Human DNA by Grabthar on Flickr (CC-By-NC-SA)

I have several posts that I plan on writing about my past weekend at Educon. Before I proceed, let me just get one thing out of the way: this was one of the best conferences I have ever been to. I’m going to talk in a future post about why I think this was, but, in the meantime, if you are someone who has an interest or investment in the current state of K-12 education, I strongly consider you attend Educon.

Specifically, however, I want to talk about my first ah-ha moment at Educon. On Friday afternoon, I arrived at the Science Leadership Academy and went on about an hour long tour. I attended with Jeff and Jen, and they were along for the tour too. It was led by two students at SLA, a senior and a junior, and they did a fantastic job of showing us around and answering questions about what it’s like to be a student at this school.

About half way through the tour, we found ourselves in a biology classroom; I believe the class being held was a biotechnology class. When we walked in the students were in small groups, and each had a laptop open. They were obviously talking and referring to something on their computers. While Jeff, Jen, and the student guides continued around the room to talk, I stopped to observe what was going on.

After about five minutes (the students had been working before we came into the class, but I don’t know for how long), the teacher asked them all to direct their attention up front. Then he called on one student to report back to the class about what his group had found. I realized that each group had been searching online for protocols for an experiment they were, presumably, getting ready to conduct. The teacher led the students through an exercise in which they shared what they’d found. As they talked, he wrote the steps up on a white board. He quickly noticed when they left something out, and would question them until they noticed the error. He asked other students in the class to chime in when the protocol they found was different.

In essence, the students were collaboratively writing the steps they needed to complete in order to conduct this experiment.

The experiment was one I know well. They were getting ready to extract DNA from their own saliva. I know this experiment well because I vividly remember conducting it at my high school (I attended a magnet school for science and tech in the late 80’s-early 90’s.) I can remember standing in the biotech lab at my school, waiting for the DNA to become visible in a tiny clear vial with a black plastic top. I probably still have that vial somewhere; it was one of the most profound experiences I had in high school. The truth is, the experiment isn’t that complicated or hard to do. But for me, at 15 or 16, knowing that the cloudy smudge in the vial was my own DNA was like poetry.

But, as I watched the students in that class I felt a deep sense of sadness, too. I couldn’t really understand why. Over the course of the next day or so at Educon I talked to a few people about what I had witnessed, and, gradually, I realized what had touched me so much about the experience.

The school I attended is known, in particular, for turning out elite young scientists (although I was never one of them). Students can take an impressive number of courses in topics that aren’t offered at many of our colleges or universities. Upon graduation, they are often poised to move directly into advanced science, technology, and engineering courses of study, and many of them go on to graduate degrees and impressive positions.

SLA, I realized over the course of the weekend, despite the “science” in the title is less interested in turning out elite scientists and much more interested in turning out elite learners. The former is appropriate if you are 15 or 16 and destined for the life of a scientist, mathematician, or engineer. The latter is appropriate no matter what path you choose.

What made me so sad? I did that experiment in high school. It touched me, deeply. But I didn’t work with my teacher to research and develop my protocol. I was handed a book or a sheet of paper with steps that I had to follow, precisely. I was graded on how well I followed those steps, precisely. My school thought it was training me to be a scientist, and it valued me, as a student, by how well I fit that mold.

But since I didn’t choose the path of Elite Scientist upon graduating (and I knew this fairly early on in my high school career), I spent most of those four years and many years afterward, feeling inadequate, unintelligent, and unimportant. What a lesson.

SLA seems to be teaching its students to become the best learners they can be. There is no one mold to fit; there is no one answer to any question. Students are expected to be as much a part of the questions and answers at their teachers. What a lesson.

I thought a lot about the title of this post. My first instinct was to call it “On Training Learners” or “On Making Learners.” But that was because my instincts were derived, I think, from my own high school experience where I’m afraid my school’s instincts were to “make” or “train.” I suppose you can make or train a scientist; but you can’t make a learner and you probably shouldn’t “train” one, either. You can, however, teach a learner, and hopefully you can teach them to be a learner, forever.

