Well, James Farmer and company are at it again, and the latest business venture is a WordPress Plugin App store a la iPhone apps. Another pay to play solution that is asserts that “the future of WordPress is premium plugins.” This development, like most of Farmer’s moves over the last year or so with wp.mu, blogs.mu, etc. have been rather depressing for me to watch.  What we are witnessing in the WordPress community is both a crisis and a crossroads, a fork in the logic of what this open source community stands for, and in many ways the reality that the GPL license was originally imagined for (operating systems like Linux) is not cutting it for an open source, web-based application like WordPress (thank you, Martha).

The logic of a paid service for re-worked WordPress plugins that are still under GPL is not outside the GPL license, people can still charge for re-coding plugins that others have offered up freely. And, by extension, I could get a paid membership to that service and download all those plugins and distribute them freely to anyone under the conditions of that same license. Fact is, both solutions create real issues. Those people who develop plugins with the idea of making them freely available can have their work appropriated, modified and sold at a profit, and for those who do try and profit from their work can have their own plugins or themes taken and given away freely, at least after someone pays the entry fee.

So given that, why don’t a whole bunch of us pool a dollar or two and gain access to the premium plugins site, and then redistribute everything freely? It’s within the letter of the GPL law, and it would make for a far more affordable and equitable re-distribution of wealth in the community.  Well, we don’t and won’t do it because it’s an abrogation of a bigger contract, a community contract of WordPress users that I believe has formed around the idea of openness and sharing back. What we are seeing now is the attempt to commodify that logic so that themes and plugins begin to represent some form of wealth within the open source community that needs to be traded on the open market.  But in my mind it is exactly this emerging logic of open source entrepreneurs that understand applications and code as commodities that will bring down a community of users, and represent a challenge to any movement towards sharing and openness.

We can not live by the letter of a license, we must think through the implications of our actions for a community that has moved further and further away from the prevailing political logic of the open source movement, which is namely to freely share software, which in turn provides zero cost of entry and public collaboration. Additionally, it allows individuals to re-imagine the software and build on that independently. And it’s with that last point where we see the attempt to commodify a community that can only be as strong as its diversity and openness.  The more a few people try and dominate this space and control “the market” so to speak, the less open the application and the more impoverished the community becomes over time.

I’m a fan of WordPress, and I’ve been in the game for a while now. That said, I’m not a developer, I am a member of a community and a movement that sees the possibility of people openly sharing their ideas and work apart from some kind of monetary compensation of the fruits of their labor as a possibility for something different.  A new model for sharing openly out of a passion and belief in the possibilities rather than professionalizing this development as a career or job. Look what professionalization did for politics in the US, it is the wrong direction, and I think it is time for the WordPress community to take a stand on what they believe and how they will deal with this challenge. Drupal has figured out this model, and the community is tight, despite the letter of the GPL law, and that has everything to do with the people, so we need to stop hiding behind licenses and establish who we are and where we are going before the community implodes. The logic of capital and commodification will tear us apart unless we are vigilant, making money must be subordinated to sharing openly. The more we commodify, the sooner we die!

North Carolina State University has really made an impressive case for using Twitter more extensively on campus.  A wide range of departments, organizations, and clubs at NCSU are using Twitter to get announcements, events, and relevant links out to the campus community, and they created a slick aggregation space that brings all of this together cleanly.  They’ve even made the source code for the application they developed freely available to anyone who wants to use it—-major kudos to the NCSU development team.

Now we have been playing around with this idea for a while now, and it seems like we are starting to see a wide range of departments, groups, and affiliated organizations here at UMW are interested in using Twitter for announcements and the like, so—if I can convince Martha—-we are going to hack around in UMW Blogs to try and get our own aggregation point for UMW Tweets that feature news and announcements that are relevant to campus.  The site will be http://twitter.umwblogs.org, and as I see it now, we will be using the Add Link widget to have people drop off their Twitter info, and then pull it all into FeedWordPress so that we can both aggregate and publish the various Twitter streams into one site on UMW Blogs.

You may be thinking to yourself at this point, why not just use the code NCSU so graciously made available? That actually a good question, and my only response is I know nothing about PHP libraries, and rather than setting up a new instance, I’d rather see if we can’t quickly hack together a similar model using the tools we have, a space a large part of our community already is familiar with and regularly visits. If it doesn’t work out, we can always play with the code and PHP libraries I’ve been trying to avoid.

The only issue with the Add Link/FeedWordPress setting is getting the Twitter avatar to appear. I think we can hack the P2 theme to get us most of the way there, but the avatar will be looking for a Gravatar associated with an email, or an Avatar created when a user starts their UMW Blogs account. So what we need to do is make sure anyone who adds their Twitter account to http://twitter.umwblogs.org has a UMW Blogs account. I think we can do this by putting a hacked version of the Add Users/Add Link widget that requires both their UMW email (they will need to be a member of UMW Blogs to add this) as well as their Twitter URL. This will allow us to map the RSS feed in FeedWordPress from their Twitter account onto their UMW Blogs user account. Once this happens, the avatar associated with their account on UMW Blogs (either through Gravatar or the built-in avatar function in BuddyPress) will be associated with their tweets on http://twitter.umwblogs.org, and their tweets will actually link back to their Twitter account.

The more I think through this the more I see it may be better to just figure out NCSU’s setup using their source code and go from there, but I guess I’m a glutton for bad hacks.  We’ll see, but in the mean time is their anyone out their at UMW interested in experimenting on this with us? If so, add your twitter URL here, and let’s get this party started right.

The librarians here at UMW’s Stafford Campus have been experimenting with UMW Blogs to create their own version of LibGuides. Jami Bryan and Paul Boger came to me almost a year ago and showed me LibGuides (a subscription CMS for libraries using Web2.0 features) and its various features—you can see it in action at DePauw University.

Jami noted that most of those features could be reproduced in WordPress, so they went about creating their own LibGuides using WPMu. I would like to say I helped with the process, but usually I would get an email from Paul asking me about a particular feature, and by the time I replied—often far too late—he had figured it out.

