WPCampus | Chris Aldrich

Watched Anatomy of a Great Faculty Website by

Steve Ryan from WPCampus 2020 Online - July 29-30 - Where WordPress meets Higher Education

Within higher education, requests to build websites for individual faculty members sit at the absolute bottom of the work queue for most marketing/communications teams. If this type of product is offered at all, it typically uses a self-service model; the institution will provide the platform while the faculty member will provide the content. And while this is the most sustainable model for most small and mid-sized web teams, it tends to produce multiple websites that are ineffective at communicating even simple messages. Worse, they have a high tendency to become the poorest reflections of the institution with a high rate of abandonment or misuse.

Let's fix that tendency together. With a careful examination of what really matters to faculty members who are looking to create and maintain their own websites, we can begin to build better sites. With better sites (and a little luck), you can start to derive value from the project at the bottom of your work pile.

Together we'll talk about:

A simple analysis of the types of content that you'll typically find within a faculty website.

A "wish list" for the types of content that you (as a marketer) would really like to see from these types of sites.

A working example of a theme that delivers on these key concepts and adds some "quick wins" which makes for a better experience.

How to leverage the capabilities of WordPress multisite to produce more value from collections of these type of sites.

This is an awesome little session at WPCampus 2020 Online. (Video for it available shortly.) It reminds me a lot of the Drupal project Open Scholar that does something similar. I can see it being useful for folks in the Domain of One’s Own space.

I totally want to start using something like this myself to not only test it out, but to build in the proper microformats v2 mark up so that it’s IndieWeb friendly. Perhaps a project at the planned IWC Pop-up Theme raising session?

Project description and examples: https://asuengineering.github.io/asu-labs-theme/
GitHub repo: https://github.com/asuengineering/asu-labs-theme

WPCampus 2019 Draft Proposal: Dramatically extending a Domain of One’s Own with IndieWeb technology

Below is a draft proposal which I’m submitting for a possible upcoming talk at WPCampus from July 25-27, 2019 in Portland, OR. If you don’t have the patience and can’t wait for the details, feel free to reach out and touch base. I’m happy to walk people through it all before then. If you’re looking for other upcoming events or need help, check out any of the upcoming Homebrew Website Clubs, IndieWebCamps, the IndieWeb Summit 2019, or even Domains2019.

Session Title

Dramatically extending a Domain of One’s Own with IndieWeb technology: How to improve your online research notebooks, commonplace books, and digital pedagogy

Session description

(This description will be edited and used on the website. Please include 1-2 paragraphs and a list of key takeaways for the audience.)

Having a Domain of One’s Own and using it as a “thought space” to own your online identity and work is just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine how useful it would be if you could use your Twitter account to reply to someone on Facebook (without needing a Facebook account) or vice versa? Open web technology from the IndieWeb movement that utilizes simple plugins, modules, or even built-in functionality now exists so that people can now use WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav and many other content management systems on any domain name to have rich site-to-site communications in a simple and intuitive way. Third party (and often unethical) corporate platforms are no longer needed to have rich interactions between scholars on the web.

It is now easily possible to have a teacher write a post on their own website and their students to easily reply/react to that post on their own websites (along with a useful reply context) and send that reply to the teacher’s website for possible display. Each participant can now own a copy of both sides of the conversation.

Teachers and students will learn how to (individually or together) collect, analyze, write, collaborate, and interact easily online while doing so in a space they own and control without giving away their data to third party platforms.
Researchers can now easily bookmark, highlight, or annotate portions of the web and keep this data (public/private) on their own website (aka digital commonplace book or notebook) for future reference or use.
We’ll show how courseware can be decentralized so that the instructor and the students each own their own pieces of the learning processes and can keep them for as long as they wish.
We will demonstrate how one can use their WordPress-based website with a few simple plugins to own all of the traditional social media types (bookmarks, items read, highlights, annotations, comments/replies, photos, status updates, audio, checkins, etc.) on their own site while still allowing interacting (if desired) with other websites as well as in social spaces like Twitter, Instagram, Swarm, etc.
We will demonstrate a new generation of free feed readers that allow composing in-line responses and reactions that post them directly to one’s own website as well as send notification to the site being read and interacted with.

You can now have the joy of a Domain of Your Own and still easily interact just as if your site were a (better-than) first class social media platform.

More Information About Your Session

(Please describe your session in greater detail for the organizers. You may be more casual in this description as it will not be posted on the website.)

