Dave Lester did a fine job of compiling a long list of Universities that are using WPMu in one capacity or another. It’s a great list, and there are at least 40 institutions on there I had no idea about. Add to this list the work Mario Núñez-Molina did last year and add a few additions to his list and you may very well have over 100 institutions using this application. And as the recent comment on his post suggest from the University of Melbourne, there are probably a heck of a lot of international universities that are using this application that we have no idea about.

Now, Mario went above and beyond and made a slide show of screen shots for every install–I do love his fanaticism and I can completely relate He just turned his diigo bookmarks tagged wpmu_university into a slide show, pretty cool.

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.)

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog  http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?

Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).

The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary

Jon Udell has mentioned the idea of Syndication-Oriented Architecture a couple of times over the the last year of so. One of the things I’ve been trying to spell outabout UMW Blog is how it in many ways is trying to approximate a Syndication-Oriented Architechture using a very hodgepodge collection of plugins and widgets.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that a university publishing platform shouldn’t only be limited to the sites created within that system (in our case WordPres Multi-User), but rather should be able to incorporate work that students and faculty may be doing on other, externally hosted services that are RSS-enabled—like, for example, Blogger,  WordPress.com, Drupal, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

In other words, folks within the campus community should be able to add their feeds to a publishing platform like UMW Blogs and have what they are doing on their own spaces join the general flow of the syndicated data already in UMW Blogs. They should appear in the site wide RSS feed (or even a single class feed); they should show up in the flow of data on the front page; and they should also be searchable in the WPMu archive. Yet, it shouldn’t necessarily be a republishing of their work to another blog space they need to create and maintain, but rather a quick way to drop of their feed so that their work is discoverable by the UMW Blogs community, leaving a trace of their work that will lead people within the community (or a specific class) back to their own space, wherever it is hosted.

We’ve been experimenting with this in a couple of ways recently using Feed WordPress on the Tags blog for UMW Blogs (the tags blog is automatically created when you install Donncha’s Sitewide Feed Tags Page plugin). For example, I can bring in the all the posts for three course being taught by professor Zach Whalen (which he is hosting on his own site in Drupal) by simply adding the feed for each of the courses. The posts are automatically brought into the Tags blog and the permalink directs the user back to the original post in the Drupal course site. The categories can also be imported, comments can be turned off,  and you can assign a specific tag for each of the courses if you want to make the work more visible in the tag cloud.  Additionally, the posts will show up both on the front page and in the searchable archive.*

So, here’s another example of this in action, Andy Rush has created a pretty bitchin’ New Media blog, and he is hosting it outside of UMW Blogs. Yet, what he blogs about there is of great use and interest to the UWM Blogs community. So, all we have to do is grab his feed, add it to Feed WordPress in the Tags blog, and tag it New Media. After that all his posts will be automatically syndicated into UMW Blogs, and they will also be tagged New Media so that he might be discovered in the tag cloud.  Further more, his posts can all be found in the searchable archive, which is just really the search field for the Tags blog.You can see his posts in the  UMW Blogs archive here.

Next step is creating something like a self service widget for Feed WordPress so that mebers of a WPMu community can add their feed (or feeds), tag it, categorize it, and then we’re off to the races.  The end result is that anyone can publish anywhere as long as it has a valid feed, and their work can still be accessible and searchable by their community as well as the world at large.

Now, with all that said, exploring and discovering work on UMW Blogs is still not that easy, you have to see the flow in real time, or wade through hundreds and hundreds of posts in the sitewide feed.  So, my next post on UMW Blogs will be looking at the experimental work Patrick Murray-John is doing with MIT’s Simile Project which he is documenting  vernacularly here and more technically here (I’m like a fish out of wter when it comes to the Semantic Web). Andrew Murphy of Metapizza nails it, “Put in an interested use of metadata and web 3.0 and we’re flying …” That is the logic behind this experiment. How might we be able to make the work happening on UMW Blogs easier to search, browse and filter using Semantic Web tools from the Simile Project like Exhibit? It seems the next logical step to try and open up this space further, and try and make the amazing amount of work being done more apparent and finadable by the community at large.

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* Much of this is inspired by Bill Fitzgerald’s Drupal setup that he outlines here, and while Drupal can do this much better than WPMu, I still think the ease and feel of the individual spaces provided by WPMu makes it worth the extra work, but that is really just a matter of preference and comfort level in the end.

Shawn Miller from Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology re-published my post “The UMW Blogs Story,” that chronicles the work we have been doing over the last several years. I am pretty excited that the approach of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is providing others with fodder for thought. The group here at UMW is second to none in my mind, and we play just as hard as we work. But I’m not sure this post is about the people I work with, though I love them each and every one of them.

But the work on UMW Blogs is just one example amongst many. So as a follow-up I wanted to take a moment to point out some of the work other people at other institutions have been doing with publishing platforms (often called “blogging” platforms ).