And what Jami and Paul did is pretty amazing. You can see their WordPress hacked LibGuides here, here, here, and here. And they have incorporated just about every feature LibGuides has using widgets and a few hacks, and this without the investment in the LibGuides service which ranges from $1,000-$3,000. I really love the way they themed their LibGuides knock-off with the same header as the Library site, and actually included all the class resources within their sites/blogs. Take a look at how they are using SlideShare to share class presentations, a page to share instructional videos, a Meebo Chat widget, a Twitter widget, and a tag cloud of relevant subjects covered. And that’s just a few of the features. You can also see they have embedded an EBSCO Article quick search, as well as widgets with relevant subject news if you go to the Business LibGuide homepage, for example.

And don’t mistake this post as a slam on LibGuides, because I have to admit I never used this service and from what I can see from the outside it does a fine job of integrating Web 2.0 tools. That said. it’s nice to know we have the possibility to hack our own within our preferred publishing platofrm. So, kudos to Paul and Jami for pulling this off, and now if they would just blog the process we would be that much richer

I’m pretty excited for the upcoming WordCamp in NYC, not only is it a wonderful excuse to go back home, but it is also shaping up to be one of the biggest WordPress shindigs ever. Moreover, it’s being hosted at CUNY’s Baruch College providing some well-earned recognition of the amazing work happening at Blogs@Baruch—a recent example of which is their Freshman seminar blogging initiative. And it is really cool to see CUNY once again involved in a WordPress event, and fine work by Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer for brining Baruch into the equation—-an institution can be very useful for hosting an event like this

Now, I have the added bonus of presenting in the Education track (yep, there is an education track!), and assuming my third child due in early December doesn’t come earlier, I’m planning to do a NYC film-based presentation focused on gentrification, LMSs, and the open source community (a mashup of this blog post and this paper).  Working title is “EDUCHUDS: the Gentrification of Web-Based Education.” And I’ll have to work in, The Warriors (1979), and Times Square (1980), and Escape from New York (1981), I mean what better than to marry my various loves: instructional technology, WordPress, and b-movies?

This morning I had a fun conversation with David Grogan, Ilene Chen, Stephen McDonald, and Hannah Reeves from the academic technology group at Tufts University. They had some questions about running a large scale WPMu installation at Tufts University, and below are some of their questions followed by my working answers. Figured I’d republish it here from Google Docs in the event anyone finds it useful, and special thanks to Hannah Reeves for organizing the session, it was a lot of fun, and it’s apparent Tufts has an excellent group that has much to bring to the experimentation with WPMu in education.

Set up and Performance

How long have you been running WPMu and what version are you currently running?

We have been running WPMu for almost three years now.  We started with a smaller pilot for one department (English Linguistics and Speech) at http://elsblogs.org in January of 2007, and based on its success decided to offer a university-wide publishing platform for all departments, students, and staff at UMW Blogs (http://umwblogs.org), which launched in August of 2007. 

What plug-ins are you using?

Oh wow, this is a big one, we have alomost 100 regular plugins installed, and then another 20 or 30mu-plugins. I won’t list them all here, but I will highlight the ones I think are essential, as well as point to Tom Woodward’s recent post about the plugins you should have (there is a little overlap here).

• Initial plug-ins at time of setup
  • Mu-Plugins
    
    • Akismet (free for educational institutions – with conditions)
    • Akismet Credit (D’Arcy Norman’s quick plugin for adding credit to footer quickly and easily)
      
    • Sitewide Tag Pages Plugin
    • Anarchy Media Player (Download here)
      
    • Userthemes
    • More privacy options
    • My-comments
    • Signup Terms of Service
    • Unfiltered-Mu
    • WP Supercache
    • WPMu Feed
    • WPMu Gravatars
    • ADA Series
      • Recent Posts across WPMu
      • Sitewide Feed Plugin
    • Sitewide Multi-Widget (works in conjunction with Sitewide Tag Pages)
    • WPMu Statistics
  • Plugins
    • Add Users
    • Add Link
    • Flickr RSS
    • FeedWordPress
    • BuddyPress
    • WPTouch
    • Subscribe 2 Comments
    • WPLicense
    • Twitter Tools
    • Twitter Tracker
    • And many, many more
• Themes
  • Farms 100+ Pack of themes is a good place to start.
  • P2 Theme (a twitter-knockoff)
  • CommentPress2

Can your users create their own themes from scratch? If so, how?

They sure could, themes are based on the open source code of WordPress, so anyone can create one who has working knowledge of PHP and CSS. We really haven’t had too many people design their own from scratch, but if they did we would need to test it before it went live. What we do a lot of, however, is use the Userthemes plugin listed above to get access to the theme files and hack existing themes. We have found this feature to be invaluable for the work we do.

Is your instance designed to be self-service? (e.g. can anyone at UMW log in and create new blogs or is there are request mechanism?)

Absolutely, anyone with a UMW email can get an account, and use it for whatever reason they like.  I think this model has been the ral key to opur success. Because at it’s root UMW Blogs is an open, and easy-to-use publishing platform for all kinds of things.  And we have allowed people to use it that way, and the results have been amazing in terms of realizing new uses and possibilities for the system. When you prescribe or define a technology too specifically, you often take out any innovative and re-imaginative teeth it might have had.

What does your hardware configuration look like?

UMW Blogs is externally hosted by Cast Iron Coding, which rules by the way, and we recently updated our server to the following specs (which work perfectly for more than 3600+ users and 3200 blogs).

Hardware specs:
SuperMicro H8SMU AMD Opteron QuadCore SingleProc Sata [1Proc]
AMD Opteron 1216HE [2.4GHz]
2 GB RAM
250 GB Hard Drive
100 MBPS network cards

Also, we give users about 150 MB of storage space, but rarely do they use that because we push external services like YouTube, blip.tv, Flickr, etc.

Have you noticed any system limitations regarding number of user accounts, # of blogs? Is so, what?

