jimgroom

This site is now housed on UMW Blogs. Go here to see it in action.

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“And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead.”
Captain Kurtz in Apocalypse Now

I saw Will Richardson’s post that Budd the Teacher had set up a working version of the Commentpress theme. I commented there a bit and generally played around, I had already set up a document themed version of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (read more here), but while posting a comment on Bud’s installation of the theme an idea hit (possibly unoriginal, but what isn’t!): “Why don’t we locate a number of public domain books that folks are reading in their classes and publish them through a blog on our WordPress Multi-User installation as an extension of the library.” These books may be linked with a class, but the library “publishes them,” so to speak, and offers additional resources on the works which in turn might foster an active community of collaboratively reading, commenting, and discussing a number of books in a distributed fashion.

This is part of a more general move we have been making to work more directly with the library folks here at UMW (which makes perfect sense) and the more I think about it the more this seems like an unparalleled opportunity to forge an even deeper relationship between the library, teaching, learning, and technology. And I can’t help but think that this theme was made for the 21st century library, allowing for a unique experience that a library is best equipped to richly frame. Why not publish novels, poems, manuscripts, historical documents, etc. and invite classes, researches, the community as a whole to engage them online. Just think about it, working collaboratively with teachers and professors, the library can help lead students to more detailed resources, databases, articles, etc. about a particular text or topic. making the relationship between reading, discussion, writing and research that much more seamless.

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“Without order nothing can exist - without chaos nothing can evolve.” - Unknown
Picture used courtesy of Ivanomak

I spent most of the last two days (and all of today well into this evening -meaning now) finishing up a transfer of almost 80 blogs from one domain running WordPress Multi-user using subdirectories to a new domain using dynamic subdomains. The details are many and varied, and I would be more than happy to discuss them with anyone who is going through this process (but I don’t have the stamina to document them all here -sorry). In fact, this post isn’t necessarily about the technical details, its more about some preconceptions and my recent push towards centralizing things in my head. Ever since I have been waxing vulgar about using WPMu as a university-wide authoring platform for students, professors, courses, etc. (it’s been going on almost a year now) I am just awaking a bit from my monomaniacal trance. Now don’t get me wrong, I do indeed think WPMu is the cat’s meow when it comes to a distributed space for authoring, feeding, and sharing work, as well as allowing students to take it with them when they go. Fanboy ’til the end!

But I have been stressing for the last week or so, and as a result refusing to do anything else until summer session ended and all the “old blogs” on the ELS Blogs multi-user site are ported over to the new UMW Blogs site. Why? Jerry and Martha astutely asked me this at Wednesday business meeting and I came up with some half-assed answer about needing everything in one place, directory structures (when I start talking tech it is a sure fire sign somethings amiss), and management concerns. What? Management concerns?! “Come on, Jim -get over yourself.” I couldn’t manage my way out of a wet paper bag. So, why the need to port these blogs, spend almost six hours re-configuring sql queries and re-encoding text (things i am terrible at) when so much of what made the ELS Blogs an important and forwarding-looking space was the conversations, pings, and trackbacks so many students shared there. in fact, when I did a full port (I left the original ELS Blog site untouched and it remains up and running) I realized just how many of those connections might be severed by my push for order and everything that is holy. So, in the end, I think Jerry and Martha’s question about why I’m doing this was good one, and I still don’t have a good answer. So, rather than playing WPMu admin god boy -I’m gonna send out a nice little e-mail to everyone with a ELS Blog and say the following:

After struggling with my own sense of ownership, power, and technical Napolean complex. I decided that I am gonna shut down ELS Blogs and kick all you freeloading squatters out because you’re lazy, dirty and you have no proper place in my domain.

Actually, no, I’m not gonna write that, I’m gonna write something more like this:

Hey guys and gals, we have a new Multi-User space for blogs, classes, and independent studies and such. If you want to bring your blog over (for most of the work we do with WordPress will be taking place in the new space from here on out) here’s how. If not, that’s fine, I still love you and ELS Blogs will be trucking along for as long as you need it. Enjoy.

