course sites for both sharing course materials and creating a dynamic forums via the blog posts. Additionally, Professor Steven Gallik is using UMW Blogs as digital laboratory notebooks for his Cell Biology course, harnessing the power of syndication for his Online Laboratory suite (find out more about this project here).

Yet, all that said it does not replace our LMS because there are several things it cannot do (all of which might be more of a blessing than a curse):

• It cannot integrate into Banner and other institutional data systems.
• It cannot provide pre-populated lists of students and courses for professors.
• You cannot have a testing/quizzing module, nor do you have a grade book.

The logic behind UMW Blogs is a loosely coupled system that gives the community the ability to publish and share online, it is not (nor do we necessarily believe it should be) contorted to meet the the administrative concerns that are often better dealt with by course management systems. Let’s face it, learning management systems are seldom about learning, and primarily deal with administrative overhead.  And that’s fine, but for really powerful and compelling examples of learning, LMSs are probably the last place one would look online if, indeed, one could look at all.

Finally, in terms of the hosting and administration of UMW Blogs, it is hosted off campus and for the first year it was on a shared server and cost us $30 a month. This year we hae it on a dedicated server with nightly backups to an alternate site and it currently costs us about $400 a month. And if a campus wanted to offload the hosting and maintenence entirely, James Farmer’s EduBlogs Campus might be an excellent, cost-effective alternative. The cost of any campus publishing endavor like this should be far more in terms of people working with the faculty and students for imagining ways of using these tools rather than infrastructure and administrative overhead. Howabout that for a cost effective and sustainable model in these troubled economic times!

-What sort of faculty have been interested in participating? Feel free to hit us with some stats.

In many ways the range of faculty has been interesting. It isn’t simply the ase that the most tech savvy folks are using UMW Blogs, as is often the case with new media. Rather, it has attracted those faculty who want to do something online, and want it to be both simple and aesthetically pleasing. This is where such a system has become a tremendous asset for the professors. It is often no harder than writing an email, and the ability for them to maintain full control over their space and make it look the way they want has made it very appealing to a wide range of people. This includes working committees, staff organizations, student organizations, and faculty who want to create online resources for their professional presentations and research. It has offered a low-threshold entry point for many who have been previously uncomfortable with the web, while providing the room for experimentation and customization that keeps those who understand the web intimately continually intrigued and engaged.

Want some stats? Check out a previous post of mine that offers some insight from the beginning of September about overall site usage, posts, comments, etc.

-What have the general faculty and student reactions been?

So far, the reviews have been rather favorable, and the number of people using it might be one indication of this. The dialogue around the tool is wide open, and we are constantly getting feedback about tweaking things and ironing out some interface issues. But most of the conversations center around how to further push the limits of using this space for teaching and learning, which might suggest we have gotten beyond the question of whether or not it’s functional and onto the issues of how we can make it even better as a space for syndicating the amazing stuff happening around campus.

-Since many (all?) the blogs are public, how do you deal with privacy concerns? Along that same thread - have any of the blogs received ‘outside’ attention/feedback/collaboration?

Making blogs public or not is determined on a case-by-case basis by the user. Not everything published on UMW Blogs is open, and every person controls the extent to which others sees what they create. This is essential to the logic of such a system. We wanted to put as much responsibility and control in the hands of those managing their own space as possible. The logic behind the model is that someone who wants to share their work freely can do so as easily as someone who wants to control who sees their work. What is radical about this is the idea of choice built into the system, the ability of controlling permissions and access in LMSs and CMSs is often far more difficult than it should be, and emphasizes just how they were designed around the logic of control and administrative management rather than openness and sharing.

That said, I would imagine most of the sites are open to the public, but that has less to do with the system than the culture. It is made easier given our choice of platforms, but the faculty and students often understand this space as a resource made freely available as part of the mission of a public university. Below I’ll point to a few of the class projects that have intentionally created resources for the world at large:

• Jeff McClurken’s Digital History course sites researched created by students have become heavily trafficked resources by the local community (check out the Historical Markers student site);

• Marie McCallister’s Eighteenth-Century Audio have become a resource that has collected and contributed hundreds of audio files to the internet more generally;

• Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals projects that provides students the ability to envision, solicit entries and create a web-based literary journal over the course of a semester.

If you followed any of the links above, you may have noticed that many of these sites are not blogs at all, but dynamic websites for publishing research, media, and creative works for the world at large.

-In terms of using blogs (and in this case Wordpress) is the main thing the platform (ie: Wordpress makes so many things possible) or the concept (ie: blogs have a flexible nature to them)?