Not yet, as the numbers suggest above, we have a healthy community, but have not had real issues.  We are currently using Multi-DB from WPMuDev, but are currently working on switching to Hyper-DB (which is what wordpress.com is run on) because we no longer have a premium account at WPMuDev.

Have you noticed any system performance issues? If so, what?

Well, we had a system performance with traffic at the beginning of the semester, after which we upgraded to the server specs laid out above. Right now it is running smoothly, but the real issues with performance is plugin related, so I would watch that far more closely than we do

Security and Upgrades

Have you encountered any security issues that you have had to patch yourself? If so, what?

We actually upgrade to latest version very regularly. And so far so good, we have been pretty secure as things go.  With that said, we do not have UMW Blogs linked into any other  system, and the login and password is not connected through a single sign-on solution.

Support

How many staff/partial FTEs are needed to support your instance?

As of right now, I do the majority of user support with the actuall system.  But our division 5 and 1/2 FTEs, though I think most of the support has been relegated to me, and it has not burned all my time, but as UMW Blogs becomes bigger and bigger, and more “Systemic,”  the time devoted to it becomes greater. But, in anticipation of the next question. WordPress has made any barriers to new users very easy because the interface is so slick and user-friendly. And the fact that it is open source, and has an insane community behind it makes our jobs as instructional technologists so much easier, cause we can integrate new features on the fly.

What do you see as the biggest barriers that new users have to overcome in using WP?

Well, I think that is WP’s strength, and why we used it, because it’s interface is so user-friendly we haven;t had to invest too much time at all in user training.

Misc

What do you wish you could do with the system that you haven’t been able to do?

I wish it dealt with pages better than it currently does, but this is an issue I have with WP more generally.  I think pages and the actual transformation of the blog into a website could be a bit more seamless in terms of child/parent pages, page order, and static frontpage.  It does it all right now, but I think if it were all managedin one place, and a bit more obvious, that would be a huge help.

I also wish aggregation and syndication was built into the core in a more sophisticated manner, but this can be accomplished relatiely well with FeedWordPress.

Are you automatically categorizing blogs by people, clubs, courses, etc.? If so how?

No, we aren’t categorizing blogs out of the box, we actually allow clubs and courses  to add themselves to these aggregation blogs.  For example, a new club can include the URL of their webspace (as long as it has a feed it can be hosted anywhere) on the clubs blog here: http://clubs.umwblogs.org
A model which is very similar to how we are using aggregating sites for various courses.

Have you attempted to integrate BuddyPress? If so, what’s your experience been?

We have integrated BuddyPress with UMW Blogs, and you can see the evidence of this in the blogs, members, and groups pages off the main UMW Blogs site. We haven;t pushed it at all, and we are still thinking about the profile pages, but for right now we are just seeing what faculty and students do with it, if anything.  Over th next several months we will be experimenting more, but for right now it is acting more like a directory/profile sapce with limited activity. That said, we have been watching the work of Boone Gorges closely as he works on integrating forums and groups, and eventually thinking about groups as the organizing principle of a course blog, which is intriguing.

There has been a lot of discussion about the future of WPMu with the coming merge of WPMu and WP, and I understand there are concerns and issues all around. I’m not in the business of selling WPMu, so my concerns aren’t so much caught up with the preservation of the WPMu name, but they are very much centered around the future of the multi-blogging functionality. In many ways the coming merge provides us with an opportunity to re-think some things about the WPMu architecture and the possibilities of what it might mean for individuals to manage their own WPMu sites.

I think the most exciting prospect of the merge is that WPMu will finally become as simple to install and maintain as a regular old WordPress install. And if that’s the case and the raison d’etre of the merge, then the whole push for a multi-user blogging system is not nearly as essential as a way to aggregate, visualize, and expose the work happening around a particular community within any given blog. If I were thinking the merger through I would be just as interested in the possibilities of robust and distributed syndication built into future core of WP— something that at least for me seems so much more important than giving everyone a blog on your blogging system. I don’t necessarily want people on our blogging system as much as I want them to easily set up their own site with RSS (and a WP site with the added bonus of many blogs in one install wouldn’t suck) . Why not start thinking about how to integrate plugins like FeedWordPress, Sitewide Tags Pages, BDP RSS (which it turns out still does work with WPMu 2.8x, despite my earlier post), etc. into the core and truly supporting the idea of a blog as an aggregation point for a wide range of sites. WordPress has pretty much perfected the ease of use for publishing, and that is why they rule, but working a more robust framework within the future releases for re-publishing and real-time web stuff would certainly be powerful in my mind, but this is quite selfish because it is what I’m really interested in beyond WP or WPMu. I want an elegant, feed-driven aggregation system that brings the work of an entire community into conversation with itself.

And what really gets me about this is that we are pretty close right now with UMW Blogs, I grab feeds from external blogs all the time that are related to UMW an pull them into our sitewide “tags” blog (the name tags here is confusing, it is simply a republishing of everything in the entire WPMu install) with FeedWordPress. For example, I stumbled across this post in the tags blog on UMW Blogs tonight, which was actually being pulled in from a WordPress.com blog of a student who graduated years ago, but regularly blogs about her work in historic preservation.  This particular post was all about a book she read as an undergraduate in Historic Preservation, and how great a resource it is.  A valuable post, especially since the professor who recommended that book, W. Brown Morton, retired last year. There is a kind of eternal echo in a system like this that students, faculty, and staff can continue to feed into a community of teaching and learning well beyond their matriculation period, or even their career.

I often think why we couldn’t just use UMW Blogs for aggregating clubs and organization news, course blogs, etc., but have everyone’s actual blog in their own space. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still see the value of something like WPMu for a simple solution for a quick blog without the updating and versioning headache, but I also see what we are doing as instructional technologists, scholars and students in higher ed right now is much bigger than a particular blogging system or software, I see my job as working with people to imagine the implications and possibilities of managing and maintaining their digital identity in a moment when we are truly in a deep transformation of information, identity, and scholarship. It’s key to keep this in mind well beyond the application, and when I think about WP or WPMu, I love it because the architecture has enabled me to grasp this more clearly than any other thing in my online experience.  So how might working with people to wrap their heads around this space, and manage their own WP install (or whatever floats their boat) on their own space (the Gardner Campbell SysAdmin vision is very much at work here—see his “bags of gold” talk for a mind blowing discussion of this very thing) as a means to make that lesson of the digital archaeology of knowledge that much more apparent and powerful.