I really don’t want my zeal for all things WordPress to get in the way for what’s best for a virtual learning environement. ELS Blogs is an amazing intellectual ecosystem, why do I have to “develop” it into something it’s not for my own sense of challenge, order, and pseudo-mastery? I don’t know, but all I can say is that the funk is officially gone and the port has been abandoned for the time being because I don’t want to destroy the trackbacked connections that so many students and professors have spent countless hours of building, fostering, and cultivating. OK, this all stands until I get the directive to do otherwise, or I have yet another idea for delaying the inevitable fact the WPMu is a few steps closer to being institutionalized at UMW -why does that scare me so. I think Jerry understands…

Finally, the hubris on my part -did I even ask Gardner, his students, my own, Terry’s, or anyone else about this transition and what it might mean to them? Although, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I did get it to work for what it’s worth, and I even discovered a way via the forums to have a single wpmu account spread across several different domains -next project?!

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Original post by jimgroom

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We have been experimenting at some length with WordPress Multi-User at UMW as of late. Now I have focused almost exclusively on creating course spaces using a series of distributed feeds. In short, students feed out their posts by particular categories (or an entire blog they create specifically for that class) to a designated space that aggregates all their work. Their posts can be aggregated in a distinct blog, or even using a page within a blog with a host of different aggregators -I have talked about at some length here. (A problem with the Autoblog is the constant trackbacks -thanks Shannon-I’m working on fixing that.)

Now, let’s take a look at another possibility for framing a class using WPMu. Say a professor creates a blog for a class on UMW Blogs and want to have this as the primary space for students to post. You can approach this from a few angles, if the student doesn’t have a blog and doesn’t want one -he or she can create just a username and be easily associated with a class by adding the user’s email to a particular blog using the “User” tab in the backend.

As you can see above, you can also set the permissions. Relatively straightforward process to include any student who already has signed up on the WPMu install for a blog or just a username. Now if the student already ahs a blog and wants their posts on this particular class site to be reflected in their own blog space, they can do one of two things.

1. Post on the class site and be sure to associate all their posts with a unique category (say their name or some other tag). Then simply grab this category feed from the class blog and feed back into their own blog using an aggregator solution like BDP RSS, WP Autoblog, or WP-o-Matic.
2. They can also also activate one of these aggregator plugins on the class blog, if they have sufficient permissions, and include a category feed they designate for this class on their own blog and do all their posting for the class from the comfort of their own blog

Why spend the time re-framing what might seem obvious to some here. Well, quite frankly, because not everyone is going to have or even want a blog, but they still should be able to participate in the class with little or no hassle. More than that, some folks may already have their own blog with services like Blogger, WordPress.com, etc. A class blog like the one I am outlining here allows for both of these possibilities and still makes it relatively easy for students who do not have a blog on a Multi-User space hosted by the university to participate with the class seamlessly.

An excellent example of such a setup on ELS Blogs is Professor Terry Kennedy’s Islam & Medieval Western Literature class site/blog. There were a couple of reasons to do a centralized space for this class. Terry is experimenting with course tags, and a centralized course blog is still (for the moment) the easiest way to handle this through categories tags.

Moreover, the space acts as much as a hub for course documents, readings, announcements, commentary, etc. -keeping the integrity of a more stable and unified course site in tact. One of the plugins for this course blog/site I installed recently and I think goes a long way towards further making such a space work as simultaneously a communal and individualized space is the Posts by Author plugin which appends links to other recent posts by a particular student on this blog. Giving readers an alternative means to access the various work a student has produced on a blog over time.

So, in short, Terry Kennedy’s experiment with her Islam & Medieval Literature course on the ELS Blogs site suggests that there is definitely more than one way to skin a course, and her class has done a bang up job on this one. This certainly speaks to the amazing versatility a web authoring platform like WPMu offers a university. What’s more, however, is that it speaks volumes about the unbelievable willingness of UMW’s finest faculty to experiment with new and unique possibilities for capturing and presenting the ideas, discussions , and resources that any class affords a larger community of learners. Bravo!

