wordpress issues/questions

Use this space to record issues, problems, etc. that arise as you try to use wordpress multiuser to work out your pilot projects.

10 things you can do with a blog...

Post your thoughts here...

elements of our blog flyer for the May 14 demo

0. 10 things you can do with a blog


1. What is a blog?
2. What are the advantages of a blog?
3. What are my options for blogging software?
4. Who is blogging on campus?
5. What are other examples of how blogs are being used on other campuses?
5. Where can I find out more?

Pilot Projects

Here is a tentative, unconfirmed list of Pilot Projects

1. karen anderson, glsp
2. june 6: peer advising blog for admitted students (david phillips)
3. admissions (pat will contact them --> senior interviewers)
4.Daniel Teraguchi : diversity and academic advancement website
5. Lily Milroy website
6. ATR website
7. new president blog? --> jen will ask justin
8. registrar's blog
9. special collections
10. barbara jan blog
11. class reunion blog
12. library news
13. ravi blog
14. john driscoll blog
15. technology of the month
16. afam dept website
17. acaf on-line
18. some course?

WordPress MultiUser Tentative Choice

We've chosen WordPress MultiUser tentatively as our choice of tools. We're going to start showing it to our various pilot users to see if it will meet the requirements of their particular projects, and then report back on what shortcomings we've discovered during this process.

Here are some initial questions we want to explore further:

1. what is the admin environment?
2. can you refer to groups when setting up access control?
3. are there roles to enable non-admins to design templates?
4. image handling --> is there plugin for optimizing image
5. is 2 mb php filesize limit a problem?
6. will this be a good solution for our podcasting efforts.

http://b2evolution.net/ another possible candidate

the folks at nitle have recommended http://b2evolution.net/ as another tool worthy of a close look.

-- mike

Comments on Web 2.0 Overview Document

I've posted an overview of the Web 2.0 document at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df2dswdk_115c6d7vn which is intended to explain the project to the general Wesleyan community. Please use the space below to record any comments or suggestions you have that will make this a better document.

-- mike

Allegheny's Blogging Help Pages

Allegheny College has done a nice job of creating documentation and a request form for their blogging service. It is at http://help.allegheny.edu/tutorials/mtype/weblog.php . They don't keep a directory of blogs on campus, which I found odd, but whatever.

--mike

Assignments and Agenda for March 21 Meeting

At our last meeting (March 7) we divided into 4 teams of 2 to evaluate the 4 packages.

drupal: Pat and Jen
moveable type: Jane and Adrian
wordpress: Beth and David
journal lx (blackboard): Mike & Mike

I also did a bit of searching around to see if there were other applications that we ought to be looking at but none turned up.

The agenda can be pretty simple:

1. updates and first impressions from each group.
2. reminder to give everyone access to each of the four tools
3. plan for amherst visit to demo drupal
4. plan for formal evaluation/report/demo by ?
5. develop list of pilot projects for summer/fall
6. develop plan for involving more users in testing/evaluation


-- mike

Agenda for March 7, 2007 Meeting

1. Review of overall charge to group (on dokuwiki)
1. Mike will draft a human-readable overview of the various pieces of this project
2. develop use cases and scenarios
3. recruit end users in the evaluation process
4. work with TSS to get test installations of candidate software
5. where appropriate, schedule vendor visits, or visits by/to schools that are using system(s)
6. identify technical lead for the project
7. identify functioal lead for the project
8. develop plans for training trainers
9. develop plans for writing documentation
10. identify pilot projects that will use new applications
11. if needed, develop policy


2. Assemble teams of two for:
a. drupal
b. moveable type
c. wordpress multiuser
d. journal lx (blackboard building block)

Teams should:
1. evaluate according to requirements
2. talk with other schools
3. prepare report to group (to be scheduled in the next month)

3. Sanity check:Other candidates?
what other tools are we ignoring? should we do survey to make sure we aren't forgetting something important?

Internal Blogs

Below are several examples of blogs that exist for internal university communities. They range from overviews of news and events, in general, on campus to those targeted for audiences interested in specific administrative issues (registrarial and deans, for example).

http://eaglewire.blogspot.com/
A daily round-up of Eastern Washington University's newsworthy events and happenings

http://ksulib.typepad.com/news/
Kansas State University Libraries, News and Events

http://deanstudents.blogsome.com/
The Daily Plan-it, Dean of Students Blog, Columbia Journalism School

http://lawregistrar.blogspot.com/index.html
The Moritz Law Registrar Blog, News for students at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University

http://kb.seattleu.edu/registrar/
Office of the Registrar Knowledge Base, Seattle University

In addition, here’s a great example of how an internal university blog can aid in disaster recovery/networking:

http://diasporaverde.blogspot.com/
Diáspora Verde, an on-line forum for students and faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Tulane University who were forced to evacuate the city of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath.

During my web travels I also came across the following link. Many of the guidelines for blog services that we discussed in our group meeting are similar to those outlined here. Check it out when you have a chance! Be sure to click on “Continue reading “How do I get a blog?” to see what they recommend for their personal users:

http://blogs.princeton.edu/main/faqs/
Princeton’s guidelines for university-hosted blog services

Blogging Tools

In order to coordinate our efforts, we're keeping a running list of all the various tools that we might consider evaluating for all of our sub-projects (blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, web office, web editor, rss) in a single spreadsheet, which can be found at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pR2uGe5IXkD6nA-fsShY9NQ .

We can keep our unofficial list here, and then move viable candidates to the official list once we feel they are viable candidates.

My off-the-cuff list of tools we should evaluate include:

Drupal http://www.drupal.org

Wordpress http://www.wordpress.org and (multi-user) http://mu.wordpress.org/

Moveable Type http://www.moveabletype.org

Academic Examples

We've set up a tag for use within del.ico.us that allows us to collectively aggregate examples of how higher ed institutions are using blogs within and between their institutions.

The tag is BloggingAcademicExamples . The list can be found at:

http://del.icio.us/tag/BloggingAcademicExamples

From this soup of examples, we'll want to organize the best examples into some sort of page that will also be useful to us as we reach out to various constituents and explain to them how blogs might help them solve their problems and/or reach their objectives.

Requirements

The general requirements for ALL of the web 2.0 applications we are evaluating can be found at https://dokuwiki.wesleyan.edu/doku.php?id=its:web_2.0#requirements . Do we have any questions about these?

Are there additional requirments around blogging software that we want to add?

This is an important list, as it will drive our evaluation process, so we want to make sure we get it right.

Introductions

Since we'll be evaulating blogging software, it makes sense to USE blogging software to organize the work. Our objectives are as follows:

1. Familiarize ourselves with the general requirments that the Wesleyan Web 2.0 project has developed.

2. Add any additional requirements that are Blogging specific.

3. Identify uses cases and examples of how blogging is used in higher ed to help us think about how blogging might fit into the overall technology mix on campus.

4. Identify a short-list of applicatios that we will first present to the larger group, and then evaluate.

5. Pick a university-wide blogging tool for implementation in time for Fall 2007 use.