Aside from last year’s Faculty Academy, it’s been almost a year and a half since I’ve attended a conference. This was a personal decision on my part. I chose to come back to UMW part-time after my maternity leave and staying home with my family has been my number-one priority. But last January, I listened in on Twitter as my friend Jen attended EduCon, and so when Jerry asked me if there was a conference I wanted to attend this year, I knew EduCon was the one. From Jen’s tweets, I could tell that the conference was inspiring her. But there were some other really important reasons why I was really excited about the possibility of attending EduCon this year.

First, it’s a K-12 conference. Working in higher ed, I often feel like there is a big disconnect between the people I talk to regularly about technology, teaching, and learning and the people who are doing the same kinds of work in K-12. I find this disconnect concerning and uncomfortable. Students proceeding into higher education are experiencing a continuum that starts, these days, in grade school. Technology is being “integrated” from K through grad school, but it doesn’t seem like we talk to much about that continuum. The elephant in the room when that topic comes up, I think, is that higher education has done a bad job, in general, of acknowledging this continuum. Technology isn’t just a trajectory — learning is a trajectory. Teaching is a trajectory. Do we in higher ed (professors, technologists, librarians, administrators) engage with our colleagues in K-12 nearly enough. Do we understand the forces they’re negotiating? Do they understand ours? If we don’t talk and collaborate more, then how can we provide an learning experience for our students that makes sense?

The other reason the K-12 aspect of this interested me is that I’m a parent with a daughter about to enter kindergarten in our local public school. My daughter has been attending a private school for the last 12 months — first for 5-day preschool. This year, she was moved up into 5-day kindergarten, but she won’t be old enough to enter the public school until the fall. We’ve decided to move her, and I’m suddenly finding myself trying to figure out what, as a parent, I need to pay attention to as the transition occurs. Her current school is fantastic: her classes have been small; the students are amazing; the teachers are dedicated. But I, fundamentally, believe in the idea of public education, and I want her to have a public school experience like I had. At the same time, I hear horror stories about budget cuts, SOLs, and NCLB. My understanding of these issues is rudimentary, at best. I want to start to really understand what today’s public school teachers’ are facing. I want to understand the reasons why some teachers and parents are choosing private school instead. I want this information so that I can make an informed (non knee-jerk) decision about my childrens’ future. I’m hoping EduCon will be a place where I can begin my education.

There’s another reason why I’m really excited about EduCon, and it’s more personal. The conference is held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Here’s a brief description of the school from their Web site:

The Science Leadership Academy is a partnership high school between the School District of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute. SLA is an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning that opened its doors on September 7, 2006.

Twenty-two years ago, I started high school at a school was then an experiment in science education. That school is now well-established and well-respected (and also, still, controversial). My time at Thomas Jefferson was fraught. It was intense, challenging, demoralizing, and inspiring. I left with a great education and a pretty damaged self-esteem. It took a while to get past that legacy, but, given the choice, I’d probably go again.  SLA seems to have a lot of the same goals as Jefferson did when it was starting out. I’m fascinated to hear how another science high school is starting up 20 years later. I’m particularly interested in learning more about the vision of Chris Lehmann, the principal (and, apparently, force of nature) behind SLA. I’ve been following Chris on Twitter since Jen started tweeting at EduCon last year, and he is funny, inspiring, and obviously incredibly dedicated to his students.

The third reason I’m so excited about EduCon is also personal. 12 years ago when I decided to go back to graduate school to student technology and education, my dream was to go into museum work. In particular, I really wanted to work at a science museum. Science and technology museums have always been places of wonder for me. I think it’s because, when they’re done well, then wed narrative and science. The best museums tell really good stories, and the thing I’ve always found most interesting about science has been the stories hidden in the details. In this country, we’ve been bemoaning the state of science education for decades. I think SLA has struck a magic partnership by working with the Franklin Institute. Why not let a museum into the classroom to do what it can do best — make science real and relative? And why not let students into the museum where the practice of making museums can be the ultimate model for making and sharing knowledge?

Around the same time I was applying for graduate school my husband and I had just started dating. On one of our first dates, we drove up to Philadelphia to go to the Franklin Institute. I remember thinking this was the kind of place where I wold love to practice education and technology some day. I don’t know if a dream like that will ever come true. (I really do love working in higher education.) But this weekend I look forward to reliving those dreams and getting inspired.