To this end, I have been experimenting with what the new merged WP might be like.  For example, we have a few professors with mapped domains on UMW Blogs which basically host their personal/professional site, Jeff McClurken’s mcclurken.org is a good example of this, as is Steve Greenlaw’s hosting of his personal blog Pedablogy on UMW Blogs. So, with both of these domains I have created the logic of what a merged WordPress might look like for each of these professors. Steve Grenlaw would have his own domain stevegreenlaw.org on which he could create all his course blogs (as many as he wanted off of one domain and one WP install) and with built in aggregation, he could make it easy enough for students to get their own space wherever and share their feeds to create syndicated spaces for his course discussions, postings, etc. And, by extension, we could pull anything off of stevegreenlaw.org because as I see it he would share his course feeds with us. In fact, this is precisely what Zach Whalen is already doing with his own course sites that he hosts and designed himself with his Drupal kungfu, and it works beautifully.

But, here is the kicker, for anyone who can’t do what Zach does, we’ll host domains that professors purchase and, ideally, map all their domains onto one WP install that can manage many multi-blogging solutions from one install.  The whole Russian Doll thing that WPMu can do with the Multi-Site Manager plugin. So you offer a Bluehost like setup for faculty, and if that is too much, allow them to map a domain, take control of their own course work, and encourage an aggregated course management model that pushes students to take control of their digital identity and spaces by extension.  Giving students a space and voice on your domain or application is not the same as asking them to create, manage and maintain their own space.  Moreover, it doesn’t feed into the idea of a digital trajectory that starts well before they come to college and will end well after they leave.  This model extends the community, and brings in key resources like a recent graduate discussing an out-of-print historic preservation text book a retired professor assigned to be one of the best resources for an aspiring Preservation graduate student. This is what it is all about, right there, and it’s not gonna happen in silos and on someone else’s space, we need to provision, empower, and imagine the merge as a full powered move to many. many domains of one’s own.

…and oh what a beautiful thing it is.  We made no special announcement, and we have kept the profile data to a bare minimum, and Martha just pulled the whole thing together with the awesome new theme (and who’s work shows no fear!). And I have to say I love the visual integration with BuddyPress, the entire space now works seamlessly and makes a huge difference. I’m interested to see if and how people find and discover one another through the blogs directory.  When I just opened it up, I saw a number of cools blogs, our Strategic Planning site (another brilliant Martha Burtis design being stewarded beautifully by Nina Mikhalevsky out in the open), Tim O’Donnell’s and Jeff McClurken’s Ted Seminar is a featured blog, and Theresa Grana’s Bioinformatics syndicated Lab and Learning notebooks is front and center. It is another way at this community, and it opens up all kinds of possibilities for serendipity.

I find myself using the members directory to search known users and find new ones, I also use it as a kind of trace of who’s on now.  And when I see an old friend, I friend them

The Groups directory is something I am thinking a lot more about.  No one has used it really, but in the Looking for Whitman experiment, faculty are using it to direct message/email the entire class, and it works.  It is also wold be interesting, as Martha pointed out, to experiment with a class forming a group, which immediuately spawns a blog that they can use to author, or simple work within the forum/wire of the group.  What if groups had more of a twitter design for members, and allowed that conversations throughout the site in these unique groups, but then re-aggregated all together? Maybe, or maybe not.  We’ll see.

Finally, the Profile page template is undergoing a much needed simplification, and it can be that very dashboard Gardner has talked about again and again, but something that show you your comments, blogs, friends, and various other things that allow you to frame an aggregated identity across the site.

Only time will tell, but I see the BuddyPress suite of features building in a rich means to explore the community that didn’t exist for WPMu before, and that in many ways brings some important sinews of connection between people into the architecture.  Grafting that on top of thousands of blogs asn users opens up a space to see if and how people use it, and how might we be able to make it further illustrate the work that is going on throughout UMW Blogs.

For all of you out there who deeply question the “system” model, and the idea of hosting this stuff for an institution and making it work on a larger scale. Today I agree with you,  for we’ve had nothing but consistent downtime with UMW Blogs for the last four or five day, and while I often blog about how great UMW Blogs is (I’d link to it, but it is probably down so what’s the use), today it sucks.  And it also makes me think that despite my constant notions of creating a space like this for innovation, community, and experiments—it inevitably turns into a huge albatross around our necks.

What’s causing it?  Well, if it would stay up long enough we might figure it out. It could be some constant call to wp-cron.php that we can’t precisely locate (though disabling cron seems not to help).  Could be that we are being spam attacked every ten minutes-though there’s no certainty there either.  Could be our real traffic is far too heavy and regular for our server. We’ll be upgrading to a bigger server shortly, and I am praying this will keep us up so that the professors and students who have come to count on UMW Blogs don’t start jumping ship en masse, but at the same time maybe they should. Maybe it is just another enterprise system after all, and what we’ve all labored over for two years has seen it’s last innovative breath. I mean who cares, here comes Google Wave and Twitter and all the other newest and bestest tools that we have to starting imagining pedantically.  I hate the whole whole field these days, so I’m gonna return to my nostalgia and Sears Catalog and forget about my day job for as long as I can. Edtech you suck!!!

Image credit: rcstanley’s “Train Wreck – Prob early 1900’s”

Last Tuesday marked the kick-off of the Digital Whitman course at UMW. This course is part of a larger NEH grant that is focused on an inter-campus approach to pedagogy that is designed around a rich and distributed infrastructure of social media. The project is titled Looking for Whitman, and it brings together five geographically distinct courses on Walt Whitman in an attempt to experiment with how series of distributed faculty and students can share, collaborate, and converse out in the open.

