The title of my talk is, Technologies of Possibility: Digital Identity, Citizenship, and Personal Domains in the Classroom. 

And, here’s the brief version of my abstract:

At the University of Mary Washington, for the last eight years, we have been exploring the Web in particular as a technology, not of efficiency, but of possibility. Faculty and students have become used to inhabiting the Web as part of the course of academic discovery. In particular, we have built a powerful approach to providing students with spaces of their own on the Web, releasing them from the limitations of course management systems and proprietary software solutions. Our latest project involves providing all incoming students with domains and Web spaces of their own, in which they can enact and explore their academic persona.

I’ll discuss the steps that we took to arrive at this point, and the experiments that are growing out of our investigations into digital identity, citizenship, and personal domains.

So.

Here I am just over two weeks out from the presentation, and I’ve got a lot of things rattling around as I put together what I want to say. I’m at that stage of preparation where I tend to get side-tracked easily. I know my general thesis; I can think of examples I want to talk about; I have a general sense of the overall story I want to tell; but I’m struggling with focus and specifics.

I may tend to over-think my presentations. I always feel like I should back-up, back-up, back-up, and provide as much birds-eye view as I can. I feel this pressure to contextualize, and then contextualize a bit more.

Sometimes, it feels like the first line of every presentation I give should be, “I was born in February 1974 on a small island in the Pacific.” In my desire to frame a whole story that makes sense around my idea, I imagine a narrative that’s far more complex, and epic (not that my life has been that epic — being born on an island in the Pacific was sort of the high point) then it really needs to be.

So, in a series of points, here’s what I want to say in my presentation:

1. I hate it when our conversation about technology in education focuses exclusively (or almost exclusively) on pragmatic analysis. 
2. I do understand that we all would like to work better and faster, but I think it’s unfair to technology to presume that it’s sole function is to let us work faster and better.
3. I’m fascinated by deeper understandings and interpretations of “technology.” (Hey, if anyone has some great readings/resources that I can add to my own list on this topic, send them my way)
4. I for one, am far more interested in the “technology of the internet and/or Web” than any particular device, apparatus, protocol, or program.
5. I would like our discussions to focus more on these “technologies of space and possibility” — in which the human network that the technology occupies (or vice versa) is as important as any particular device, apparatus, protocol, or program.
6. I’d like to be the kind of instructional technologist who helps faculty and students think about how technologies of possibility are changing their lives and their understanding of their roles in the world.
7. I don’t want to be the kind of instructional technologist who teaches faculty how to use clickers. I’m not saying that to be a anti-clicker snob. I just don’t think that’s particularly interesting or transformative.
8. I do understand that there is some fuzzy space between points 6 & 7 that need to be further elucidated. Thinking Big Thoughts can quickly turn into Obnoxious, Overwrought Naval-Gazing That Doesn’t Actually Add up to Anything. Sometimes we have to start with clickers and grow into possibilities. That’s fine with me.
9. Here at UMW, more than an approach to technology that involves some recipe of devices, apparati, protocols, or programs, I think we approach our work as a philosophy. Here are some aspects of that philosophy:
   • Default to Open. An idea that I think we were practicing for a while before James Boyle taught us this wonderful phrase.
   • Focus on Values. Embodied, in particular, in our approach to Online Learning.
   • Practice & Experiment & Play. This is the guiding principle behind what we affectionately call “The Bluehost Experiment,” a project conceived of by Gardner Campbell that really started everything.
   • Invest In People, Not (just) Technologies. We all agree in DTLT that this is a core component of our success. It’s not that we never need money to buy devices, apparati, protocols, or programs, but before we ever need those things, we need people to learn why we need them.
   • Education is Messy. Yeah, I still REALLY believe this one. And I’m damn sick of conversations about learning analytics getting in the way of acknowledging it. When I teach ds106, I get to eat my own dog food on this one, so I’m not being merely provocative.
   • The Web is Us. That one sounds a bit outlandish, but really this is such a core part of what I try to talk to faculty about. The Web (and what we can do in/on it) is not some “other” thing. It is not a space to be merely observed and contemplated. It’s also not a space to merely used. We must learn to live on it and in it because it is more than a device, apparatus, protocol, or program. It is part of the cultural air that we breathe. It is changing everything. It is changing everyone one of our disciplines. It is changing our institutions. It is changing our students. It is changing our classrooms. And it is changing us. We can not afford to take a guarded, academic stance on it. This is why Domain of One’s Own is so important to us at UMW.

