I just ran John McCain’s speech from the final day of the RNC 2008 convention through Wordle to generate a word cloud to see major themes.

I’ve been slowly tinkering on the Learning Communities concept, playing with the idea and starting small by facilitating a “blogging and student publishing” group. Today, I opened it up pretty wide, sending an email to over 2200 faculty members to invite them to identify topics that would interest them for potential learning community gatherings.

I expected to have to explain what I was intending, to describe what I mean by “learning community” and to reinforce that the groups are completely about faculty (and grad student, and staff) contributions, rather than The Official Presentation From the TLC. This is a faculty thing, inquiry in action. I’m just there to facilitate and provide caffeine and carbs (and whiteboard and any other support is needed to keep the discussions moving).

I’ve had phone calls in response, every one of which along the lines of “that’s great! you’re really asking US what’s important! and have I got some ideas!” - there’s been enthusiasm, eagerness, and excitement.

I posted a poll to help gather priorities about the various topics I brainstormed (as well as encouraging people to suggest other topics by posting comments, or to indicate that the whole thing is just silly). And pretty quickly the votes started rolling in.

I was a bit sneaky in how I managed the invitation for participation - I used it to quietly announce UCalgaryBlogs.ca since the poll was hosted on a blog there. Already, a prof has set up a blog to use with her class, and others are telling me they’ll be checking the service out. Very cool stuff.

This has been one of the better days. Do the right thing, don’t ask permission, and run with it.

Donncha pushed the WPMU 2.6.1 update live today, and it’s a required upgrade for security reasons. I just wanted to post that I’ve upgraded ucalgaryblogs.ca to WPMU 2.6.1 and everything appears fine. It took all of 2 minutes to do, too.

Here’s my process:

1. back stuff up.
2. login to the server via ssh
3. download WPMU 2.6.1 into ~/temp, and unzip it.
   

   cd ~/temp
   wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.zip
   unzip latest.zip

4. delete the wp-content directory in the freshly downloaded copy of WPMU 2.6.1 - I do this so I don’t accidentally overwrite any customized themes, or nuke anything in mu-plugins or plugins…
   

   rm -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/wp-content

5. copy the fresh copy of WPMU over top of the existing one in the web directory
   

   cp -R wordpress-mu-2.6.1/* ~/webdata/ucalgaryblogs.ca/

6. run the WPMU upgrade site script to run any necessary updates (I don’t think there were any database updates, but it’s probably a good idea to run it anyway). This will automatically run the script on each blog installed on that copy of WPMU.
7. done. test some blogs to make sure stuff is working fine.

WordPress has supported Gravatars for awhile, which is great, but if you’re rolling out a site for a bunch of students to hammer on, it’s not ideal to have to send them to a third party service to set up photos. It’s awkward, and confusing, for new users to have to go somewhere else to add a photo to their profile. And profile photos can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a semester when everyone is just getting to know everyone else in a class, to put a face to a name.

So, for UCalgaryBlogs.ca, I just installed the handy User Photo plugin. Now, any site can enable this, and the users of that site will be able to add photos to their profiles, like this:

The plugin can be configured with custom sizes for the full-size and thumb versions of the avatar, and the avatar image can be deleted and/or replaced at any time.

It’s not completely trivial to enable - because the themes need to be User Photo aware. That’s pretty easy to add, though. For the cutline theme we’re using on a project, I edited a handful of files to add the code, and it works great. On index.php, and single.php, just add this wherever you want the blog author’s photo to be displayed on the post (I put it in the section displaying the post meta information):

<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_the_author_thumbnail')) {  userphoto_the_author_thumbnail();}?>

Wrapping the thumbnail display code in a function_exists conditional means it will degrade nicely if the plugin is unavailable. Always a good thing to degrade instead of borking.