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Even if I must say so myself. Ok, so Gardner Campbell is at it again with ELS Blogs and the results are nothing short of amazing -did you expect any less from him? I try and keep up with the the student blogs as much as possible, but such a task is not always easy because there is always so much action coming down the pipes. Let me highlight a few gems I have come across, while acknowledging that these are a small cross section of a much richer series of conversations:

“How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog”:

• A recent post on this blog had the video clip of Werner Herzog publicly eating his shoe to fulfill a bet he made with Errol Morris. Namely, if Morris would finish his brilliant first feature Gates of Heaven, Herzog said he would eat his shoe. And so he does, but in fact he uses this occasion to go on a tirade about the state of contemporary culture in 1980. This was a particularly special find for me, because I have quoted this story to others on a number of occasions, but never thought about actually trying to find footage that documented the event. I had no idea it was even filmed. Many eyes… (Link).
• For an added bonus, check out another post on this blog that discusses how the book Little Women was re-imagined as a pulp fiction novel. The image of the cover is well worth the price of admission.

¿Qué Onda?:

• A post on this blog offered up a preliminary cross-cultural examination of the hard-boiled novel. Linking Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key with an Argentinian novelist, José Donoso´s El Lugar Sin Límites (The Place without Limits). A link to a novel I am now quite interested in reading, how would an Argentine writer invoke the Noir to talk about their culture? I wouldn’t be surprised to imagine a framing of the Pinochet nightmare or the disappeared. But I can only imagine, but I didn’t even think to do that before reading this post. (Link.)

And why not? it worked in Blazing Saddles:

• This example illustrates just how willing students are not only to do extra work, but to blog about them in order to make connections.
  

  This post is a bit random, but after watching Miller’s Crossing I decided to rent another Coen brothers film. I chose Barton Fink—and wow. What a film.I wanted to talk about it for a bit, even though it’s not technically part of our class material.

  Moreover, the analysis of the hotel in Barton Fink as representative of the Dantean spirals of Hell is very engaging to boot. (Link.)

Ellie’s FTC Blog:

• These two posts about hairstyles are really a fascinating way to imagine film. These post deal with the impact of fashion and style in film upon the culture at large. This blog traces hair styles throughout the decades in order to suggest the role film plays in defining a more pervasive cultural identity. See “The Veronica” and Hairstyles Cont..

Kathleen’s Blog:

• A post on Kathleen’s Blog discusses the implications of The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris. She offers a nice overview of her impressions of Morris’s film-making acumen, and then includes a clip from the film that profiles David Harris which is a perfect example of the unbelievable moral imperative driving this film. It is really exciting to see that students have the ability to meaningfully quote films like this within their reflections. Moreover, the shots of the cassette tape towards the end of the highlight Morris’s unbelievable ability to inform his documentaries as much through the aesthetic of the shot as the compelling stories he so tightly weaves together. Brava!

I’m continually blown away by all the great stuff coming out of these blogs, and I have only focused on one of Gardner’s two classes. How does he do it? And if that wasn’t enough, UMW is currently preparing the next iteration of WPMu that will be a much broader, campus-wide multi-user blog initiative that even has working dynamic sub-domains -boooyah! You can get a sneak preview here, though keep in mind that this space is still very much in its infancy as of now.

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Once again, Mario A. Núñez Molina is fueling this blog and I can’t thank him enough. He recently turned me on to the Semiologic theme for WordPress -designed by Denis de Bernardy- which really pushes the possibilities for thinking about a blogging platform beyond the often conceptually limiting logic of the blog. If you take Denis’s excellent theme, customize a skin (see more on this at the Semiologic site here) and integrate it with the divShare uploader -the implications are kinda radical!