In our offices at DTLT we are all frequently victims of listening to each others’ diatribes against any number of forces threatening higher education, online community, and the world, in general. One of Jim Groom’s favorite topics to rail about is “Twitter is killing Blogging.”

(I could go look for a post on his blog to link that last sentence to, but, truth be told, the man is so prolific that a) it takes nine years for a search query to process on his blog and b) when you do get the results, invariably there are so many posts related to your search terms it takes nine years to find the one you’re looking for. I don’t have nine years, so I’m not going to try. Color me lazy.)

I frequently push back on his statement because a) have you seen the man’s Twitter stream? Talk about people who live in glass houses b) truthfully, Twitter has become *my* main form of staying on top of the pulse of my online network and I DON’T LIKE BEING CRITICIZED.

But I’m here to publicly acknowledge that Jim may have a point.

Sometime last fall I stopped using Google Reader. I’m not sure how it happened. Maybe it was when my iPod Touch died briefly (thanks, Graeme!) and so my Reader button got removed. I think it was more gradual, actually. Over time, I’d started to rely on Twitter to tell me when my contacts had written a new blog post. As time passed by I figured that I didn’t need Reader. I was seeing people’s posts. Maybe not ALL of them, but, frankly, what I was seeing was enough to keep my busy. Maybe, for me, Twitter was just a better way to stay on top of the blogs I read.

Bad, Martha. Bad, bad, Martha.

Last week, I finally re-opened Google Reader. I was scared to do so, actually. I thought it would yell at me (kind of like my fear of going to the dentist.) Actually, it was very kind and gentle. For most of the blogs I read the number of posts that were marked unread was actually pretty small. I’m not sure why. There was lots of stuff I hadn’t seen that wasn’t marked unread. But I didn’t complain.

I started picking through the list, visiting some sites I hadn’t been to in months. And I realized that Twitter was a very poor substitute for an RSS reader. I had missed whole topics of conversation. More importantly, I had missed almost *all conversation.* I guess it never occurred to me that although (some) people post to Twitter when they have a new blog post up, there are no tweets about comments. Duh.

So, I’m recommitting to my reader. And, hopefully, you’ll see more of me around your blog parts. And, Jim, you were kinda right.

Last semester, when we launched our new DTLT Web site, I was hoping to really use it as a tool for getting the word out to our faculty about news, upcoming events, professional dev. opportunities, and showcase projects. Ideally, I wanted to use it as a hub from which all of this information could be delivered.

What I really wanted was an easy way to create a newsletter that included content from the new site. I planned on sending these out to all UMW faculty about once a month. By using the site to generate the newsletter, I wouldn’t have to build it from scratch. After all, everything that I wanted to share with the faculty should, ideally, also have some presence on the Web site. What I quickly discovered, however, was that there was no easy way to use the content I was generating on the site to create such a newsletter.

WP has a few newsletter/subscription plugins, but they seem to do one of two things: send updates to subscribers whenever a new post is generated or simply generate a list of emails that you can then use with some other newsletter program. Neither of these was really ideal. I was pretty certain that most faculty wouldn’t appreciate an email from DTLT every time we added something to the site. And I’m not using any other third-party program to generate a newsletter. I also didn’t want an opt-in solution. I really wanted to be able to send something to all faculty using our internal all faculty email list at the University.

What I wanted was very simple: a basic text of html email that I could send to faculty with a list anof new items and links to read more.

After a few months of tinkering (and getting distracted by other projects), I’ve finally come up with a solution.

Basically, I created a custom page template called template.php which can be applied to page when you create it. The text you put in the page becomes the text at the top of the newsletter. (”Welcome Back! We hope you had a nice break. Here is our latest newsletter. . .”). Then you use a custom field (”issuecat”)on the page to define a category number. In my case, I created a category called “January 2010 Newsletter” and entered the corresponding category number into the custom field.

When I view the page, I get a specially formatted page, showing the text of the page and the content (up to the “More” divider”) for whatever posts I put in my category. At the top of the page is a link to the actual page on the blog in case someone can’t view the HTML email. I’ve also allowed for custom images to be displayed with the posts through the use of another custom field: newsimg. (Although I’m not using these at the moment.)