The application we are using, WordPress Multi-User, is indeed a blogging engine, but we have found its open-ended possibilities and simplicity make it far more. It’s a highly flexible and accessible platform that the UMW community can use for anything from publishing dynamic personal web pages to managing courses, or sharing audio and video on the fly to framing eportfolios. So, its ease-of-use and built-in syndication works well for what we are trying to accomplish, and hence was the tools of choice.

All that said, the concept of an open and flexible syndicated publishing platform is far more important than any one application. Moreover, the willingness of faculty and students to experiment has been the key element for something like UMW Blogs to garner the impressive response and buy-in we have had over the past year.

-What sort of plugins/extras/widgets (RSS feeds, Flickr widgets, special help with themes) does your department and/or others at UMW provide?

This is a tough one to answer because we have so many plugins, widgets and themes (I can give you an idea, but an exhaustive list might well be impossible). Our method for themes and plugins is that we basically test themes and plugins before we add them to the system to make sure they don’t crash our installation. We are open to people in the community requesting both themes and plugins if they need more functionality or a different layout. Our group either helps them find it (often when we are working with a specific professor who expresses a particular need), or we take the larger communities requests and  recommendations and test them out to make sure there are no issues.

Part of the genius of this system is that additional functionality comes at no extra cost. More importantly, such a system encourages faculty and students to explore the framework and think about what they would like to see and go out and find it. In that very act there is a different relationship to how you frame the educational experience online.

For a list of regular plugins we offer on UWM Blogs see this post, for WordPress Multi-User specific plugins see this post (which is generally accurate, but a but outdated now), and for a list the the themes (although not an exhaustive list) see James Farmer’s Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack for WPMu.

Ok, that’s it! If I missed anything or was less than clear (which is often the case), just let me know and I will clarify and expound where appropriate. Thanks for providing the opportunity to think closely about what exactly UMW Bogs is all about, I always relish the opportunity

Two weeks into the semester and UMW Blogs is a non-stop post party.

Blog Activityon UMW Blogs as of 9-6-08

And while I get excited about the activity and the overall usage, it’s often the tidbits that get me going. Like Fumanchu’s random video post about the Triadic Ballet from the 80s.

UMW Blogs is about a different kind of teaching and learning resource, it’s the interstitial space of sharing that happens between people, and that’s why it’s unique in its beautiful chaos. It’s not about collecting institutional data, or some staged brochure for the world at large. It’s a complex series of intersecting roads that have no routinized map for learning. Rather, an online community driven by the engines of inquiry which randomly seeks out inspiration in the most unsuspecting spaces. Together we have built a highway leading to nowhere and, to misquote Gus Haynes from the final episode of the fifth season of The Wire, “we just want to see something new everyday.”

Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.

Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….

First, FeedWordPress is the real deal, it is a solid interface, not too complicated, works out-of-the-box without cron plugins, and makes syndication a breeze. (D’Arcy overviews it beautifully here). Combine this simple syndication with all the tag and category feeds made available by Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and you got the goods, EDUGLU-o-rama! As the great Mara Scanlon said after we demonstrated the power of FeedWordPress for her Ethics and Literature course today, “This is getting so much easier!” And that it is, she suffered through the days of BDP RSS and the untold issues with WP-Autoblog last year with character and fortitude, and her recognizing this afternoon that the syndication angle is coming together was a morale boost, for she doesn’t compliment ed tech stuff often or lightly.

So, I’m really excited. I can see some real potential and power here, we have over 15 classes using some version of FeedWordPress syndication, and for the most part it works seamlessly, enter one feed for a class tag, and the course blog populates itself, aggregating the student blog posts tagged accordingly. All is good….well, almost good.

Here are some of the issues we have run up against in the last week, in order of gravity:

1) For a few classes we are actually feeding the posts in with comments turned off and the permalink sending the reader back to the original blog. This works well when the feed is first syndicated in FeedWordPress. However, after that the subsequent posts that are pulled in link within the course blog, the permalink no longer send the reader back to the original post on the student’s blog. This sucks! This was a way to allow posts to aggregate in one place, but lead the rest of the class back to the student’s space, particularly useful if the class is subscribing to the course blog feed, for all the feeds will immediately take the reader to the student’s blog, a way to aggregate feeds from a variety of sites off one feed (a kind of tag specific OPML feed for class sites). So, this one is major, and it ain’t working as of now

2) This may be related to number one, but for several feeds that I click on that have been aggregated via FeedWordPress I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_insert_category() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/sitewide-tags.php on line 120

Making me think there may be a correlation between the FeedWordpress issues and the Sitewide Tags plugin. Anyone experience anything similar to this?