Why? Well, because between these two plugins you begin to get closer and closer to a distributed and flexible CMS that can scale to an enterprise-level using an application like WordPress Multi-User. How so? Well, divShare offers you a free and simple file management system that integrates seamlessly with WordPress, and the Semiologic theme (like the K2 theme) offers you a presentation package that builds in the possibility for a whole host of simple customizations for the look and feel of your site. Unlike K2, however, the Semiologic theme has built in a series of skins that sit on top of it allowing you to choose from one of several or create your own customized skin by building on the CSS of a blank skin provided. So, in other words, you can re-skin your theme, making the theme not so much about the design or aesthetics (as most themes are) as it is focused on affording the ability to do more with the presentation elements of the site -such as side bars, font style, font size, fixed or flexible width, customized captions search engine optimization, customized header, customized page navigation , customized page elements, various page templates for different content, etc. (you can read about all of these goodies and more here).

What impresses me most about this whole thing is that as we push further with WPMU as a blogging platform at the University of Mary Washington -it is quickly becoming apparent that we could just as well be thinking about this tool as a distributed Content Management System for the University more generally. With an simple, customizable, and highly functional theme like Semiologic along with a file management solution like that offered by divShare -two of the most important elements of content management are taken care of. All we need to do at UMW is customize a skin for this theme and give it a whirl. I plan on playing with this at length shortly. If you are interested in seeing a Semiologic theme in action, I have set one up here, and you can login using the following name and password to play around with the presentation options:

login: testuser
pw: semiologic

Have fun!

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Recently I have been corresponding with Mario A. Núñez Molina, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, who has been also working on integrating a WPMu blogging solution (RUM Edublogs) for the College of Arts and Sciences. He is also blogging the process, so it looks like I have yet another person to share with and learn from. He is trying to get BDP RSS to play nice with his WPMu install (which is the same version as the ELS Blogs and was the spark that initiated our relationship), and as usual I have offered him little in the way of technical support - lo siento, Mario. I am much better at moral support, but I will continue to search for some answers as to why the plugin is borking for that install while working fine for ours -very strange. In the mean time, as is often the case these days, he has turned me on to a really interesting plugin call divShare uploader that may very well change the game for uploading and managing uploaded files for WPMu, or any WordPress installation for that matter. many thanks to Mario for giving far more than he has received!

So what is divShare? Well, it’s not really a plugin per se, rather a free online file uploading and storage service that integrates directly into the upload field of a Wordpress blog’s backend (see figure 1 below). It works seamlessly with WPMu as well, and the way to integrate it is relatively simple. Sign up for a free account at divShare ; download the WP plugin and install & activate it; finally, get your divShare Uploader Key from your divShare account settings and enter it where appropriate -you’re then ready to roll.

Figure 1: divShare upload field embedded within a WP blog

According to their site you can upload up to 200 MB of files at any given time, and I have seen no discussion of limits for how much space you can use up. It appears that divShare is offering unlimited storage and access to the files you upload to their service, but I am not 100% certain on this point. Here is their website copy:

DivShare is a new type of web host. We’re all about freedom and simplicity. Upload your videos, photos and other files, and we’ll host them forever, for free. You can embed your files anywhere, and co-brand your download pages. How? We’re ad-supported, but fear not, we’ll never invade you with obnoxious or offensive ads. Signing up takes about 15 seconds.

So while the verdict is still out whether or not they can host everything you upload for ever (how can anyone ever prove this true or not?), the interface and integration with Wordpress is extremely impressive and has me quite excited for using such a program to enable students and professors alike to manage their web-based materials online in an simple, organized, and distributed manner. I particularly like that divShare offers an alternative to the WP uploading system, for while a fanboy, we were just discussing at DTLT last week with Steve Greenlaw just how
unintuitive and poorly configured the WP uploading logic can be for someone who is not intimately familiar with the backend. For example, why can’t users upload files using the “Uploads” tab in the manage section of the backend? Seems logical, right? Certainly a space for potential confusion.

Figure 2: divShare Upload complete message

Figure 3: divShare “My Files” Tab

But I digress. What I like most about divShare is that it is simple, allows users to organize their uploads with the option for password protected folders, while also allowing for easy insertion of text files, images (creating multiple sizes for easy insertion into blog posts), and video (providing conversion to FLV on upload, a built in player, as well as a static URL and embed code much like YouTube -wow- how ’bout them apples Andy?). It is a dead simple interface that delivers everything the open source Coppermine media gallery promised last year when we were experimenting with that app. The only difference is we don’t have to host it, it is free as in beer, and a million times easier to work with!