Getting the newsletter into an email program takes a little bit of trickery, and it depends a lot on what email program you’re using. In my case, I work on a Mac and use Mail or Entourage to send through our Microsoft Outlook mail server. Sending an HTML email that you’ve created elsewhere can’t be done out of the box in either of these programs. However, for Entourage there is a script that will allow you to send a complex HTML email. Basically, you save the WP newsletter page to your computer and then use this script to point Entourage to the file. The message should preserve all it’s formatting. In Mail, you can copy and paste the text of the newsletter into an email message. This won’t preserve images, but it will preserve the basic formatting.

In all honestly, I would love to do this with just a plan text email.  There’s no particular reason why it has to be HTML and I’m not huge fan of HTML email. However, in order to have something that gets automatically generated (so that I’m not spending a bunch of time doing even basic line/paragraph breaks) by WP, this seemed like the only solution.

The code to make the template itself work is nothing fancy — just a variable for the category custom field that’s used to execute a second query on the page to grab the appropriate posts. The ordering is just descending chronological. I’d like to play around with grouping the posts based on type (event, news, project, etc.) but that’ll have to be for the next iteration.

The formatting of the page is based on a basic HTML email template I found online (can’t find the link right now, but I’ll try to add it later). As it turns out, the HTML you use to generate email is like generating a circa-1997 Web page. Figuring out how to make that work was painful.

If anyone cares to try it out, here’s a link to the template file, zipped up. You’ll have to make some changes to the code (for the page title, image, etc.) Also, full disclosure: I’m not a programmer, just a hack. There may be a better way to do this, code-wise. I just know it served my purposes.

Okay, now that that’s done, let me tell you why I really don’t suck after all. (As if there was really any doubt.)

As of about a week and a half ago, I am the owner of this Web site and domain. Up until then, the University of Mary Washington (where I work part-time), owned this piece of the WorldWideInterTubes. But a year ago, I finally got around to having them transfer ownership of the Web hosting space to me when it came up for renewal. I had to wait another year for the domain to come up for renewal so that I could officially own that too.

I decided to do this upon coming back to UMW after my maternity leave. It just occurred to me that I didn’t really want my Web site to be owned by anyone but me. That’s not to disparage UMW in anyway; it’s just that this space (however infrequently I update it) had become an extension of myself. It isn’t just my professional space for my work at UMW. It’s much more than that.

I think this seems like a natural progression from where I started with this space — as a place to experiment with for my work in DTLT. I still continue to do that from time to time, but I have other sandboxes to experiment with at UMW (including UMW Blogs and our own departmental Web hosting space). What I want now is to fully stake my claim to a small corner of the Web.

I also want to be able to cat blog without guilt.

Several reasons why the above is true:

1. My personal WP blog is so out-of-date in terms of version, I’m embarrassed to tell you what version I’m using.

2. I’ve been so bad about staying on top of my blog, I just found two nice comments buried in my spam from months ago. I’m a loser.

3. Did I mention I never blog?

4. I never blog

5. I have stopped using Google Reader, which means not only am I a bad blogger, I’m a bad blog reader. Shame on me.

Okay, enough with the self-loathing. I’m off to upgrade my blog and turn over a new leaf (again.)

I rock.

I’ve blogged in the past about my endless DTLT Web Site Redesign project. And I’ve committed myself to regularly blogging about what I’m doing as part of that project. And then, of course, I’ve promptly broken that commitment. Oops.

I guess it’s time for an update, and, to start, I want to describe how I’m handling event presentation on the new site. (We actually launched it a few weeks ago, but there’s still a lot more work to do.)

I knew that one of the features of the new site needed to be a way to publish information about upcoming teaching and learning technology-related events. I wanted this not only to be a mechanism for publishing information about our own events but for sharing information, particularly with UMW faculty, about events that ELI, NMC, and NITLE were hosting.

To start I played around with a host of Event plugins for Wordpress. But they all failed me in one way or another.