The premise of the course is Professor Matt Gold’s brainchild (you can read his overview of the course here), and when he asked me to be a part of the project early on I jumped at the prospect because I firmly believe it’s an important opportunity to illustrate how social media can re-imagine the possibilities for sharing amongst and between students of a similar topic from a wide range of institutions. It in many ways frames the importance of an open and porous ecosystem of sharing not just within a single institution, but across many. It builds upon and amplifies an experiment like UMW Blogs by bringing a number of different institutions into a larger, focused conversation around a particular theme or topic.

And while the courses all still run a face-to-face model at their respective universities, a large majority of the work will be happening online and between faculty and students from entirely different campuses. All of which presents a really fascinating opportunity for re-thinking distributed courses between universities, and opens up an exciting possibility for re-imaging the architecture of distributed learning. Something that just about any LMS on the planet couldn’t even begin to address, or even imagine, given how deeply rooted they are within the logic of a single institution, not to mention how entangled they are in the restrictive logic of stringent permissions and content ownership—yet another roadblock to truly essential innovation brought to you by the LMS!

So, as may be clear by now, I’m pretty fired up about the possibilities of this project because it marries the classroom experience to a more distributed network of learners from a variety of institutions that represent a wide-range of students from all walks-of-life and backgrounds. From the University of Mary Washington to Rutgers-Camden to CUNY’s City Tech to Serbia’s University of Novi Sad, the project represents a rather compelling spectrum of courses from a variety of universities that provide a unique network of students from a wide array of experiences. This is not a “country club for the wealthy,” but a re-imagining of a distributed, public education that is premised on an approach/architecture that is affordable and scales with the individual. It’s a grand, aggregated experiment that will hopefully demonstrate the possibilities of the new web for re-imagining the boundaries of our institutions, while at the same time empowering students and faculty through a focused and personalized learning network of peers, both local and afar.

Now, all that said, what makes it all the more exciting is that we’re building this ship as it sails. We have set up an overarching site premised to some degree on the work we have been doing at UMW with blogging and aggregation, a setup cheap enough that we can direct more of the grant money to hiring people and training faculty and students than worrying about designing and programming yet another framework. The tools are already out there, what we are doing is focusing on hacking an open source application like WPMu and BuddyPress to give us as much flexibility as possible. And, that’s right, we’re pushing the logic of the syndication bus that much further, trying to see just how publication and syndication can create a rather simple, yet powerful framework for sharing, collaborating and conversing. So, to that end, I’m going to talk quickly about two three syndication based experiments we’re working on right now with this project.

Frontispiece Project
The frontispiece project is just under way, and it foregrounds the power of tag-filtered syndication for a distributed series of courses. At UMW Professors Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart—a project the other four courses will also be doing—are having the student design their own frontispiece as a means of reflecting upon the 1855 frontispiece from Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass.

They’ve posted the frontispiece in their individual blog (which feeds into a course, aggregated blog you can see here) and tagged it with frontispiece. All the posts from around the Looking for Whitman site are republished in the http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org über blog (created thanks to the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin) which means we can get a single feed of all the posts from around the environent tagged with frontispiece: http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org/tag/frontispiece/feed.

Now, I created a new blog for the frontispiece project at http://frontispiece.lookingforwhitman.org and activated a cool photo theme called AutoFocus. After that I simply dropped the sitewide feed for the frontispiece tag into FeedWordpress, and every post tagged frontispiece will now republish into this project blog creating a very cool visualization of all the students’ frontispieces from all five courses. Tale a look here. It was dead simple, and the effect is not to be underestimated, this is now a space we will see almost 100 frontispieces emerge reflecting the wide-range of students and faculty traveling through this course together.

A Twitter-based RSS Reader?
There have been some rumblings since Twitter took off that it has the potential to replace RSS readers, I haven’t found this to be entirely true in my experience, but there can be no doubt I spend far more time in Twitter than my RSS Reader on a daily basis. And I am pushing hard that this course experiment with Twitter (although I am getting some push back from some analog UMW professors who will feel the wrath of the Reverend, and soon) and one of the things I discovered is that it would be rather easy to have a Twitter account that basically republishes all the students distributed posts at UMW into a single twitter feed. Given we are already aggregating all the UMW-based posts into a single blog, I simply activated Tweetable (my new twitter app for WordPress Mu thanks to Shawn Miller) which allows me to include the project hashtag (#ww20) as well as tweet right from the WordPress site.

So, in short, whenever a post is re-published on the course blog, a tweet is sent out through the @whitmanumw twitter account, so you can follow this account as a kind of course RSS reader, or simply search the hashtag #ww20 to see the latest posts as well as what people are saying about it on twitter, if anyone at UMW actually tweets, which the dearth of is highly annoying to me. I mean the course is titled Digital Whitman, not Analog Whitman, get with the program hippies!

Discourse
This idea is one I have been playing with for a while, and I have never really seen it pan out, but I figure what the hell, I’m already losing the Twitter battle, might as well unload everything at the very beginning, and cry myself to sleep thereafter. I created a separate blog at http://discourse.lookingforwhitman.org that I themed with P2, which is basically a Twitter knock-off theme for WordPress. And while students can become authors on this site and use it as a quick and easy space for discussion (something better handled on Twitter in my opinion, you hear that Mara, are ya listening?), I actually think of it as a way to integrate the Twitter conversation into the ecosystem of the Looking fro Whitman site via the feed for the #ww20 hashtag on twitter. Finding the feed for a hashtag is made easy by http://search.twitter.com—you can see the feed for the hashtag #ww20 on the wrongfully reviled Twitter here.

Once I got the feed for the hashtag, I simply activated FeedWordPress on the Discourse blog, and dropped it in there, and automagically all the tweets with #ww20 republish within this blog, and become part of the Looking for Whitman ecosystem. They are now searchable and discoverable through recent posts, sitewide search, and simple RSS feeds dropped in the sidebars of course and/or individual blogs.

