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.

It occurred to me after I published yesterday’s post that I should probably talk about why I think it’s important to do all the things I was trying to do with the Faculty Academy Web site. I’ve already touched on a few or those reasons — mainly the selfish desire to learn more about how WP/WPMU works and to, hopefully, discover some techniques/ideas that I could put to use on other projects. But I don’t want to suggest that putting together this site was purely an exercise; I’d like to believe that there was actually some meaningful purpose behind the experience.

In a former job, I spent a lot of time planing Web sites, thinking about their communicative goals, talking to focus groups and committees about their purpose and how we would measure their success. While I learned a lot from that experience, and I think I was able to put what I learned to good use, truthfully, a lot of it felt like wheel spinning. Talking about what we were trying to do so as to convince ourselves we understood what we were trying to do. Making a science (or a study) out of something that still, for me, often feels very nebulous and difficult to define.

So one of the reasons I love, love, love working on the site for Faculty Academy is that it has a somewhat short life-time (I know that it serves a purpose as an ongoing, permanent archive of the event, but it’s core user functionality is really critical for only about 6-8 weeks prior to the conference). It’s also a small enough conference, with enough returning attendees (most from within my own University), that I have some freedom to try new things and not worry too much if they backfire. Sure, the cfp and registration system needs to work. The program needs to be clear and easy-to-find. Logistical information needs to be accurate and consistent, but, beyond that, there’s a lot of opportunity to play.

This idea of “playing” as a way of building a Web site is, more and more, a much more rewarding way for me to work on sites. I feel pretty lucky that most of what I build online these days has a somewhat short life-span (a semester, perhaps), is done in collaboration with other playful individuals (my colleagues in DTLT and the amazing faculty and students at UMW), and doesn’t contain a lot of “serious,” institutional data that I need to worry about vetting with a huge committee or administration.

That said, I don’t want to downplay the importance of these projects. I just think course management systems, with all of their institutional-looking interfaces and static feature sets have lulled a lot of us (instructional technologists, faculty, students), into thinking that building online experiences within the Academy needs to be a locked-down, top-down, “standardized” experience. I think that’s just antithetical to how we ultimately teach and learn.

So as I embarked on this year’s conference site, I was seeking to build a site that could serve the following goals:

* provide clear, accurate information about the event (that’s a no-brainer)
* allow people to easily register or submit proposals (again, duh)
* provide an online venue for pre-conference interaction and investigation
* provide an online venue for live conference activity and monitoring of conference activities happening in other spaces

True:

* Not a lot of people added tags to program items
* I’m not sure how many people cared that there was a “live” feed of current sessions on the home page.
* As far as I can tell from the Google Analytics, no one viewed any of the archived conference video from previous years that I highlighted in the site footer prior to the event.
* Only a handful of people used delicious to add bookmarks that were tagged “umwfa09.”

But, by no means, do I think any of what I tried was a failure. First, as I’ve said before, I learned a ton doing it. I’m never failing when I’m learning. Second, even if a lot of people didn’t participate in some of the opportunities I provided, I believe a few people had seeds planted that we can continue to nurture throughout the year and at next year’s conference. Bit by bit, we make inroads. And we also model for our faculty, our students, and ourselves a way of building and creating that values learning, creativity, experimentation, and even “failure.”

Over the next week or so, I’m planning on putting up a bunch of posts about the work I did this year on the Faculty Academy Web site. Every year, working on this site is a particularly fun project for me, starting four years ago when we first began to host the conference Web site at www.facultyacademy.org with a one-off Wordpress install. And every year, I’ve tried to use the project as an opportunity to push myself to learn more about how to use Wordpress as a site for an event/conference. I spend an awful lot of time barking up the wrong trees and generally getting myself in trouble, but I chalk it all up to a great learning experience. For example, what I learned this year will not only come in handy as we put together the site next year, I’m also imagining how I can use it to help with a regional instructional technology conference that we often participate in here in Virginia and how I can put my lessons to use in the revamped DTLT Web site that went on hold as FA ramped up.