Events Calendar, which we’ve had in UMW Blogs for quite some time, has tons of features but there was one thing it didn’t do well. See, I wanted my events to have a post-like presence within the site. In other words, I wanted to be able to use the standard Wordpress Loop to filter info about events and I wanted to be able to tag them and categorize them like all the other content on the site. Events Calendar creates a whole separate structure for storing event information. It was also, quite frankly, a beast of a plugin. There were more features then I really needed.

I looked around a bit for a calendar plugin that would actually store events as posts. Event Calendar 3 looked promising, but it wasn’t compatible with the latest version of WP.

Events Category looked really promising — very simple and elegant solution. But it’s not being maintained anymore. Vent also looked like a possibility, but, again, no 2.8.4 love.

Then I stumbled upon this funny, half-baked plugin called Upc0ming. It seemed to allow you to show all upcoming events on a Google Calendar in a sidebar widget. I thought this sounded intriguing. We use Google calendars pretty regularly in DTLT, and I thought it might be nice to publish our events in that application, and then just feed information into the site.

The next challenge was how to get information about those events into the main content stream of the site. Simply displaying Google Calendar events wasn’t going to solve my dilemma of how to tag and categorize event information just like any other post on the site.

Then it occurred to me that I could actually grab an RSS feed from Google Calendar and run it through FeedWordpress. Each event could become a post (that I could automatically stick in an “Event” category with FWP’s settings). As FWP captured those events, I could tag them appropriately. Granted, this requires me to remember to periodically go in and tag posts, but this didn’t seem like to big of a deal. I expect to be spending quite a bit of time in the back-end of this site, anyway. It also meant anyone in DTLT could easily add an event to our Google Calendar (which I shared with everyone in the division) and it would just show up in the site.

This solution took me about halfway to where I wanted to be. At this point, I had a widget on my homepage that would show upcoming events. If someone clicked on the “More information” link, they’d be sent to the Google event page (which I actually programmed to open in a thickbox). However, if they ended up on a tag page where an internal page post (fed by FeedWordpress) for an event showed up, they’d go to that post not the Google calendar. This didn’t seem ideal to me. The information fed in from Google Calendar wasn’t elegant or formatted, so those posts were sort of unappetizing. And I really wanted people’s experience to be consistent.

As a solution, I decided to hack the archive template of my theme. For those of you who don’t know, the archive template (archive.php) is the template that gets used by default whenever a user goes to any category or tag page. So, for example, if a user clicks on a link for the tag “umwblogs,” WP uses the archive template to show all the posts that have been tagged with “umwblogs.” The Loop in the template is set to just return those posts that fit whatever criteria is appropriate to the page someone has browsed to.

I went ahead and modified The Loop so that if the post was in the category “event,” (which every Google Calendar-fed post would be), WP would use a link to the Google Calendar event (in a thickbox, again), instead of a link to the post. I was able to do this because when FeedWordpress makes posts out of a Google Calendar feed items, it puts the original calendar item url into a custom field called “syndication_permalink.”

So what does this all mean? Basically, it means that the event information that gets fed into posts from Google Calendar (supplemented by my own manual tagging) can be used to filter events, but what users actually see when they want more information is the Google Calendar event not the ugly post. The post just serves as placeholder for storing information about the event that Wordpress can use for filtering.

I’d like to say that this was the end of my journey, but, of course, it wasn’t. It gets better.

I mentioned that the plugin I was using to display the Google Events was upc0ming. Out of the box, this seemed to work. I plugged a Google Calendar feed address into it, and it spit out a nicely formatted event item in a sidebar widget. However, I quickly noticed some problems. First, events weren’t ordered by when they were going to occur, but by when I had authored them (more on this later). Second, I couldn’t control how many events were showing up — by default it just showed me everything. Third, when an event was over, it didn’t drop off the list (again, more on this later).

I decided I needed to go back to the drawing board to find a better way to display my Google Calendar events on the homepage. I actually worried that all my work mentioned above might have been for naught. I thought for sure I’d find a Google Calendar plugin that allowed me to customize ordering, display, number of events, etc. But my searches were fruitless. (If I missed something, let me know!!)