That results in this display when viewing the post:

Now, if you also want to show avatars on the comments, just edit comments.php to add this code (I put it in the comment meta info section):

<?php if (function_exists('userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail')) { userphoto_comment_author_thumbnail();}?>

And that will look like this when displayed on the blog:

If a user hasn’t added an avatar, it won’t display any image. But if they do have one, they’ll get the properly sized version of their avatar image displayed automatically. Easy peasy. It’s a bit awkward having to edit the themes, but it’s not difficult. The hard part will be remembering to re-apply the edits if the themes get updated (hence this post…)

I took the text of Obama’s speech from the 2008 DNC and fed it through Wordle.net to generate a word cloud to visualize common words. I’ll be interesting to compare with McCain’s speech next week…

Merlin Mann wrote a great post called “Social Networks: The Case for a Social Network Pause Button“, where he suggests we need a few more states of engagement with social network applications as a way to manage the deluge of data.

I’ve got a better solution. Walk away. Do something else. Here’s my social network pause button, and it’s extremely effective:

It pauses everything. No inbox. No RSS. No IM. Nothing but me, my bike, and the wind.

Jen has her own system.

Don’t we all have Pause Buttons already? We just need to use them. We’re all in control of our engagement with these tools, we just need to realize that, and exercise our own control to our own levels of comfort.

I was going to write up a post describing how to use the cool FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress to syndicate external content into a blog, and republish it in the context of a class or group. But, of course, Jim Groom has beaten me to the punch, and done a much more thorough job of documenting the process than I would/could have done. So, yet again, I’ll just refer to Jim’s work. What I can do is provide a demonstrating workflow to show how FeedWordPress could be used to pull content from one blog into others in the context of a group, project, or class.

Take, for instance, this post I wrote back in July about the Learning Community for Blogging and Student Publishing. It’s published to my blog, and stored in my own outboard brain. But it’s not presented in the context of the University of Calgary.

What about my campus blog at dlnorman.ucalgaryblogs.ca? Should I copy and paste the post there, because it relates to UCalgary? Nope. I’ve just enabled FeedWordPress on that blog, and anything I publish to my “main” blog using the tag “ucalgary” will automatically get republished on my campus blog.

What about the Learning Communities blog? That post would also be useful to the participants in the project, and I’m not about to expect or compel them all to subscribe to my blog. So I just configured FeedWordPress to pull the “learning communities” feed from my “main” blog and republish posts to the Learning Communities blog.

FeedWordPress in action

This gives some pretty easy flexibility - I don’t have to manually republish things into various community resources, and I don’t have to make anyone subscribe to anything they don’t want to. If a one-stop-shopping type of resource is useful for a community (class, group, department, etc…) then why break that? Just use syndication and republishing to get the best of both worlds - decentralized publishing and centralized contextualization.

This process also gets around the hassle and confusion of republishing content. I’ve never wanted to publish to any place other than my own blog. I’ve never accepted invitations to write for other blogs. If I want to write something, I’ll publish to my blog. But, with automated syndication and republishing via tag-based feeds, it becomes trivial to allow content to flow into various other blogs and websites where it might be beneficial.

There is one wrinkle in the love fest that is FeedWordPress. Although it can suck categories and tags from items in an RSS feed and put them into categories in the receiving WordPress blog - it doesn’t currently create tags. It just adds category after category after category. Which works, but is messy. Hopefully a future revision of the plugin properly groks the category/tags distinction…

Finally, this post is tagged with “ucalgary” but not “learning communities” so I know it will automagically appear on my campus blog, but not the Learning Communities project blog. And I won’t have to do anything else to make that happen. Very cool stuff.

I just upgraded to wp-mollom 0.6.0 and it has a bunch of additions and fixes. If anyone has problems with it, please let me know asap.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find where I heard a specific sentence about peace and peacefulness. I’m pretty sure it was triggered by this lost interview with John Lennon, although the exact quote isn’t in it. Either way, it’s a very powerful presentation of a student’s illicit interview with Lennon in 1969.