I think that’s it. Does this look anything like a useful outline? To me it sort of does, but I’m still a bit unsteady about the focus. My audience for this talk is most faculty, I think. I presume there will be some staff/administrators, but I’m still trying to figure out how to take topics that I usually talk about to other instructional technology people and frame it so that faculty feel like I’m really speaking to where they are at.

Advice, of course, is always welcome. This presentation is billed as a “keynote” so that’s a bit daunting for me. In the past, whenever I’ve spoken at a conference there’s been somewhere else for people to go if they didn’t want to hear me. So, it’s important to me that this be accessible and meaningful to as many people as possible.

Some rights reserved by sr. mzocoxito on Flickr

I just want to go on the record saying that I have a HUGE problem with this proposed legislation to have colleges collect and publish data about the average salaries that formers students are now making (broken down by major). I think this is indicative of a terrible trend in our society — assuming that “success” is measured wholly on earning potential. Other critics of the legislation have noted that the data, without further explanation, misrepresents aspects of earning potential.

My issue with it is more general. Why are we assuming, and sending the message to young people, that when thinking about one’s future the potential to earn big bucks is the main factor we should be considering?

I majored in English here at Mary Washington. I got a graduate degree in instructional technology and media. I now work for the University and, while I make a decent salary, I could probably increase it by half as much or more if I went to work in the private sector. I’m not doing that because I happen to be passionate about working in education. I think that working in a job where I feel like I’m doing something that contributes to the public good is more important than making a lot of money. On a personal level, I also enjoy the laid-back nature of working in higher education, the freedom to explore and try new things, and the overall flexibility. All of these factors make me HAPPY in ways that money would not.

My husband and I just had a conversation about this issue yesterday. He’s a scientist who teaches at the community college level. He could definitely double his salary by going into the private sector. But, to do so, he’d likely have to travel about 30-50% of the year. He wouldn’t have the option to take his summers off. He wouldn’t be able to set his schedule so that he can easily be home to see his kids on weekdays. We would be a lot more wealthy, but, for us, that doesn’t translate into happier.

I HATE our culture’s tendency to think of earning potential as some sort of validation of one’s self-worth as a person. It’s one-dimensional.

Yes, I understand that when you graduate from college you’d like to be able to assume that you can earn a good living — enough to support yourself and, perhaps, a future family. But I think that reaching that goal is more about understanding, holistically, your needs as a human being, than it is about looking at a list of majors and picking the one that has the highest starting salary/earning potential attached to it.

(Also, can we talk about how UMW was just ranked (for the third year in a row) in the top 5 small universities that produce Peace Corps volunteers? Reducing a presentation of our students’ potential to what they earn completely IGNORES this kind of information.)

How can we really prepare our students for happiness AND financial security in the future?

• Create programs at our schools that prepare our students to be adaptive, life-long learners in the 21st century
• Talk honestly with students about what kinds of jobs they’re likely to get out of college and what kind of money they might be able to earn. Talk about this topic in a well-rounded, honest way. Acknowledge the difference between starting salaries and late-career salaries. Discuss earning potentials with regards to graduate school. Bring in former graduates to talk about what they actually do AND what they actually can earn. Tie this information to real people,  living real, full, happy, and complicated lives. Talk about the choices we have to make as adults when it comes to weighing salary potential against other, important factors in our lives.
• Teach kids (from a young age) how to manage and save money, and how to not spend more than they have
• Understand the realities of financial aid and college debt, and do our best to arm students and families with information to make good decisions
• Encourage our kids to strive to do something they LOVE. Yes, they need to think about how to translate that passion into a living, but picking a major JUST because it can earn you a lot of money is one to way end up in a career you hate — which can quickly translate into a life you hate
• Teach our kids ALL the dimensions of happiness — public service and giving back to our communities; living a healthy, active life; building meaningful relationships with people we love; raising a healthy, happy family (IF that’s what one wants out of life)

I know this is NOT an easy checklist of things that we can do to ensure our students’ future success. Guess what? Life (and learning) are messy and complicated. There is no checklist, or list of data, or easy answer that is going to guarantee success.