Figure 4: divShare site interface

Figure 5:

Figure 6: Drag and Drop uploading interface:

In short ;), here is an excellent solution for a university hosted WPMu installation that gives the faculty and students the power to control and integrate their own text files, multimedia, images, etc. that we don’t have to worry about managing, i.e. losing, their files nor be over concerned with file size and storage space. This service offers much the same in the way of hosting videos on YouTube or images on Flickr, though I don’t dare to pretend it replaces the power of either of these sites by a long shot. What it does provide, however, is a centralized services for uploading and inserting videos, images, and miscellaneous files into a WordPress blog, while at the same time offering more sophisticated file management. I certainly wouldn’t want all the videos and images I have on this blog to be a part of my Flickr or YouTube accounts -for these space are increasingly becoming an extended part of my approach to presenting my work online. The images in this post, for example, would simply clutter my flickr account which I am imagining as a space for sharing learning resources not collecting random, decontextualized screen shots.

Looks like the Content Management features of Wordpress are strongly rooted in the small pieces loosely joined philosophy of the plugins community -this feature is not part of the WP system, but integrated cleanly enough so that you don’t notice the difference. What’s more you can use this service across several WP installations, and you can really liberate yourself from the idea of getting information out of WPMu, it is never uploaded directly to WPMu so we don’t ever have to concern ourselves with transferring their data from one blog to another -it is always already in their possession and under their management.

An quick example of a video embed from divShare is below, you can see examples of the images above -just click on one for a bigger image and a little google ads action:

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So, it’s just about time to ckeck-in on the work that has been happening on the WordPress Multi-User front. First and foremost, Gardner Campbell is my Godhead. He is teaching two classes this Summer session and they are already abuzz with all sorts of amazing blog action. You can see his New Media Studies “blog portal” here and his Film Text and Culture “blog portal” here. I can’t begin to tell you how amazing Gardner’s vision for this space is, and I think a quick perusal of his student’s work will attest to this almost immediately. More than that, he is willingly doing this in the face of some technical hiccups -taking some lumps this Summer so that many folks can enjoy the same benefits for their classes. So, in short, thank you Gardner for all the amazing work you are doing.

Ok, here’s the tale of the tape thus far:

ELS Autoblogs: The first thing worth mentioning are the experiments with WP-Autoblog for WPMu (I talked about it briefly here). This plugin has really afforded some very interesting versatility for class blogs, in my opinion. WP-Autoblog is basically an aggregator plugin that pulls feeds from ATOM, RSS, & RSS2 into a blog post (which is very similar to WP-o-Matic -which does not work just yet with WPMu). What I like about this plugin is that anyone with a blog on ELS Blogs can enable and add feeds to it. It’s a cinch.

Now let’s think through the implications of this, a professor creates a class blog, enables WP-Autoblog, and then adds the students as administrators to this, and only this, blog. The students are then asked to login in and add their feed to the Wp_Autoblog aggregator (which you can see below) and there it is. An aggregated class blog that constantly provides a trackback to the original posts. So you can republish the student’s work in this class blog, making sure that they know that they should create a separate category for this class so only the relevant posts will feed out, and wham -you have a quick and easy class blog that does not disrupt the flow of the student’s blog nor overburden a professor with a whole lot of hacking and devising to make these resources show up in one, centralized space for the duration of the class.

OK, now what about the student? Well, why couldn’t they use these “autoblogs” to feed out their own work to separate blog spaces that they control to highlight their best work or particular subjects, etc. -what we have here is an infinitely malleable eportfolio? Can you dig it? I knew that ya could.

So Wp-Autoblogs is a huge, simple, out-of-the-wpmu-box solution to aggregation, I really like this. Not to mention it gives a central feed for all the relevant posts for a single class. We have three autoblogs running currently
on ELS Blogs: Film Text and Culture autoblog, New Media Studies autoblog, and All Els Blogs autoblog. Check them out.