So, it is just the first week, but as you can tell, the experimentation will be fast and furious, we have plans for digress.it (or what was CommentPress) as well as Google MyMaps, YouTube, FLickr, and all those other not-so-new-fangled sites. So, stay-tuned to the bava for evermore cutting edge instructional technology, your one-stop-shop for brilliance writ large

Last Tuesday marked the kick-off of the Digital Whitman course at UMW. This course is part of a larger NEH grant that is focused on a inter-campus approach to pedagogy that is designed around a rich and distributed infrastructure of social media. The project is titled Looking for Whitman, and it brings together five geographically distinct courses on Walt Whitman in an attempt to experiment with how series of distributed faculty and students can share, collaborate, and converse out in the open.

The premise of the course is Professor Matt Gold’s brainchild (you can read his overview of the course here), and when he asked me to be a part of the project early on I jumped at the prospect because I firmly believe it’s an important opportunity to illustrate how social media can re-imagine the possibilities for sharing amongst and between students of a similar topic from a wide range of institutions. It in many ways frames the importance of an open and porous ecosystem of sharing not just within a single institution, but across many. It builds upon and amplifies an experiment like UMW Blogs by bringing a number of different institutions into a larger, focused conversation around a particular theme or topic.

And while the courses all still run a face-to-face model at their respective universities, a large majority of the work will be happening online and between faculty and students from entirely different campuses. All of which presents a really fascinating opportunity for re-thinking distributed courses between universities, and opens up an exciting possibility for re-imaging the architecture of distributed learning. Something that just about any LMS on the planet couldn’t even begin to address, or even imagine, given how deeply rooted they are within the logic of a single institution, not to mention how entangled they are in the restrictive logic of stringent permissions and content ownership—yet another roadblock to truly essential innovation brought to you by the LMS!

So, as may be clear by now, I’m pretty fired up about the possibilities of this project because it marries the classroom experience to a more distributed network of learners from a variety of institutions that represent a wide-range of students from all walks-of-life and backgrounds. From the University of Mary Washington to Rutgers-Camden to CUNY’s City Tech to Serbia’s University of Novi Sad, the project represents a rather compelling spectrum of courses from a variety of universities that provide a unique network of students from a wide array of experiences. This is not a “country club for the wealthy,” but a re-imagining of a distributed, public education that is premised on an approach/architecture that is affordable and scales with the individual. It’s a grand, aggregated experiment that will hopefully demonstrate the possibilities of the new web for re-imagining the boundaries of our institutions, while at the same time empowering students and faculty through a focused and personalized learning network of peers, both local and afar.

Now, all that said, what makes it all the more exciting is that we’re building this ship as it sails. We have set up an overarching site premised to some degree on the work we have been doing at UMW with blogging and aggregation, a setup cheap enough that we can direct more of the grant money to hiring people and training faculty and students than worrying about designing and programming yet another framework. The tools are already out there, what we are doing is focusing on hacking an open source application like WPMu and BuddyPress to give us as much flexibility as possible. And, that’s right, we’re pushing the logic of the syndication bus that much further, trying to see just how publication and syndication can create a rather simple, yet powerful framework for sharing, collaborating and conversing. So, to that end, I’m going to talk quickly about two syndication based experiments we’re working on right now with this project.

Frontispiece Project
The frontispiece project is just under way, and it foregrounds the power of tag-filtered syndication for a distributed series of courses. At UMW Professors Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart—a project the other four courses will also be doing—are having the student design their own frontispiece as a means of reflecting upon the 1855 frontispiece from Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass.

They’ve posted the frontispiece in their individual blog (which feeds into a course, aggregated blog you can see here) and tagged it with frontispiece. All the posts from around the Looking for Whitman site are republished in the http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org über blog (created thanks to the Sitewide Tags Pages plugin) which means we can get a single feed of all the posts from around the environent tagged with frontispiece: http://tags.lookingforwhitman.org/tag/frontispiece/feed.

Now, I created a new blog for the frontispiece project at http://frontispiece.lookingforwhitman.org and activated a cool photo theme called AutoFocus. After that I simply dropped the sitewide feed for the frontispiece tag into FeedWordpress, and every post tagged frontispiece will now republish into this project blog creating a very cool visualization of all the students’ frontispieces from all five courses. Tale a look here. It was dead simple, and the effect is not to be underestimated, this is now a space we will see almost 100 frontispieces emerge reflecting the wide-range of students and faculty traveling through this course together.

A Twitter-based RSS Reader?
There have been some rumblings since Twitter took off that it has the potential to replace RSS readers, I haven’t found this to be entirely true in my experience, but there can be no doubt I spend far more time in Twitter than my RSS Reader on a daily basis. And I am pushing hard that this course experiment with Twitter (although I am getting some push back from some analog UMW professors who will feel the wrath of the Reverend, and soon) and one of the things I discovered is that it would be rather easy to have a Twitter account that basically republishes all the students distributed posts at UMW into a single twitter feed. Given we are already aggregating all the UMW-based posts into a single blog, I simply activated Tweetable (my new twitter app for WordPress Mu thanks to Shawn Miller) which allows me to include the project hashtag (#ww20) as well as tweet right from the WordPress site.

So, in short, whenever a post is re-published on the course blog, a tweet is sent out through the @whitmanumw twitter account, so you can follow this account as a kind of course RSS reader, or simply search the hashtag #ww20 to see the latest posts as well as what people are saying about it on twitter, if anyone at UMW actually tweets, which the dearth of is highly annoying to me. I mean the course is titled Digital Whitman, not Analog Whitman, get with the program hippies!

Discourse
This idea is one I have been playing with for a while, and I have never really seen it pan out, but I figure what the hell, I’m already losing the Twitter battle, might as well unload everything at the very beginning, and cry myself to sleep thereafter. I created a separate blog at http://discourse.lookingforwhitman.org that I themed with P2, which is basically a Twitter knock-off theme for WordPress. And while students can become authors on this site and use it as a quick and easy space for discussion (something better handled on Twitter in my opinion, you hear that Mara, are ya listening?), I actually think of it as a way to integrate the Twitter conversation into the ecosystem of the Looking fro Whitman site via the feed for the #ww20 hashtag on twitter. Finding the feed for a hashtag is made easy by http://search.twitter.com, and you can see the feed for the hashtag #ww20 on the wrongfully reviled Twitter here.