(Also, can we talk about how SICK I am of adding another data reporting burden on institutions of higher education? Can we please spend our money on what matters — quality teaching?!)

Last week, a few of us here at UMW kicked off a new program: The Domain of One’s Own Faculty Initiative. This program, sponsored by UMW’s Center for Teaching Excellence & Innovation, brings together a group of almost 30 faculty work with and discuss the implications of the Domain of One’s Own (DooO) project.

Start your (DooO FI) Engines

DooO (an admittedly awkward acronym, but a kick-ass name), is a pilot project that debuted at UMW last fall and which we’ll be taking into full production this fall. It provides all incoming freshman, as well as faculty at UMW, with the opportunity to get a free domain name and associated Web hosting space. This year, we’ve been working with a handful of select faculty to experiment with the possibilities of this space: what happens when, within the context of a course, students are given the ability to build and manage their own, personal Web space — beyond institutional systems?

DooO has grown out of eight years of experimentation at UMW that began when Gardner Campbell had every member of DTLT acquire their own domain name and Web space. That seed that was planted by Gardner has grown into many, many fruitful flowers, in the shape of free and open learning environments housed in open-source applications. By providing us with a sandbox in which we could experiment with the Web as a space of possibilities, Gardner unleashed our imaginations. And, I believe, we were then able to help many faculty and students unleash theirs.

UMW Blogs is one powerful space that has grown out of that work, but, for years, we’ve also talked about how cool it would be if we could just give students and faculty their OWN space, untethered even from the bindings of our WordPress installation. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place and time for using systems like UMW Blogs. But, we’re beginning to think that creating personally-controlled spaces on the Web is a vital opportunity for us to give to our faculty and students. So, that’s why we’ve got DooO. And, really, we have it almost entirely due to the determination of my colleague in DTLT Tim Owens. We may have talked about the possibilities of DooO for years, but Tim is the one who, about 12 months ago, said, “What would it take to do it?” And then he figured it out.

Realizing that there was an actual, strong possibility that the University might decide to fund this project beyond the pilot (and it looks like they definitely are!), last fall Jim and our new director of the Teaching Center, Mary Kayler, brainstormed the Faculty Initiative. The purpose of this program is mainly to give a group of faculty the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of what DooO is, what it could be, and how they can use it.

We started the formal program last week, with the first meeting of our cohorts. (There are five cohorts, each managed by Jim, Tim, Mary, Andy, and me.) The “curriculum” for the program consists of readings and technology investigations. Last week, we read a short post by danah boyd from 2007 about controlling your digital identity, and we began to talk a bit about the technical underpinnings of domains and how to organize and imagine your online space.

It was fantastic, from my perspective, to be having a deep conversation with faculty about not only why we’re doing this initiative but also how all of this stuff works. I’m a firm believer that we all need to develop a deeper literacy about the technology of the Web. I hate when people say to me, “But I don’t need to know how phone exchanges work in order to use a phone!” It’s. Not. The. Same. If not knowing how a phone exchange worked (and was programmed to work) prevented you from being able to actually use the phone in useful ways, there would be a reasonable comparison. Phones are technology. The Internet is also technology. That doesn’t mean that we should think about them the same way.

I’ve been working under a bit of a shadow on and off for the last few months, cast primarily from the failing health of two people who are incredibly important to me. My grandmother (for whom I’m named) has been fighting health issues for a number of years, ever since she was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. This spring and summer, her health declined, and my family (particularly my mom and her siblings) were searching for answers to get her the help she needed. Luckily, doctors were finally able to locate and treat the problem, and we were fortunate that her recovery was speedier than it has been in the past. And, the best news, is that 4 years after being diagnosed and treated, she is still cancer-free!

Unfortunately, while my grandmother’s health was failing and then she was being treated, my grandfather began to deteriorate. While fighting a battle on one front, another one emerged.

Eight days ago, after a rather sudden and intense illness that landed him in the hospital for almost a month, my grandfather, Ricardo Daniel Barrera, passed away. He was just shy of his 89th birthday, which would have been on Thanksgiving this year.

My grandfather, who for my whole life I have called Cardo, was diagnosed with diabetes 56 years ago. He had lived with that disease for as long as I’ve been alive, and for a lot longer before that. But he really did more than live with it; through his own determination and resiliance and the strength and love of my grandmother, he managed to thrive. Up until a few months ago, my grandfather was the healthiest 88 year-old diabetic that you could ever imagine meeting.