3) After FeedWordPress is activated and up and running, if you try and create a Link (just a plain old link in the Write–>Link tab) it actually creates a new, malformed feed in FeedWordPress. Bizarre. This doesn’t necessarily hurt anything that I know of, and I stress that I know of.

4) FeedWordPress doesn’t pull in tags from syndicated posts. Not a huge deal for us right now, but it would be useful.

5) The creation of categories from syndicated posts doesn’t work out-of-the-box. You have to actually update the rss-functions.php and rss.php files using the two they provide in the MagpieRSS Upgrade folder that comes with the FeedWordPres plugin (thanks for pointing this out, D’Arcy).

Ok, that’s it. I’m gonna post a modified version of this on the WPMu forums as well to see if anyone knows anything. The plugin author, Charles Johnson, seems to have been busy with other things and hasn’t upgraded his plugin for WP/Mu 2.6+, and frankly the guys built it out and supported it brilliantly. And once your plugin becomes popular, it must seem like as much as a burden as a service to constantly update and maintain it, I’ve seen it happen with a number of good syndication plugins which makes me nervous. We need to support these folks, and help them develop it out, or contribute accordingly.

So, there it is. FeedWordPress is about as close as we’ve come to realizing the syndication bus in major way, mad props to Andre Malan for turning me onto it again at Norther Voice this past February, and if anyone has any ideas for making it work a bit more consistently don’t be shy.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

The BDP RSS widget Andre Malan created for allowing people to add their feeds to a site via BDP RSS would make even more sense these days for FeedWordPress.

Today it really hit me that UMW Blogs is back and roaring. I rolled through the jungle filled with RSS and picked lovingly from the fruit of connected people thinking about wild stuff. And I knew it for sure when I read Jesse Kopp’s first blog post of the semester:

From the makers of last summer’s smash hit “The Stove That Ate Sylvia Plath” comes “When Dishwashers Attack”–so blood spillingly, bone chillingly thrilling that you may never feel safe with kitchen appliances again. Anne Scaldwell (Sigourney Weaver) and Peter Boilsworthy (Matt Damon) are excited about renovating the kitchen in their newly purchased and well-isolated beach house, but soon after moving in, they discover their old Kenmore dishwasher has very different plans… Coming to a theater near you this September.

Jesse is an amazing thinker and blogger, and his work with Carole Garmon last year in her Video Art class was awesome. In fact, she had some wonderful folks pushing the boundaries, currently missing the Roblog, but loving the rise of a whole new year with new discoveries. Shannon is back at it and will be discussing William Faulkner an Toni Morrison for literature and Grapes of Wrath in her US Film History course with the great Jeff McClurken (who is all about honor). And Serena proves her literary acumen by caricaturing the mighty Reverend, and her sharp and exacting voice makes me marvel at her ability, and feel a bit self-conscious about my WordPress habits

And professor Sue Fernsebner pushes the boundaries with a full blown FeedWordPress site for her Historical Methods course.  And already the students are taking their research sites and the ideas to the next level, check out how Nick Ford’s imagines his own vision of history and teaching which is punctuated by a punishing quote from Orwell’s 1984:

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

That’s right, school is back in session, and everyone’s getting ready to imagine. And that is what Gardner Campbell nails in his presentation at the UCEA pre-conference; it’s a masterpiece of the first order, and in it he notes beautifully that on top of and between every open course resource is not only content, but the mindface of the people you think with. The pushing of ideas and the experience of learning that makes it intoxicating. He noted the openness as not opposed to or at odds with the resources, but an integral part of the design of education and a faith that puts us one step closer to a manifestation of a kind of real school. He’s on to something. The interstices of experience, the moment that happens between structures and beyond localized routines of learning. A commitment to the life of the mind and a sense of comunity, not to some abstracted notion of excellence. I makiing my committment, I’m gonna read Faulkner’s The Wild Palms (maybe my favorite of his, maybe), watch some John Ford, re-visit Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and promise myself I will get at Marx’s Capital sooner or later.  The year’s begun, and just like every Fall of my life til now, I’m excited to learn.

Last semester, Professor John Morello’s “Communication and Political Campaigns” class did something interesting with UMW Blogs. Rather than thinking of the class blog as a semester long activity for writing and reflecting (which is always good), he used it for one specific assignment. The blog provided a space where students could upload, categorize, and receive feedback on their own recorded “surrogate speeches” that support one of the various candidates for the then upcoming Virginia Primary.

John Morello's Speech 311 Video Site

Keeping in line with the small pieces loosely joined philosophy, all the speeches were uploaded to YouTube, and then embedded in a post on the class site. What you have is not so much a blog as it is a broadcasting engine where students can easily post media and receive feedback from the class.