BDP RSS 0.6.2: I have talked at length about this slick aggregator plugin for WordPress here. And I recently checked back at the OzPolitics blog to find out that Bryan has updated this brilliant WP plugin. And the upgrades are pretty major, namely he has updated his aggregator so that it is widget ready! How, pray tell? It took me a little bit to figure it out, but you can actually load feeds into the aggregator and configure it accordingly (the ability to configure BDP RSS is unparalleled as far as I can tell) to create a single feed for any combination of blogs you choose. For example, I installed the latest version of BDP RSS on this blog, and I am currently aggregating a unique combination of ELS Blogs and comments into the sidebar. This is now something that students and faculty have the ability to do with the activation of the plugin, and while it is not as dead simple as WP-Autoblog, it makes up for it with customizing option which would be welcome for more experienced users. The BDP RSS upgrade offers an impressive addition for allowing users to work through their own unique aggregation possibilities. I’m still a huge fan of this plugin. We are using BDP RSS to aggregate the all blog posts and comments into the Sitewide Content page here.

King RSS WordPress Widget: Now it gets interesting, the King RSS plugin (powered by SimplePie) allows you to get really specific with where and how you want to place your feeds. And once you get the collated feeds from BDP RSS, you can plug that feed url into King RSS and decide where you want particular aggregated elements to show up on your blog. That’s right, customize where the aggregation shows up in the sidebar from page to page -sick, right! This plugin will take a little bit of getting used to, for it is not totally user-friendly just yet, despite its being a widget.

These three plugins for WPMu in combination, or individually, begin to suggest some interesting ways to feed, aggregate, and re-combine posts to create a rich, connected, and constantly evolving connections with one simple WPMu install.

Upgrading to WPMu 1.2.3: The bestest thing about this whole post is that Gardner and I upgraded WPMu from version 1 to version 1.2.3 to see if it might fix some database bugs (the verdict is still out on that, fingers crossed), and it went as smooth as upgrading a single WP installation. Can you believe that? Almost 100 blogs, and not a hiccup with the upgrade, I know 100 blogs is nothing by WPMu standards, but try upgrading a 100 single installs manually -even if via Fantastico.

Ok, this post is almost over, and if you made it this far I commend you. Andy Rush had mentioned to me today that the ELS Blogs site seemed a bit cluttered (oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a colleague’s ingratitude!). Which in turn made me think about whether this site would prove completely undecipherable to the unacquainted user? Well, do me a favor and go to ELS blogs and take a look and let me know what you think. More than that, give me any recommendations you may have to make it more user-friendly.

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Well, if you don’t know the quote from O Brother, Where art thou? it is worth a listen for it speaks to what exactly we’re doing over at ELS Blogs -this project ain’t no one off -this is the whole kit and kaboodle in one simply complex install!

We are getting ready to build a more extensive WPMu installation for UMW that touches many departments throughout the campus that will be starting with many of the Freshman Seminars for the Fall and Spring semesters -but by no means limited to these seminars. That being said, I have been using the last couple of weeks to experiment more extensively with WordPress Multi-User, something I enjoy tremendously. It was nice to discover that there are a lot of cool new options, plugins and theme packs (see this post for more on themes) that I will be blogging about in the near future. But right now I want to focus in particular on the aggregating possibilities that are beginning to emerge in WPMu.

WP-Autoblog has been around for single-installations of WordPress for a while now which does a nice job of aggregating content into blog posts from various feeds around the web -much like WP-o-Matic discussed here. I like WP-o-Matic a lot because it uses SimplePie parsing that does an excellent job with images and other objects, while being relatively feed agnostic. Unfortunately, WP-o-Matic is not compatible with WPMu just yet. WP-Autoblog, on the other hand, has been made to play nice with WPMu (get the WPMu version of this plugin here) and it is a really dead simple interface that allows for an easy cut and paste approach to including feeds. So, I got to thinking a couple of things:

• What about taking all the feeds from ELS Blogs and putting them into a WP-Autoblog blog -you can see an example of this up and running here. What WP-Autoblog provides is a site wide aggregator in the guise of a K2-themed blog (although you have 66 other themes to choose from on ELS Blogs) that is capturing all the content from around the environment. Simple enough to do and yet another way to capture and re-present all the rich content that is coming in over the wires, or is it tubes?
• OK, so now we have this plugin that pretty much anyone with a blog on ELS Blogs can use to create an aggregator of feeds within a blog (with these feeds themed to their preference). Hmmm, so does this mean that professors and their ilk can create their own aggregator blog by asking students to record their blog’s RSS feeds in something like wiki, google docs, spreadsheet, or what have you? It is a quick and easy way to locate content in one specific blog that may give folks who come across a blog like this an interesting and different visualization of a group of posts in relationship to one another within the context of a “class blog,” which is quite distinct from the logic that will emerge on an individual student blog. We have experimented with aggregation like this already here, but it wasn’t something anyone in the environment could do by simply activating a plug-in and copying and pasting feeds. And while I like this aggregation space referenced (find out how the two plugins BDP RSS and Optimal were used to create this space here) it requires a small php hack which is impossible for general users on WPMu. So rather than hacking around these limitations, the idea here is to make it simple in order to multiply the ways people can access content and map relationships within various contexts.
• Last, and by no means least, the best way at cross-pollinating student content within a specific class as well as throughout the entire ELS Blogs environment might be to create these little blog aggregators (and remember that anyone on the system has access to this plugin -a splog nightmare if you aren’t careful) in order to syndicate sites they are reading and highlight content that they are interested in. The genius here is that content becomes re-purposed and propagated throughout an environment (sometimes redundantly) with the idea that you create myriad possibilities for serendipity by republishing content in various spaces throughout this distributed collection of blogs.

I’m pretty excited about this because I think it offers a quick, easy and informal way for users, profs and students alike, to create spontaneous collections of feed-driven content that will in turn populate blogs throughout the community, potentially giving rise to a certain amount of content chaos that may ultimately result in a new way of avoiding the “one-at-a-timin’ [Aggregator and single WordPress installs in relative isolation] so that we can work towards mass communicatin’ [throughout campus]” the web for one another on a more regular basis within a specific environment.

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Mike Caulfield’s post “Enterprise Learning Systems Considered Harmful to Learning” reminds me of some important questions that still remain unsettled with me. Why am I such a big advocate for a WordPress Mulit-User installation at UMW? I do believe that blogs can be an out-of-the-box e-portfolio solution. I also believe that WPMU builds in some interesting possibilities for aggregation, tagging, and cross-pollinating ideas for a particular community. Yet, despite these advantages, potential disadvantages such as becoming application specific and making a personal learning environment that is fostered by and hosted through the university are important for us to hear right now because we are currently working on taking WPMU to the next level (one step closer to enterprise) for our university.

The question Mike is posing here (and which Jerry and Martha ask often) of whether or not we should host enterprise solutions (blogging or otherwise) still needles me on occasion when I read a post like this. Almost as if I am convinced that everyone will, and should feel the same way about Wordpress as I do. When I notice someone using a Moveable Type or blogger blog I find myself scoffing at them, and do far worse for anyone who has chosen the bloated blog system of Drupal to publish their thoughts. In general I pity their lack of vision. This might all be part of the psychology of fanboys, but regardless it is getting pretty bad -I barely recognize myself anymore.

So here is an important, if rare, interlude for reflection. Do we need to create this space for students? Do we need to provide their “spiral notebooks” for them? Why not simply let them sign-up for their own blog at WordPress.com, blogger, or some other service, and concentrate our efforts on hacking the space for aggregating these variegated resources and devising ways to use these tools in courses more effectively?

Well, in short, here’s your answer: I secretly want a community in training of homogeneous WordPressers who will go on after their four year indoctrination to use this tool to take over the world! (I bet you all thought I was ready to capitulate -NEVER!)

But in all seriousness, can you think of some major disadvantages to providing a Mutli-User blogging service through the auspices of a University -even if it is hosted for 6.95 a month?

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Original post by jimgroom

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