Cardo lived an amazing, full life. After immigrating to this country from Ecudador in his twenties, he rose from a clerk in a Manhattan company to become a vice president. He and my grandmother traveled extensively, circling the globe five or six times.

He eloped with my grandmother when he was 22 and she was 16 (!), despite the protestations of her protestant Dutch parents about their daughter marrying a Catholic from South America. They had nothing when they got married, but over 60+ years of marriage they built an amazing life for themselves and for their family.

They had five children, of which my mother is the oldest. My youngest uncle was only a few years older than my brother, and the three of us grew up together. Upon passing, my grandfather leaves behind 14 grandchildren (ranging from 42 to 6) and 7 great-grandchildren. In another two months, two more will be added to the role call. My mother’s family is very close, and so for the last month, my uncles, aunts, and cousins have been arriving in Virginia to be with each other as we struggled to figure out what was going to happen to my grandfather.

On the night before Cardo died, I was lucky enough to sit with him in the company of one of my cousins. He was in and out of consciousness, and, he was having difficulty making himself understood. At one point, we asked him if he wanted us to put some music on, and he didn’t respond. About 20 minutes later, he opened his eyes, sat up a bit and said, “Music!”

That was the last thing he said to me and my cousin, and it was very fitting. My grandfather loved music, and he passed that on to all of his children, grand-children, and great grand-children.

When I was a child, my grandparents took my brother and I on trips on the east coast — to Pennsylvania and Florida. When I was thirteen, they took us on our first trip to Europe, a six-week journey that spanned Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and France. When I was sixteen, they took me and another cousin to Hawaii for two weeks. It was the first (and only) time I’ve been back to the place where I was born and which I left when I was three years old. They went on trips like this with almost all of their grandchildren.

Absolutely nothing mattered more to my grandfather than family. Nothing. If he had his way, our entire extended family would have lived together in an extended community. (We would have driven each other crazy.)

I have a memory from when I was a child: I’m maybe 5 or 6 and I’m at my grandparents’ house on Long Island and someone has died. I’m not sure who, either my great grandfather or my father’s father.

I’m sitting in the living room, and someone has given me a stuffed rabbit, which I am hugging. Elsewhere in the house, I know that there are adults who are grieving and crying. I’m very scared by this. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say or feel. All I feel is alone. And at the time, I remember realizing that this thing called death was unavoidable. That at other moments in my life, it would mark days of grief and sadness. Sitting there, I tried to figure out how to solve this problem. What was I going to do when other people died? How could I make sure it didn’t feel this bad? How would I know how to act and what to feel?

And what I remember thinking is, “It’s okay. This isn’t how it will always be. I’m young, and in the future when people die, I will be much, much older. I will be an adult, and I will know how to get through this then because I will be an adult.”

Last Saturday morning, after getting the call from my mother that Cardo had just passed away, I got in the car and drove from my parents’ to my grandparents’. And on the way, I thought about that memory. I’m much older then I was when I sat on that couch, but I wasn’t sure that the years had given me any more wisdom or strength.

Then I got there, and I found my family, and that’s when I realized that what the years had given me was what Cardo had given me — all these people who love me unconditionally and who, through that love, would help me to know how to grieve. And they did.

And now my grandfather is gone, I’m not sure where the last month went, and, as I said, I’m having trouble figuring out how to dig down and just keep doing what needs to be done. All I really want to do is curl up with a book and read under the covers for, oh, a few months. I feel drained and sad and a bit at loose ends.

And I’m reminded of another memory. This also took place at my grandparents’ house on Long Island. The whole family was there, probably for Christmas. And I was upstairs, in my uncle’s old bedroom, reading. Cardo came to find me. I remember all that I wanted to do was read, and I thought that certainly he would get that. There couldn’t possibly anything wrong with wanting to read. But instead when he found me he said, “Mija, there is a time to read, and there is a time to be with people. Right now is the time to be with people.” And then he took me downstairs to be with my people.

I miss you, Cardo.

Cardo holding my daughter, Madigan, in May of 2005.

testing

Broken Technology Sux

Doesn’t it just suck when technology doesn’t work — particularly when it’s the Web site for your online class the night that all your work is due?

