So, it’s been over a year since UMW has had it’s main .edu website running on WordPress. DTLT has been experimenting with the possibilities of aggregating posts from UMW Blogs into umw.edu (in fact, this post will aggregate into DTLT’s site on umw.edu). But the cooler part is to start experimenting with bringing the work students and faculty are doing in the classroom to the university’s website, and to that end Jess Rigelhaupt’s Oral History class last semester has done some really cool things. Every semester I come and talk to this particular class about the possibilities for creating an open, online space to share the documentary histories they create over the course of the semester. We look at a ton of sites, and imagine what’s possible for them. The final project/product for the entire class is to build a site and populate it with all the documentary media on the assigned topic they create, collect, and curate for the world to … [Read more...]
Longwood Blogs Moves Out!
Almost four years ago I experimented with what up and until then was pretty much the coolest thing I had done in edtech (pre-ds106, mind you )—though no one else really noticed save the great Brian Lamb. In less than an hour I had cloned and made available the entire UMW Blogs WordPress framwork (including hosting, plugins, themes, and support material) for Longwood University—a fellow Virginia state university—for the low, low cost of a domain. So, in other words, two years of experimentation and iteration packaged up and mapped to greenwoodlibrary.org at the low, low cost of $8.95 for a namepsace. The trick was mapping a network onto UMW Blogs and using the same core files, themes, and plugins as UMW Blogs (I used a much earlier version of David Dean’s Networks for WordPress plugin). These days the process is pretty common, we’re doing it pretty impressively on umw.edu—but in 2008 it was a bit of radical idea. In fact, I had big dreams for it, this is from my post on the experiment … [Read more...]