NERCOMP 2008 Blog

This presentation was given by Ken Panko, Senior Instructional Technologist, Yale Instructional Technology Group, and Randy Rode, Information Technology Director, Yale School of Drama, on March 11, 2008.

Why WordPress?

[Ken]

We use WordPress (WP) because it’s easy, cheap, and flexible. I want to focus on the “easy”. If you don’t want to do anything fancy, and if you’re comfortable installing applications on servers, WP can be installed in five minutes. You run an install wizard, change your password, and you’re up-and-blogging. WP runs on linux, Windows, Mac and Unix servers. The NERCOMP blog is a good example of how WordPress looks “out of the box”. If you’re willing to put some time in on it, the appearance of your blog can be highly customized.

If you don’t want to bother with hosting WordPress yourself, you can have your blog(s) hosted at wordpress.com. It’s free, and your blog can be private, but you just can’t customize it as much as you can blogs that you host yourself.

One of the reasons we love WP is that it has a big developer community. Because WordPress is open source, there are tons of people writing cool stuff for it. There are hundreds of themes that people have contributed that allow you to change the look and feel of your blog. There are also all sorts of cool plug-ins available for WordPress, and it’s the library of plug-ins that gives WP much of its power. Plug-ins make it possible to embed video or audio, do polling, and add many other functions. Most WP plug-ins are contributed by the developer community and are free. (More about them below.) Many themes and plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org.

Pitfalls

• There are security concerns. One of our sites was hacked. (Randy: Secunia is a great resource for checking for security vulnerabilities). The best way to keep WordPress secure is to constantly update it (and likewise update plug-ins you use).
• There is lots comment spam that finds its way to WordPress blogs (Akismet is a plug-in that helps fight it).
• By default, blogs are open to the public. This includes most of the blogs we’ve done (the exceptions use a Yale service for putting websites behind a login), and we ask students to sign an agreement so they know what they’re doing before putting their work in the public domain.
• Data preservation is another issue. People ask “what’s going to happen to this site?” All I will say right now is… that’s something to consider.

Rapid Development

[Randy]

One of the reasons we like WP is that we can do things quick. It’s got a low learning curve. Using WP lets us react very quickly to ideas, questions, and opportunities. We’re not advocating use of WP for big institutional projects, but it’s great way to actualize small ideas we want to get up fast. If a faculty member in December comes to us with an idea for something s/he wants to do in January, we can talk about it and get that kind of stuff going. Often what we do is for one class, for one semester. Even without a lot of experience, and with no programming, you, or a faculty member, can turn out some pretty good looking stuff.

In a rapid development environment, testing is done in the real world. Rapid development means the cost of failure is low. “If you never fail you’re not trying hard enough.”

Many of these ideas are drawn from Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application. Read it here.

Plug-ins

Here’s a laundry list of useful plug-ins that take WordPress well beyond its core functionality: Akismet (anti-spam for blog comments - absolutely essential in any WordPress blog); Bliki (Wikifies WP posts); FAlbum (uses Flickr API to do photo galleries in your blog that are hosted in Flickr); Related Posts (generates a list of related posts); wordpress.com stats (lets you keep all kinds of interesting statistics on visitors to your site); Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (one of the best ones; saves you from having to manually reinstall every time there is an upgrade); and WP cache (speeds up blog rendering). Wordpress.org is a good place to start looking for plugins, but I often just do a Google search for the features I’m looking for.

Examples: four, very different examples of using WordPress for supporting learning initiatives:

[Randy]

1. Online Text Analysis The Shakespeare Analysis class picks a text and together they go thru a line-by-line analysis of it. They had been using a paper system. There’s a WordPress theme called CommentPress which allows line-by-line (or paragraph by paragraph) commenting of text that seemed very suitable for this project. This class was a good opportunity for a small, rapid development project: 4 students, a short time frame, and a very interested professor. In the screenshot, note the text along the side, line numbers, and comment bullets. This class is just now getting started. One limitation of WP out of the box is that comments can’t be edited. We added a plugin, AJAX Comments, that let’s people edit their posts. In four hours work done over two days, the site was up and running.

2. Interactive Website Authoring The Yale Summer Cabaret needed a student run content management system. Again there was a short development time frame. The students wanted to facilitate a lot of audience interaction. The last show of the summer was to be an audience driven show for which they wanted to poll the audience and get comments from them. The plan was to get audience input on a choice of 3 different plays; on the location where it would take place; and on menu items for the cabaret. People who submitted choices or comments would get immediate feedback. It took perhaps 12 hours to develop a custom theme. Other than that, the need was met with WP out of the box and some plug-ins.

[Ken]

3. Multimedia Sharing In a Modern British Architecture class, students who had traveled to London, did an online analysis of an architectural site. They were expected to take a lot of photos, but didn’t have time to discuss their work or show their photos in class. The Prof. wanted to extend the conversation into the on-line environment so students could share all of the photos they were taking. Students’ blog posts were paper length writing assignments illustrated with photos.

The editor provided for authoring posts is standard WSYWIG editor. The lightweight HTML authoring interface is much like facebook and students are very comfortable with it. To upload an image (or other media type), just browse to it and click upload. If you tell it to “send to text”, WordPress will embed the image (or audio or video file) at the location of the cursor. We put some plugins on sites that enable all mime types and use Anarchy media player plug in which plays most media types.

We asked students to use WP categories to categorize their posts using their name and by the number of the assignment. This allowed the instructors to view all submissions for assignment #, or all submissions by student x.

This blog also includes links to standard support pages http://brst440.commons.yale.edu/?page_id=649 I created.

4. Podcasting In an Abnormal Psychology class. Students were required to do a podcast project that involved recording interviews. We used WordPress because it plays so much nicer with media than the campus course management system. The ability to for students to easily upload their media files has led us to turn to WordPress over and over. In addition, WP makes it simple to link RSS feeds to particular categories defined in a WordPress blog. If a “podcast” category is defined and an RSS feed created for it, people can subscribe to these podcasts in iTunes or another aggregator.

- Posted by Peter Hess