Luckily, you have an awesome instructor who will just give you a couple days of extension, right? WRONG! If you’re waiting until the last minute to do your work and the ds106 site goes down, there will be no extensions. I know, I know. That’s so unfair. But, fear not, while I still expect ds106 students to get their work done on-time, I will provide a few useful tips for making sure a site outage doesn’t completely ruin your chances of being successful.

1. Save a local copy of assignments! Weekly ds106 assignments come out on Monday. As soon as they’re out, why not save a local copy of that page or copy and paste the assignment into a local document? That way, if for any reason, you can’t get to the site, you’ll still know what you need to do.
2. Subscribe to more RSS feeds! If you subscribe to the ds106 RSS feed and the Daily Create RSS feed, than Google Reader can be your friend! All of the posts from the feed are archived in Reader from the time you subscribe. That way, even if you can’t get to the site, you can still read the content!
3. Post anyway! So let’s say it’s Sunday night. You’ve got all your work done, but you can’t get to the Assignments site to figure out what tags you need to use for your work. POST IT ANYWAY! You can always go back later and add the tags. Late work is unacceptable. But work that is (temporarily) missing tags, is fine.
4. Check out the Google cache. You may not know this, but most of the time when Google indexes a Web site (to make it available for searching), it also saves a cache (or backup) on its server. You can try and find it.
5. Use your network. The ds106 community can be your friend, if you’ll let it be. If you’re really desperate, try tweeting a message (using #ds106) asking for assignment details, tags, etc. Someone might just know the answer to your question.
6. Don’t do nothing, ever. Look, we know it sucks when the course site goes down. We’re doing everything we can to avoid these outages. But, the fact of the matter is, sometimes technology goes wonky. That doesn’t mean you can check out and simply blame the outage for your missed work. Assignments are posted for an entire week — make use of that WHOLE WEEK and plan ahead.  If nothing else, post whatever you have done and update it as soon as the site is back up.

What other advice would you give #ds106 students (or anyone students who are dependent on the Web for course information) when technology fails?

To that end, I’m going to try and blog more in this space about the work I’ve been doing with WordPress over the last 6-12 months, particularly working on aggregation methods for learning communities. I got into Web design/development years ago because I loved how it allowed me to architect experiences. I got into higher education at the same time because I really do believe that education is one of our society’s highest callings. Blending my passion for education with my passion to craft experiences is basically what drives me. Over the last seven years or so WordPress has become the platform upon which I can enact these passions. To be able to make code do things that affects people’s behaviors and feelings seems almost magical to me. And, as I’ve said before, I believe strongly that the fundamental nature of the code we work with speaks to the values we’re trying to embrace in the practices that our code enables. I love WordPress because it affords me possibilities. It affords me possibilities because it is open.

All of this is on my mind as I prepare to fly tomorrow morning to San Juan, Puerto Rico and conduct a couple of workshops with students at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón on hacking WordPress. Given that this is the challenge that’s been looming ahead of me for the past few weeks, Boone’s post couldn’t have come at a better time. I kind of needed a kick in the pants to just get over myself and start imagining that I might have something valuable to offer these students. I’ve spent most of the past 2 months (since another inimitable, Antonio Vantagiatto, extened this invitation) wondering how the heck I was qualified to conduct these workshops.

I think I more or less know how I’m going to approach the program. I want to start by stepping back and talking a bit about the philosophical foundations that underpin the work that I do in WordPress — this includes my own biography as a English degree undergrad who moved into the world of ed tech and finally found herself working more and more as a programmer hacker. People are always amazed when they find out I studied English as an undergrad. I never quite understand why. Don’t they know that code is poetry? Seriously, I’m going to talk a bit about the relationship between code and poetry — a relationship that I’ve always found fascinating. I’m also going to talk about code as a tool for building experience. Finally, I’m going to talk about the way our values and politics (small “p”) inhabit the code we work with.