There’s Mario Nùñez-Molina’s RUM Edublogs (who was the first person I started collaborating with while doing ELS Blogs back in Winter 2007). His advice, guidance, and help was (and continues to be) invaluable to the work we were doing at UMW, and his own publishing platform at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez has an attractive new front page, and is doing some great things with syndication in the “planeta” blogs.

Cole Camplese’s thoughts about re-imagining a blogging platform as far more has been immensely useful for us here at UMW. His team’s work is always about pushing the limits of these tools to be far more than just a blog, and PSU Blogs is probably one of the best examples of this, I highly recommend Cole’s posts on thinking about campus-wide blogging platforms as publishing spaces/portfolios here and here, as well as a syndicated publishing framework here –important conceptual stuff.

Barbara Sawhill and Ryan Brazell’s work at Oberlin College with blogging and the languages (though a quick look at the “Class Sites” tab suggests many more departments) frames one of the most important conversations in my mind: how can language departments all of the country (if not the world) be tapping a publishing platform like this to harness the unbelievably rich archive for language learning that is the open web?

Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer have launched Baruch Blogs this semester and it is a beauty. I particularly love the Baruch Teaching blog they have created which features a number of professors sharing their thoughts and opinions about the best approaches for teaching in a variety of scenarios. What an excellent idea for a blog! You can see it here or read Luke’s post about it here.

D’Arcy Norman’s stealth launch of U. Calgary Blogs has quickly been delivering the goods. I’m jealous already at how slick and pimped his WPMu install is –those folks at UCalgary are spoiled with this guy! He has also been thinking honestly through the value of a campus blogging platform, and what it might mean as a learning community publishing platform as well as a vehicle for Open Education. Plus, once D’Arcy gets started on something, you know the tips, tweaks, and general tech goodness is soon to follow, making him the Reverend’s most strategic convert

I recently peaked over at Laura Blankenship’s Blogs at Bryn Mawr, I love the new theme, but more than that I am amazed at how they seem to be planning on using this space as a way of bringing together their campus community as well as the alumni from all over the country, if the “Who’s Blogging at Bryn Mawr” sidebar widget is any indicator. Using a blogging platform as a space for allowing the students, faculty, and staff to create quick and easy club and organizations spaces is a huge. This is a space to watch in my mind, we are finding much of the same activity here at UMW and I think it marks a changing tide in just how popular and powerful a user-friendly and open publishing platform will be on campus.

Esther White’s recent work on Smith College Blogs is opening up some interesting ways to both think creating a dynamic front page for a campus blogging platform as well as using blogs as sites for faculty to create there own personal sites.

And then there is Tony Hirst at the Open University who is developing ways of turning a such a blogging platform as WPMu into an automated publishing platform fueled RSS from the course sites created at Open Learn. In short, a way for other institutions with flexible publishing platforms to pull in these resources as re-arrange, edit, and re-contextualize as they see fit. A mashup engine for educational resource that can be pulled in in a matters of seconds, that is one potential road we can imagine in our quest for simple, syndicated publishing platforms.

In short , “what we have here is the non-failure to communicate.” Above is a distributed group of people doing awesome work at their respective institutions and sharing it widely. What comes out of this is a loosely formed community of folks that have together framed one way of thinking about the future of sharing the work done online quickly and easily with very little overhead. What we have here is a community dedicated to sharing and openness, a model for open education that is firmly embedded in the an institution’s community, yet always already within the community of the open web. Feeds from other campus blogs, online resources, etc. can be brought in easily and shared readily, but that’s the subject of my next post….

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

I have to give some love to the work Esther White is doing with WPMu at Smith College Blogs, it is well worth a look. She has shared her process for customizing the front page, which details some very cool hacks. Moreover, today she posted about using WPMu as a space for faculty bio pages and personal blogs/sites.

I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty….We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio….Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page….

Very cool stuff, and the plugin for bringing in faculty RSS feeds may very will be aggr. It’s this kind of thing that just further reinforces how useful it is to share what happens in our work regularly. Moreover, it illustrates how key it is for colleges to have a simple, powerful publishing application that will allow this to happen more readily. Looks like Esther is taking care of this for Smith College, so bully for her.

I stumbled upon a bizarre WPMu comments bug today (it may also effect single WP installs, but I’m not sure). Here’s the skinny, if you include to: with two trailing spaces, you will not be able to post a comment on UMW Blogs or bavatuesdays. I’m not sure this is true for all WPMu sites, and I guess others would have to test it for certainty, but it is definitely the case on the two WPMu installs I have tested it on. As soon as you try and post the comment containing the to: with two trailing spaces it will throw a 404 error. Think I’m kidding? Try and comment here with a to: and two spaces, I dare you, hippie. Heck, I’ll even give you 100 bucks if it gets through.

Thanks go to Patrick for knowing about this bug and helping me trouble shoot it, I would have been flummoxed without him.

Update: Even more bizarre is that I tried posting this post with the to: and two trailing spaces and it wouldn’t let me publish the post either, it just threw a 404 error. Wow, what a strange, strange bug.