To start with, I’ll run quickly through a number of the tools, plugins, etc. that I made use of this year. I’ll try to dig deeper into what worked and what didn’t work for each one in future posts:

Wordpress/WPMU: The conference site “proper” has lived within Wordpress for several years now. I toyed with the idea of using something different this year, but ended up settling on WP again for a couple of reasons. One thing different this year was the the site was actually a blog within a WPMU install that Jim Groom helped me set up. The plan is to migrate all of our past FA sites to this install so that we can more easily upgrade, maintain (and possibly link) them. Another reason I decided to go with WP/WPMU was that we were hoping to use BuddyPress as a way to solicit registrations and proposals this year. We thought we might be able to set up custom user fields for the information we ask for when people are registering or submiting a presentation. Then, everyone would have an accounts on the site and we could maybe use that  to build some kind of stronger online community presence for the conference. Bottom line, the BuddyPress experiment didn’t work out for a couple of reasons, but I’m still glad we went with WPMU. I think being able to migrate all of the conference sites to this platform — and build future conference sites within it — could pay off in the long run. Plus, it allowed me to get my feet wet with WPMU and to develop a deeper understanding of how that system works.

Google Docs/Spreadsheets: For the last three or four years, we’ve been using PhpSurveyor/LimeSurvey as the tool for soliciting registrations and proposals. It was a fine solution, but there were a couple of things about it that I wasn’t nuts about. For one, because it’s really a survey tool, the internal language in the application often confused people. I ended up hacking the core code so that there were no references to “survey” when people filled out the form. There was also no way to send people emails upon completion of the survey — which we got a few complaints about. Also, we had gotten to the point with that tool that we were making use of branching so that we could have one form for both registration and proposal submission. This seemed needlessly complicated. It was a pain to set up, and it was a pain to switch the forms mid-stream when the cfp would close but registration was still open. Finally, the output from PhpSurveyor  isn’t very pretty. I ended up doing a bunch of exports periodically to a .csv or .xls file, and then cutting and pasting things together. I was always paranoid that I would screw up the cut-and-paste, and I felt like I was juggling way too much.

As I mentioned above, we toyed with the idea briefly of going with BuddyPress for this purpose, but we weren’t thrilled with how that was going to play out. So, instead, I used a Google Form/Spreadsheet which I embedded into the conference site. I’m not sure I’d do it again: there was a fair amount of template hacking (because I wanted more control over the form styling), Patrick still had to write a custom script for me so that people could get emails when forms were submitted, we ended up separating the cfp and the registration process which WAS better for us but may have been more complicated for users. All that said, having the data in a spreadsheet was very cool.

Exhibit/Google Spreadsheet: We’ve never had a dynamic registrant list on the site before — there was never any easy way to feed registration data into a place where we could consume it. But this year, when I realized that all of our registration data was going to be in a Google spreadsheet, I also realized it would be very easy to set up an Exhibit to display the data. It actually took a fair amount of time to set this up — more template hacking and some issues with getting the data to feed out of Google docs properly. But once it was set up, it worked seamlessly.

Various WP Plugins: I used a whole slew of new WP plugins for the site. It’s always fun to have a project that allows you to experiment with new plugins, and FA is a great opportunity to try things on:

* Add Link and FeedWordPress: I knew from some recent posts by Jim that these two plugins were working really well together, but I couldn’t believe how easy they made it to add a “Live Blogging” feature to the site while the conference ran (and beyond). We had about 8-10 people add their blog address/feed, and we’re still featuring any posts they write that they put in a category called “umwfa09.”

* More Fields and Advanced Custom Field Widget: I had experimented a few months ago with a plugin called “Flutter” which makes it easier to add custom fields (and create custom write panels), but it had some bugs and didn’t really work properly on WPMU. This time around, I discovered “More Fields” which is dirt-simple to setup and use. Then I stumbled on “Advanced Custom Field Widget” which makes it even dirt-simpler to display the values of custom fields in the sidebar. Bottom line: I was able to use the combination of these two plugins to enter session data for each presentation (location, time slot, format, presenters, etc.) and display it in the sidebar for each presentation’s post.

* Advanced Category Excluder and More Privacy Options: One of the challenges of working on a site for a conference that is coming up/ongoing is that you’re working on a site that people are going to be hitting regularly. You don’t want to show them some of what you’re working on for the actual days leading up to/of the conference. I was able to use these two plugins to hide certain activity until I was ready to make it available.