From there, I’d like to talk about my own organic growth in the world of WordPress. I think that the experience I’ve gone through learning how to work with this system (and attempting to bend it to my will) has taught me more about learning than any other experience in my life. When I started working with WP in 2004, I was just a blogger. The files that comprised my blog installation were thoroughly opaque to me. As I’ve developed deeper skills with WP, I’ve learned to essentially speak a new language —   the language of the application. I understand how themes are built, how templates are arranged in a hierarchy. I understand how functions provide a fundamental syntax around which I can craft a space. I understand how plugins extend the language in both predictable and unexpected ways. When you hear a foreign language for the first time, it’s almost impossible to imagine that you will ever be able to decipher it. That’s how I feel about my first experiences of WordPress. While I know I’m still not fluent, I’ve learned enough now to believe that I can figure out what the things I don’t know mean.

Finally, I’ll be spending time with the students asking them to actually DO something in WordPress. This has been the hardest part of preparing for the workshop. I’m not entirely sure how comfortable they are with the system. For all I know, they can code circles around me in WordPress! In the end, I’m going to approach this on two fronts: I’m assembling a resource for them that points in useful directions based on the kinds of thing they want to do in WordPress. I’m not providing answer; I’m just providing pathways. Then I’ll go in with a list of challenges/activities that we can tackle. Everything from basic tweaking of a theme to writing a plugin. Based on what they’re interested in, we’ll pick a few to work on in groups and see where it gets us.

That’s Friday’s plan. On Saturday I meet with a smaller group of WordPress developers at the University who are working on a grant project. I’m hoping to show them the work I’ve been doing with aggregation of posts and latest content both within Multisite and from external RSS Feeds. Hopefully, we can carve out a plan for them to use some of this in their own work and maybe even start building it.

I can’t remember ever being this excited — or this terrified — about leading a workshop.

Boot Camp is meant to hone those critical ds106 skills before the really hard work starts. So, last week their primary objective was to get their domains registered, their web space configured, and WordPress installed. In addition, they had to dabble with the Daily Create and set up accounts on a bunch of social media sites that we’ll be using this semester. By Sunday at midnight, all of this work had to be completed, and each student needed to write a summary post of everything they’d done.

In the past, the first 2-4 weeks of ds106 was consumed with just getting students’ domains registered and sites up and running — while also dealing with the first storytelling assignments.

I’m happy to say that by Sunday, every student in my section (and I believe all of Alan’s students as well) had registered domains and installed WordPress successfully. In addition, most of them had created their ds106 accounts and linked them to their new blogs so that their posts were pulling seamlessly into the main ds106 site.

I cannot tell you how radical this is. We owe the success to three things, in my mind: 1) I think the Boot Camp approach is proving successful. Students are really focusing on these fundamentals and getting it done. 2) The reworking of sign-ups on the ds106 site has proven to be great. Almost every new account automatically gets a feed and institutional tag assigned to it. Occasionally, we have to troubleshoot a problem account, but those issues are few and far between. 3) The launch of the Domains of One’s Own pilot at UMW which is delivering free domains and Web space to our students means that we can manage them through this process WAY more easily than in the past. And DTLT’s Tim Owens is the man is has made that happen all along the way.

Here’s a screenshot of the Google spreadsheet that I’ve been using to track my students progress through the first week of Boot Camp obstacles. As you can see, only 1 student is really lagging behind. Other than that, there are only a few missing pieces. (Names/domains/twitter handles have been blurred to avoid embarrassing anyone )

Again, this is so RADICAL.

Alan and I ended up really tearing our hair out for the first few weeks of CMM trying to get everyone signed up with their blogs in FeedWordPress and tagged appropriately (in the CMM case, tags were used primarily for the bunk houses students were assigned to).

Going into the fall semester, I really wanted to clean-up this process. 

To review, here’s how things more-or-less have worked in the past:

1. New DS106 participant/student goes to http://ds106.us and clicks the “Register” link. This takes them to a form that they fill out with information about who they are, what user id they want, what password they want, their institutional affiliation, and the URL of their blog.
2. Using BuddyPress, when they submit the form, a user account is automatically created for them.
3. One of the ds106 admins (Alan, Jim, or me) then goes and hunts down their new User Profile and copies and pastes their blog URL into FWP.
4. We then try to discover the feed in FeedWordPress.
5. Then we have to assign the appropriate tag to the feed (so that incoming posts have a tag added to them that we can use to organize content)
6. And, finally, we have to ensure that posts from that feed are assigned to the new user account. This last step is the trickiest for me. FeedWordPress allows you to create author maps for posts in a feed, but we have so many users in ds106 that the list is kind of crazy to work with — especially if you’re not sure how the user’s name is displayed in the list. And, if the feed has already been updated at least once, a new user has already been created and assigned to the feed’s posts. Cleaning this up is a BIG headache.