In some sense, this session will be a crash course on using IndieWeb technologies and building-blocks with WordPress in the Education space. I’ll aim to remove a lot of technical jargon and keep coding examples to a bare minimum (if using any at all) so that those with the technical ceiling of downloading and installing a plugin can immediately benefit from the talk. I will also provide enough pointers and describe the broad outlines that developers will have a broad overview of the IndieWeb space to find and extend these plugins and functionality if they wish.

I’ll be covering the basics of new W3C recommendations like Webmention, Micropub, and WebSub along with forthcoming specs like Microsub in combination with IndieAuth (a version of OAuth2 for login). I’ll show how they can be applied to personal websites in research, teaching, collaboration, and other educational domains like creating Open Educational Resources. Many of these can be easily implemented in WordPress with just a handful of simple plugins that allow the web to become the social media platform we all wish it would be.

I’ll use examples from my own personal website and several others (which use Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, etc.) to show how these plugins can be used in educational settings and will walk through a case study of a course built using DoOO and IndieWeb philosophies and technologies (EDU 522: Digital Teaching and Learning at Southern Connecticut State University) on which I collaborated with Dr. Gregory McVerry.

👓 Call for Speakers – July 25-27, 2019 – Portland, Oregon | WPCampus 2019 Conference: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education

Read Call for speakers - WPCampus 2019 Conference: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education - July 25-27, 2019 - Portland, Oregon (WPCampus )

WPCampus is looking for stories, how-tos, hypotheticals, demos, case studies and more for our fourth annual in-person conference focused on WordPress in higher education.

🔖 Where WordPress Meets Higher Education | WPCampus

Bookmarked WPCampus 2019 Call for Proposals: Save the Date! (WPCampus: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education)

Hello WPCampus friends! We’re excited to announce that our Call for Proposals for this year’s conference will be opening soon! We’re looking forward to another year of wonderful ideas, demonstrations, brainstorming, and benchmarking. Session Topics As in past years, we’re looking for a variety of topics on anything that might bring value to our community. …

🔖 WPCampus 2018 Call for Speakers

Bookmarked Call for Speakers (WPCampus 2018 Conference: Where WordPress Meets Higher Education)

WPCampus is looking for stories, how-tos, hypotheticals, demos, case studies and more for our third annual in-person conference focused on WordPress in higher education. This year’s event will take place July 12-14, 2018, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The call for speakers will close at midnight PDT on April 7, 2018.
The planning committee will begin their selection process and be in touch shortly thereafter.

h/t to @wpcampusorg

We don’t care what software you use but we know you’re awesome and we’d love to learn from you. If you’re passionate about #WordPress or #highered, #WPCampus would love to hear more this summer in St. Louis. Our call for speakers is open until April 7. https://t.co/EeoaLqGCSo pic.twitter.com/n8Mgnymw1L

— WPCampus (@wpcampusorg) March 23, 2018

🔖 PressForward in the classroom

Bookmarked PressForward in the classroom (pressforward.org)

Do you want to work with students to publish class assignments or research? Instructors use PressForward in the classroom to consolidate and review student assignments, help students learn to survey their fields, and create opportunities for collaboration, communication, and research. The Lewis & Clark College Environmental Studies Program produces Environment Across Boundaries, a student-led publication that cultivates interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental issues. Participation gives students an opportunity to engage with their discipline through experiential, project based learning. They develop skills both in their field and with a suite of digital tools.

An interesting use case for PressForward: creating a “planet” website to aggregate and/or showcase work of students in an entire classroom who are all posting content to their own separate web spaces.

Sketch idea: create a standalone WordPress site for a course, install the PressForward plugin, input the RSS feeds for students’ websites to aggregate all their work collectively into one space. Various ideas include:

Use the feed for students and teacher to keep up with the entire classroom.
Publish an OPML file for students to easily subscribe to all feeds in their feed reader of choice.
Optionally publish the highlights of the best work or even all of it.
Teachers could use the feed to check that students are posting/keeping up with assignments for grading purposes.
Use the read/unread functionality to “mark” pieces as graded/ungraded or seen/unseen.
Use the internal commenting system to keep private notes on student’s work.
Create output feeds for specific tags and/or categories
Works with any student sites that produce feeds, not just WordPress, so students have choices of different CMSes.
Use the nomination functionality to quickly aggregate and disseminate online sources for classroom assignments or readings.

I had contemplated planet like aggregation at the recent WPCampus online conference. It’s interesting to see that PressForward has considered it as a use case as well though I’d love to hear about or see examples of this in the wild.

How else could this rich, multi-functional Swiss Army knife-like plugin be used in education?