Once I had the feed for the hashtag, I simply activated FeedWordPress on the Discourse blog, and dropped it in there, and automagically all the tweets with #ww20 republish within this blog, and become part of the Looking for Whitman ecosystem. They are now searchable and discoverable through recent posts, sitewide search, and simple RSS feeds dropped in the sidebar of course or individual blogs.

So, it is just the first week, but as you can tell, the experimentation will be fast and furious, we have plans for digress.it (or what was CommentPress) as well as Google MyMaps, YouTube, FLickr, and all those other not-so-new-fangled sites. So, stay-tuned to the bava for evermore cutting edge instructional technology, your one-stop-shop for brilliance writ large

Here is a noticias test for a page.

Is the syndication working by tags?

Hats off to Andre Malan for getting the dev.wpmued aggregation site together in no time at all—did it take him a single night of kicking ass while Brian Lamb was fast asleep? The idea behind the site, which you can find here, is right line with all the goodness that came out of the Open Ed conference—do it cheap, do it out in the open, share it, and make the focus of our labor people and ideas.

Let’s face it, many of us are working and hacking within WPMu, and this provides a place to aggregate and share out centrally that development. More than that, it is up and available to any one out there who wants to include the work they are doing. And what’s more, I’m a contributor, so what the hell else could you want? (Although Boone Borges’s blog has been on total fire, which means I better get my game face on )

Gratuitous image for Joss Winn, cause I love web fat!
Image credit: “Gratuitous pussy shot” by bl1nk

1. Issue with überadmin not being able to login into users’ blogs. The user blog still recognized me as a siteadmin and would show me edit links, etc., but could not access backend.
   Fixed! Solution: Caused my the ardx.php plugin in mu-plugins (that has been deleted)
2. BuddyPress 1.0.3 is creating havoc in the backend ajax. All sorts of things won’t work, and it generally makes the backend unusable. No image uploads, timestamp changes, etc.
   Not Fixed. BuddyPress de-activated, searching for solution, think it may be a plugin conflict—though ruled out a mu-plugin conflict. This one has got me on the ropes. Update: Turns out this was an issue with WPMu 2.8.1, when I upgraded to 2.8.2 this issue stopped.
3. For some reason Anarchy Media Player freaked out on me today as well. [What a nightmare today and yesterday have been.]
   Fixed. Went to An-archos site and downloaded a fresh version of Anarchy media Player for WPMu, things seem to be working fine now.
4. Yesterday got a note that a student could not add a tag to her post. Seemed odd, but when I tried to log into her blog, however, the first issue on this list came to my attention After I finally fixed that, I realized she was right, I killed myself over this for a bit today, and still have no solution. But I think if you try to add a pre-existing tag or category to another post in the same blog it will not take (at least that’s the case on UMW Blogs). This is a huge bug, and I’m not sure if others are having a similar issue, or if it is tied to global tag/category tables and multi-db. I’m still stumped here.
   Not Fixed. This one is gonna take some testing and I think the last of my hair will be gone by the time it is ready to go. Update: this issue was finally resolved, turns out the multi-db database setup was causing this issue. Special thanks to D’Arcy Norman for figuring out the issue, and posting a plea on the Premium WPMuDev forums for a fix.

How do I feel about hosting a blogging platform and the idea that this is becoming a system? Well, now’s probably not the best time for that discussion, honcho. System? Fragile? DIY? Some things just ain’t easy, and that’s why they’re good, innovation ain’t free even though nobody is paying me to kick web ass.

The last few days I have been doing the arduous work of making sure the BuddyPress admin bar and D’Arcy’s Akismet Credit Inserter plugin work cleanly with all the themes on UMW Blogs. It’s painstaking work, but pretty important if BuddyPress is going to go live this fall. So, anyway, as I was going through our over 120 themes (the edited versions of which i will make available when finished) I found that almost 50 of the theme previews were just showing a white screen. Odd, so while I still haven’t updated UMW Blogs from 2.7.1 to 2.8.1 (still making sure the userthemes plugin is rock solid), I tested the same theme previews on the bava, which is running 2.8.1, and they worked. Long story short, this bug is fixed in 2.8.1, but if for some reason you can’t upgrade from 2.7.1 just yet, here is the fix which refers to the themes.php files within the wp-includes directory (wp-includes/theme.php):

Around line 852 replace

$_GET['template'] = preg_replace('|[^a-z0-9_.-/]|i', '', $_GET['template']);

with

$_GET['template'] = preg_replace('|[^a-z0-9_./-]|i', '', $_GET['template']);

and around line 861 replace

$_GET['stylesheet'] = preg_replace('|[^a-z0-9_.-/]|i', '', $_GET['stylesheet']);

with

$_GET['stylesheet'] = preg_replace('|[^a-z0-9_./-]|i', '', $_GET['stylesheet']);

And if you are upgrading—which you should—then this is one more thing to cross off your list, cause 2.8.1 makes this bug go away.

Image credit: Tambako the Jaguar’s “Croccodile with open mouth”

Something struck me this morning as I was reading the comments from Mike Caulfield, Jared Stein, and Jim Doran on Brad Efford’s The Play-List blog. Here are three people who are not part of the UMW community per se, but who just might want to contribute a song or two to the Play-List on a lark. I’m not saying they would be regulars, nor am I saying they can’t comment—cause they can and they did.  But they can’t author their own thread because to become a member of that blog they need a UMW email to get an account (we have sign-ups limited to the umw.edu email domain).

This same issue came into focus a year ago when Marie McCallister was interested in opening up her Eighteenth Century Audio site to people from the Librivox community and beyond–we nixed it because there was no real way to allow users to be added to her blog without über admin intervention. So, I didn’t think much of it and went on my way.  Then more recently Philipp Schmidt asked me during the Mozilla Open Ed seminar if UMW Blogs was open and available to anyone, even folks outside of the UMW community, and I once again said no.