Invariably, I always screw pieces of this process up (Jim and Alan are better at it  ) So, really, the work I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks on this has been mostly to make my life easier!

Here’s how the new system works:

First, it requires a Premium plugin, Gravity Forms, which we use extensively at UMW. I cannot sing this plugin’s praises enough! Not only is it a robust form creator, in and of itself, it’s got some slick add-ons and tons of hooks and filters to do custom development on top of it. I love me some GF! There are a couple of “levels” for purchasing, but I think it’s well worth the money, especially for an institution.

Second, we’re using one of those slick add-ons for GF which allows a form to be used to create user accounts. (The add-on is free).

Now, we do user registration currently on ds106 using BuddyPress. And I have no doubt that someone could probably do what I’ve done using that registration system, instead. But I’m NOT a BuddyPress expert, and I do have a bit of experience with Gravity Forms. So, I chose the poison I knew.

The new user registration consists of two forms:

1. Form #1: This is the basic user registration form. You choose a userid & password. Then you provide your name, email, institutional affiliation, blog address, and Twitter handle. As soon as this form is submitted a new user is created, using this information. In addition, I incorporated a custom function that Alan wrote to discover RSS feeds associated with the blog url.When the form is submitted, a custom function is called that runs Alan’s code. Currently, we’re grabbing just the first RSS feed discovered. This is then passed as a variable, along with the userid and institutional affiliation, to the second form.A note about the institutional affiliation: When you fill out the form, you’re presented with a set of radio buttons for this field. Each button corresponds to a different course/institution on which we might want to filter incoming posts. Gravity Forms makes it really easy to associate those listed affiliations with a value. That value will ultimately become the tag that is assigned to the blog’s feed. So, for example, if you fill out the form and choose “University of Mary Washington: Fall 2012 (Burtis)” as your affiliation, what actually gets passed as a value is “umwfa12s1,” which is the tag we’ll be using for posts written by my students this fall.
2. Form #2: This form consists of two hidden fields which contain the username and affiliation tag (passed from Form #1). A third field is a text box that is dynamically populated with the value of the RSS url (also passed as a variable to this form).Users can simply click “Submit” to accept the discovered feed address. Or, if they want to get fancy, they can put in another feed address (particularly useful if they’re using a category/tag on their blog and want to only feed those posts).When a user clicks “Submit” another custom function is run that adds the RSS URL to the blogs Link list. FWP actually uses a category from WP’s native Links feature to dynamically generate the list of feeds that it checks. The default category it uses is “Contributors,” but you can change this in the FWP settings.In addition, FWP uses the built-in “Link Notes” property of each Link to track information about each feed. In some ways it’s kind of slick how FWP builds upon the already existing Link type; in other ways it’s a bit kludgy. The Link_Notes is just a text string that FWP breaks apart in order to discover all of the settings for a feed. It was pretty tricky for me to figure out how to manually build the string that assigns authors and tags to a feed. Basically, FWP looks for linebreak characters escaped with C-style backslashes to break apart the Link Notes string, and, as it turns out, the built-in WP function to add links strips these slashes out. I had to address this on two fronts: First, I had to remove KSES filters when new links are added. Second, I had to actually edit a core file to take out the function that removes the slashes. Obviously, this is a big no-no. So, I’m looking for better solutions. Anyone got one?!

   For the meantime, though, here’s what the submit link function basically does:

• Translates the username (in the first hidden field on the form) into the corresponding user ID.
• Builds a string based on the format that FeedWordPress uses for assigning authors and tags to feeds. The user ID is used to assign the author. The institutional affiliation tag is used to assign the tag.
3. Creates a link in the “Contributors” category with the contents of that string in “Link Notes.” The RSS url is assigned as both the main link url and the associated RSS url (All Links in WP can have an RSS URL associated with them, and this is what FWP uses to syndicate posts).

The whole thing is packaged as a plugin so that if/when we change themes on DS106, it should continue to work.

If anyone wants to take a look at the code here it is. But, because this is programmed to work with ds106 specifically, if you try a similar technique on your site, you will have to edit it to correspond to your form fields, etc.

So, that’s it. What needs to be changed/fixed/improved?