I want to stress the fact that John is not at all seduced by the shininess of the tool or sermons about technology as the future of education, being UMW’s debate coach for many a year he could easily dismantle anything resembling an argument I tried to throw his way. Rather, I think he uses it because it’s straightforward, handles embedded video seamlessly, and provides an easy way for students to aggregate, organize, and comment on videos without completely relying on a decentralized tool like YouTube. UMW Blogs is just the publishing framework it all fits into.

This Summer I had the good fortune of working with professor Angela Gosetti-MurrayJohn and the students of her “The Classical Tradition” course. I would like to say I came up with some original and elaborate EdTech scheme to change the world through mediated mean, but I didn’t. However, Angela did by pushing her class to explore a variety of digital tools for relating their work. And I just happily obliged by pretending to be a dog, and barking about 50 ways you could present a digital story with free Web 2.0 tools.

During the session where I talked to the class about these tools, I channeled Alan Levine’s presentation on the 50 Ways resource that he gave at Northern Voice 2008—which was a gem. I found myself laughing hysterically when he went to the Blabberize homepage and showed the Llama speaking with a thick, comical Indian accent. I stuck with me, so I tried it out on this group and lo and behold everyone was laughing hysterically and I felt good. Nonetheless, I still wrote Blabberize off as a pretty useless tool, and went on to my own personal favorites once I had their attention like YouTube, FlickrSlidr, etc.

So when I saw a group from the class that was working on the theme “War in the Aeneid“ and had incorporated Blabberize effectively into their web-based, multimodal narrative of The Aeneid and war, I was intrigued.  Here it is below, featuring none other than Vergil himself:

Now, that is an entertaining and intelligent use of this seemingly silly technology to set the stage for a dynamic, media-rich site dedicated to The Aeneid. What’s more, this group utilized a number of embeddable resources from YouTube and Comiqs to highlight and contextualize their presentation while at the same time enriching their own readings. Alan’s 50 Ways is the resource that keeps on giving and, as an added bonus, just about every tool that has embed code available works with UMW Blogs, making it the Web 2.0 Digital Storytelling publishing platform par excellence

Well, I have written a bunch about domain mapping on WPMu over the last year or so. Up and until tonight I have been using Richard Bui’s tutorial here along with David Dean’s Multi-Site Manager Plugin. The combination of the two have worked great for me thus far, and I liked that with this combination each mapped domain could act like its own, stand-alone WPMu install—with each domain have the possibility of unlimited dynamic subdomains—a feature I’m not so sure is available with this plugin. That said, you did have to be brave enough to muck around in the database.

Well, that was then, this is now. Donncha just released a plugin that brings domain mapping for WPMu to the masses in the form of a simple, easy-to-use plugin. Is Donncha on a roll or what? Last month it was the Sitwewide Tags Plugin (though it’s much more than the name suggests) which kicks major ass. This week it is the Domain Mapping Plugin, which is for many the Holy Grail for WPMu admins.

So, I just got around to testing it out on a WPMu install that uses [[CPanel], and it is actually pretty painless, though not entirely automated. Keep in mind this will only work for installation that have sub-domains setup, no love for sub-directories just yet.

Here is how I got it to work with CPanel:

After you install the plugin you will find the Domain Mapping subtab under the Manage tab. Once you go there you will see the following:

Domain Mapping Subtab

The logic here is simple, each WPMu blog will have access to this subtab once the plugin is installed. If someone has a blog on your system and they have a domain they want to map, they would need to do two things:

1) From where ever they purchased their domain, they would need to point their domain to the nameservers of the WPMu install. For example, if your WPMu install was hosted on Bluehost, they would need to point them to NS1.BLUEHOST.COM AND NS2.BLUEHOST.COM.

2) After that, they will need to go tot the Manage–>Domain Mapping tab and specify the IP address of the WPMu site and have them put in their domain. (You can decide how you want to share the IP address with them.)

That’s it on their end, pretty simple. But on the admin end there is one more step if you are using CPanel.

You need to create an addon domain for the mapped domain and point it to the directory with the WPMu installation. For me it looked like this:

Add Domain Trick in Cpanel

You can see that the domain is added normally, but the document root is changed to point to the actual directory with the WPMu installation. After that, it works like a charm. Now, this was simple and awesome, and for folks who aren’t using CPanel it will probably work automatically once someone points their domain to the correct IP address. But with CPanel there is one extra step, and while a relatively easy one, it does rule out strict automation of the mapped domains. But, th upside is that at the end of the day even I can map domains with out hacking Apache settings or putting our WPMu install in imminent danger. Disco!

So, can UMW Blogs map domains now? Well, I gues we can now, can’t we