Ive’ been thinking about this recently, in part because D’Arcy keeps the great UCalgary Blogs wide open for anyone to sign-up for an account (and his work around for Splog prevention makes this that much more possible on the admin side). So, I got to thinking out loud, “What the hell is going on here, is UMW Blogs really open? What are we BlackBoard or something? Pandering to the term open, but slaving under the idea of ‘membership’ in the form of an institutional email?” I punched the wall, I banged my head against a stand up mirror and bloodied my forehead a bit. Hell, I was getting ready to do a G.G. Allin before Martha, Andy, and Patrick piped up and suggested that this would invite some issues.

What if the membership explodes and we can’t handle the onslaught?

Would this be an issue? I’m not so sure it would, and I really don’t think the membership would explode, but I do think that others would be able to join sites who aren’t necessarily part of the institution. It would also allow alumni to join the community without being manually added or forced to go through someone to get an account.

The other issue is that we have a whole lot of plugins and and we allow embed code in posts and pages, possibly putting us at risk code-wise.

I’ve heard this from the very beginning when we started using WPMu, and I still haven’t run into any major issues 3,000 users later.  Am I just being naive, or is this concern over emphasized?

We might put the whole experiment at risk if something goes wrong.

Maybe, but my feeling is that if it’s so fragile then maybe its value is purely surface. Maybe it needs to die so that it can resurrect itself from the ashes outside of the institutional logic of fear and one strike and you’re out mentality. And to be fair, this isn’t the administration saying this, mind you, this is a larger cultural mindset we have all inherited as if by osmosis. And I am quite certain this idea would be killed long before anyone in power heard about it.

All that said, I am leaning towards UMW Blogs being opened up further, but I have to acknowledge and admit I don’t really have that much “control” over UMW Blogs anymore, and whether I think it should or shouldn’t have open sign-up might not really matter much. The fact is that UMW Blogs has become bigger and more successful than we had ever imagined, and while it is still the most kick ass system ever, I wonder if we aren’t starting to settle in on that idea a little. UMW Blogs should really be an interim step to the Personal Learning Environment, an idea of training wheels for social media (as Andre Malan so brilliantly frames it in his recent post here) that will come off! That, in fact, must come off at some point. What is UMW Blogs if not simply a step towards something else? Why are we so jealous about protecting it, let’s burn it down and build it anew.

Now, Marth Burtis suggested that we take some kind of middle ground and create a plugin where users can actually invite and add authors from outside UMW Blogs into their blogs to author or even create their own sapce—a kind of sponorship of “outsiders.” I think this is a far more rationale approach, and actually puts the power of opening up the community in the hands of the various individuals that make it run. This is a plugin/feature that we should develop, for we need to start thinking of this as network that both relfects UMW, but also all the various individuals and their networks and relationships that move beyond it.  And if that doesn’t work, then we need to really focus more diligently on the syndication bus and encourage everyone to get their own spaces on the open web after they’ve had the training wheels on for a year or so.

I have been envying Lafayette College’s NextGen Gallery goodness in their WPMu Pilot, and after finally setting aside some time I installed the plugin and played with it (you can find it  here).  It worked pretty much out-of-the-box, the only issue I ran into was that I had to disable the flash uploader in the Image Upload page (it’s the button right next to upload image). It is annoying that the flash uploader is still causing issues since it was introduced in WP/WPMu 2.6, looks like we’ll have to disable it entirely until we figure it out.

Other than that, it’s up and running, and I have to say this is one of those plugins that seems more like an application than a simple extension. Alex Rabe (the mastermind behind WordTube) is the developer of this one—and once again he designed a tremendous amount of functionality and usability right into the backend of WP and WPMu—fine, fine work! And while this obviously doesn’t replace the social beauty that is Flickr, it does provide an easy and immediate way to upload, manage, and present photos in some sophisticated ways on UMW Blogs.

Moreover, I particularly like the ability to view your images in PicLens and Cooliris right from the post, click on the PicLens link to see this in action (could make for some pretty impressive presentations right from a WordPress post or page). In fact, seems to me the PicLens slideshow feature works better than the one built into NextGen Gallery, I can’t seem to get the native slideshow to fit my images cleanly into space provided and then scale them up accordingly in fullscreen.

There have been a few people expressing interest in getting together and talking about using WordPress and WPMu for education here in Fredericksburg. And I imagine there might be some others out there, so I’m proposing an informal gathering called WordCampFred that will focus on using WP/WPMu for schools. It will not have any presentations, but simply provide a place to talk about ideas, questions, plugins, approaches, etc. There will be little or no structure, and we will simply dedicate the time to asking specific questions as well as dealing with more conceptual ways to make this application work as an educational publishing platform.

It would have to happen sometime in the next two weeks, so I am proposing either Friday, July 17th or Tuesday, July 20th. These two days may not work for folks, so let me know in the comments what would work. But, in reality, we really can’t do too much accommodating in terms of dates. Way I see it is it provides a free, unorganized opportunity to talk about this stuff—small, intimate, and quick. If you can make it, great, if not, we’ll try something more organized in the near future. I think we can host it at UMW, we have room for about 10-15 people in DTLT, but if it gets bigger than that (which I can’t imagine it will given how quickly it’s approaching) we’ll have to plan accordingly. Leave a comment below if you are interested, and what day you’d prefer and I’ll tally it up and see what day makes most sense.

Boone Gorges developed this pretty slick extension for MediaWiki which makes the loose integration of MediaWiki, WPMu, and BuddyPress that much more useful. You can read his post about the extension here, but short version is that edits made in MediaWiki by anyone within the user community will show up in the BuddyPress activity feed. This is a rather simple bit of information that makes the integration of these tools that much more relevant and powerful. For, in the end, the whole idea of BuddyPress is making what’s happening within a community that much more visible to the members (something extremely difficult with WPMu alone), and the shifting focus from the blog to the individual’s profile page points towards a larger shift in thinking about blogs as aggregation points of all of one’s activity around the web. All I have to say is very, very cool—I will be testing this out shortly.