At this point, I posted a desperate tweet asking if anyone had any ideas. Alan suggested I just use the “agenda” feature in the Google Calendar embed code. Doh. I probably should have noticed that earlier, huh? I went ahead and played around with this, but I have to admit I couldn’t get past the visual look. The embedded calendar just looked clunky, and I’d become wedded to the simple CSS styling of upc0ming and my thickbox hack. There’s just no way to style an embeded iframe, so I kept looking.

My friend Jamey suggested I check out the Google Calendar feed api’s. This turned out to be a great suggestion, but I’ll come back to it in a bit.

In the meantime, I kept searching for plugins that might afford me some solution. And then I stumbled on the motherload: KB Advanced RSS Widget. If you’ve ever struggled with the default RSS feed widget in WP and wanted more control over how feeds are presented, CHECK OUT THIS PLUGIN. Basically, it allows you to customize how feed items are displayed on a very granular level.

The Widget comes with a script that will parse your feed (uses Magpie, I believe) and show you all of the “hidden” xml fields that the standard RSS widget doesn’t touch. Using the parser, I was able to pick out the starttime (and customize the date display), and wrap it in the css and html I needed to replicate the elegant display that I liked so much from upc0ming. Truly, I only grazed the surface of what I think you could do with this widget. Let me repeat: If you work work with RSS feeds and Wordpress, CHECK OUT THIS PLUGIN!

One more note: As I was working with the KB widget, I realized my Google Calendar feed wasn’t quite meeting my needs. For example, by default it was ordering calendar events by publication date, not start time. Also, it was showing me them in the wrong order. That’s when my friend’s suggestion to check out the Google Calendar feed api came in handy. As it turns out, by adding various parameters to the calendar feed, you can modify the feed output. I added “orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true” and got a feed that was ordered by startime, in ascedning order, and only showed future events. Sweet.

One, one more note: The one nut I wasn’t able to crack was how to deal with recurring events. The Google feed structures the recurring event information in a way that the KB widget couldn’t handle. So, you’ll see that events which recur on several days, have a listing for each day. Maybe someday I’ll figure that one out. . .

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my first stint at Mary Washington, now close to 10 years ago. (wow!) I’m not sure why, except that a few things have reminded me about how different the job I have now is compared to the one I had then.

In early 2000, I joined the staff of the then Department of Instructional Technology at Mary Washington College. My job involved working out of an office in duPont hall, where I supported the faculty in the fine and performing arts. The job was a very different one from what we do in DTLT now. Located as we were in the academic buildings, we became, by default, the de facto user support system for the faculty. My job consisted more of fixing printers, installing software, and troubleshooting scanners than it did of consulting or partnering with faculty.

I worked in virtual isolation, only seeing my colleagues in DTLT once or twice a week for staff or project meetings. We actually collaborated on projects rather infrequently; our technical support duties didn’t leave us much time to imagine or create.

Professional development was pretty non-existent. At one point, my then boss recommended that I might consider becoming an Apple Certified Technician as a developmental step. I’m sure that’s a great certification, but it wasn’t really what I had gotten into instructional technology for.

All of this said, I deserve no credit for either challenging that situation or even thinking very far outside of the box. Whereas a year prior I had been in grad school in New York imagining how open source software development practices could inform education and the development of educational software and tools, I found myself at a loss of how I could continue to think creatively in my new job.

Recently, I remembered two examples of my failure in that job.

About a year into the position, a faculty in the music department approached me about a project she wanted to work on. Every summer, she and the other music faculty auditioned dozens of students for placement in the program. She really wanted to take the registration process for this activity online, allowing students to sign up and reserve slots through a Web site. She asked me for help.

I remember telling her there wasn’t anything I could really do for her.

I thought about this the other day when, searching for a good event plugin for our new WP-powered DTLT site, I came across one that allowed for the very functionality she was describing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my response to her. Why couldn’t I help her? Was it because the technology wasn’t there yet? I didn’t have the technical chops that were required in 2000 to do what she asked? Or was it a failure of my own imagination and initiative?

Now, arguably, what she was asking me to do wasn’t *really* instructional technology (whatever that is), but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than un-jamming printers.

Sigh.

Around the same time, I was asked by my then boss to start leading a workshop we offered on computer-mediated communication. I remember trying to put together a plan for that workshop and being completely flummoxed. What was I going to show them? How to use email? In 2000, showing a professor how to instant message seemed ludicrous, unless it was the “virtual classroom” in Blackboard. As the workshop drew closer, I grew more and more anxious about my job. One faculty member signed up; on the day of the workshop, he didn’t show up. I was relieved.

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

I wish I could say I had risen to these challenges. I wish I could feel alright telling myself that it wasn’t my fault, but I have this nagging feeling that it was.

When I think back on both of those experiences, what I remember feeling most was fear. Fear at being asked to do something I couldn’t do. Fear of being exposed as a fraud in my job.

Occasionally, I find myself drifting towards the same fearful reaction when asked to do something that is new, uncomfortable, or now what I expected. I guess I need to try and keep reminding myself of how far fear didn’t get me before.

Last week, my family spent a few days visiting family and friends in New York. It was a lovely trip, and, at some point, I plan on blogging about the few days we spent in Chautauqua, NY (where a dear friend of mine and her husband play every summer in the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra). Our brief visit to that place was surreal, inspiring, and provocative — there’s some interesting lessons to be learned about ideals of lifelong learning, utopian visions, and the weight of institutions.

But that’s for a longer, more involved post. Right now, I’m reflecting on a much simpler, but equally fascinating experience I had on the drive home.

Emerald Ash Borer Survey Tree (Harpers Ferry, WV) by takomabibelot on Flickr

As we were making our way across the New York – Pennsylvania border, several times I noticed some strange, triangular purple boxes hanging from the trees on the side of the highway. I was intrigued, particularly when I continued to see them as we made our way across PA, into Maryland and West Virginia.

My husband and I debated what they were for — perhaps they were meant to house some kind of bird? Erik wondered if they were related to studying the white nose syndrome that has been plaguing bat populations up and down the east coast.

When I got home, I did what any good citizen of the Web does. I fired up Google and typed in “purple boxes hanging on trees near highway.”

What I found was approximately 15 thousand search results, and the first one answered my question. In this thread at a forum of VW enthusiasts, someone responded that the boxes were part of a study to monitor the emerald ash borer, a vicious little beast that has been destroying ash trees in eastern states. And, of course, that forum thread was only one of thousands of posts where people were asking about and discussing the purple boxes. I could have spent the rest of the evening learning everything I wanted to know about the boxes, the borer, and the demise of eastern ash trees.

It hit me as I was conducting the search and having my question answered that I was engaging in an activity that 15 years ago was totally impossible. I know that’s not a huge revelation — of course the internet (and Google) have completely redefined my access to information.

But what was interesting to me was how I didn’t even think about what I was doing. Here’s what happened

1. I saw something I didn’t understand.
2. I had a question about it.
3. I went to Google.
4. My question was answered.

It never even occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to get an answer to my question.

Now, contrast that to what my response would have been 15 years ago had I seen strange purple boxes hanging from trees on the highway. I probably would have gone, “Huh. That’s weird.” And not given much more thought to the phenomenon.

Now, however, as soon as I saw those boxes I simply had to know what they were for. And I had to know because I pretty much knew I had a way to find out the answer. I guess my point is that in this information-rich world, not knowing is simply not an option for me anymore. If I didn’t have access to the tools to find my answers, I think it would drive me crazy. I’d lie awake at night wondering about those little purple boxes. Losing the internet (or Google) would feel like losing part of my brain. Now that’s weird, huh?

A long, long time ago, Rev. Jim blogged about a new theme for Wordpress know as Prologue, which created a Twitter-like front-end on a Wordpress blog. The basic idea is that the authors of the blog can quickly write a short post (a la Twitter) right from the blog’s front page. In typical fashion, Jim saw the potential for this new theme long before I understood it. In fact, I remember sitting in a meeting in which he demonstrated it thinking, “I don’t get it.”

Well now I get it.

Last week, UMW’s acting provost, Nina Mikhalevsky stopped by to talk to Jim about a class she’s teaching this fall. It’s a repeat performance of her freshman seminar on Banned Art. Two years ago, in UMW Blogs first semester, Jim set up a blog for Nina that she used to teach the course, with varying success. Apparently, the students were reticent to login and regularly post. She thought that perhaps lowering the threshold into the conversation might help.

I was sitting in the office while Jim and Nina discussed options, and so I heard Jim suggest using the current, revamped Prologue — now known as P2. I confess I was intrigued by the conversation, so I started eavesdropping.

In addition to using P2 as a way to foster a more informal conversation among her students, Nina still wanted to maintain a more formal blog for the class that she would contribute posts to. It seemed like an elegant solution. Use P2 for the more “chatty” conversation about the course, relying on P2’s ability to let authors easily tag posts as they write them to organize and filter the conversation as needed. Meanwhile, Nina will foster a more scholarly conversation through her own posts (and hopefully resulting comments).

During our conversation, the easiest solution seemed to be creating two blogs, one with the P2 theme and the other with a more conventional theme like K2 and then just linking them together.  But it occurred to me that it would probably be easy to hack P2 so that both conversations could happen within a single blog. I volunteered to try my hand at it.

So I spent a few hours today messing around with a test P2 blog on UMW Blogs at http://p2test.umwblogs.org. And, I’m happy to say, that I was able to make the necessary adjustments so that a single blog could be the home of both conversations.

It was actually pretty easy once I got out of my own way.

All I really needed to do was to use WP’s built-in feature to designate a static page as the home page and a separate page as the blogs page. In this case, I created two pages, one called “Nina’s Commentary” and one called “Class Chat.” The first became the blog’s front page (and will host Nina’s posts); the latter was the location for the P2 conversation.

Then I had to tweak the templates for the two pages. By default, there is a single page template in the theme called page.php. Rather than editing this template, I decided to create a new page template (that way if Nina wants to create pages for any other content, the core template will still be tact) In order to do this, I needed to copy the existing template file. I called the new version new_page.php (NOTE: Adding files to a theme is NOT something you can do via the backend in WPMU, even with User Themes installed. I had to work directly on the server for this.)

Once I had the copy of the page template, I just had to do a simple hack to display the correct posts. I started by creating a category called “Commentary” which Nina can use to file her posts. (All other posts on the site (which are NOT in the Commentary category) will be part of the Twitter-like conversation.)

Next, I added the following code right before the loop in the new_page.php template:

query_posts(’cat=9043′);

All this does is run a custom query resulting in only the posts that have been placed in the category with an ID of 9043 (which corresponds to the “Commentary” category.) Then, I edited the “Nina’s Commentary” page and assigned this new template to it.

At this point, I had a page of just posts in a single category as my blog’s home page. Now I needed to make sure the page with the P2 interface DIDN’T show those posts. It took me a bit to figure out that when you assign the blog posts to another page in Wordpress’ general settings (as I described above) you end up using the main index.php template for that blog page. Once I realized that, the hack was to just add another query before the loop. This time, however, it’s a query that EXCLUDED posts from the “Commentary” category:

query_posts(’cat=-9043′);

A few quick hacks, and I’ve got both conversations managed through a single blog.

Before I’m done, I’d *really* like to figure out a way to make this technique easily adaptable for other classes. I’m thinking if I have a custom field on both the “Nina’s Commentary” and “Class Chat” page that contains the ID or name of the category that I’m using to filter with, I could then use a variable (containing the value of that field) for the filtering. Then, we’d have a theme in UMW Blogs that, theoretically, could easily be used by any faculty to create a site like this. That would be cool.

One final step I played with tonight is using FeedWordPress to pull Twitter posts into the P2 side of the conversation. This was actually laughably easy. I just subscribed to my Twitter feed with FeedWordpress and ran an update. Then I was able to go back and use the Authors setting in that plugin to make sure all future posts from that feed were assigned to my profile and to retroactively assign the posts I’d already imported to my profile (I had to run the update on the feed first to see how FeedWordPress identifed the author of the incoming posts before I could assign them to the correct profile).

Next, I’m hoping Patrick can help cook up some magic to convert hashtags from Twitter posts into tags on the WP blog. THAT would really allow students to participate in the conversation via either the blog interface or Twitter.