* FeedBurner FeedSmith: I’d never used a FeedBurner feed for a Wordpress site before, but I’m glad I did this time. Not only did it allow me to track subscriptions to the site feed, I was able to set up a way for people to receive updates via email — which was really important since the plugin we’ve used for this in the past — Subscribe2 — wasn’t playing nicely with WPMU.

* Flickr Photo Album and Quick Flickr Widget: I actually used two different Flickr plugins at different times in the life of the site to display photos from Flickr. Flickr Photo Album was ideal for the display I wanted leading up to the conference (and made it easy to embed previous FA photos in pages/posts), but when the conference was running live, I preferred the output of Quick Flickr Widget on the home page to show a live feed of photos.

* WPtouch iPhone Theme: I don’t know who else benefitted from this besides Andy :-), but it was very cool to be able to simply install a plugin and have an iPhone/iPod touch-ready conference site.

* Yet Another Related Post Plugin: I kind of threw this one in at the last minute as the program was going live, and I was very pleasently pleased with the results. Basically, it allowed to me suggest related conference presentations for each individual session. If you’ve got a community that is actively tagging conference content (which ours wasn’t–see below), I could see this being very dynamic.

* Matt’s Community Tags: So often when you’re working on a site like this you spend an inordinate amount of time on a feature that seems really important to YOU but no one else cares about. This was one of those. But I don’t care, because I still think it’s a neat feature and maybe we’ll use it in the future. Basically, it allowed anyone to suggest a tag for any conference post (including all of the presentation posts). The tags go into moderation (which isn’t necessarily ideal), and you can use this to grow your tag cloud and, ultimatley, your understanding of the ideas inspired at the conference.

There were a few other great plugins that helped with the basic content-management aspects of the site, but I won’t go into all of those here.

For those who care, the theme I used was a seriously hacked version of Wordpress Magazine Theme. It had good bones for what I wanted to do.

The feature of the site that I was most proud of, though, really didn’t require any special plugins — just a pretty mild hack to index.php. I knew I wanted to have something on the conference home page that displayed what was going on right now as the conference was running. It occurred to me the weekend before the conference that all I needed to do was create a post for each conference time slot with links to the various presentations and then time them to publish at the time when the slot began (actually, Jerry suggested going with 15 minutes prior to the beginning of a session, and that worked better). I put all of these posts in a new category called “currently.” Then I put a custom Loop on the home page that just displayed the most-recent post in that category. Voila! Dyanmic conference program on the Web site. I have no idea if anyone cared that there was a dynamic program on the Web site, but, again, I learned something figuring it out.

So. That was a lot longer than I intended. Maybe I don’t need to do individual posts about different tools now, but I think I still will, if only to document the successes and challenges for myself.

Lots of great take aways from this first day of the conference.

James Boyle’s talk was inspiring, engaging, simply awesome. In Twitter someone said he had the audience in the palm of his hand, and that was certainly evident looking around the room. There was so much to take away from his talk, but I’ll mention two things that jumped out at me.

* It’s really interesting how we avoid thinking about issues of open-ness vs/ closed-ness in self interested terms. The conversation always seems to veer towards discussions of values and philosophies. I think values and philosophies are great — but Boyle reminded us that openness is also a great choice because it can serve our self-interests. We just tend assume it can’t.

This reminds me a lot of the way my dad talks about environmentalism. He’s a biologist with the Office of Endangered Species, and although he certainly believes in the mission of the ESA for philosophical reasons, he’s also great at reminding people that preserving species and the environment is a choice that protects our own self-interests.

It’s OK to be self-interested. It’s even better when our self-interests jive with our philosophies.

* At one point Boyle basically referred to the practice of teaching as the ultimate mashup. Teachers are constantly “stealing” techniques, lesson plans, activities, styles from each other — often without attribution. The next time I’m talking to faculty about mashups, I plan to use this as a means to explain the concept.

During Lunch, Jim Groom and John St. Clair blew us all away with the mock debate, “Is the CMS dead?” Jim, quite predictably and charmingly went the zombie route. John, however, well. . .who knew John had that in him? I can’t describe it. I recommend visiting the faculty academy Web site in a week or so and watching the video.

In the afternoon, Cole Camplese’s plenary captured people’s imaginations about how we can use lightweight emerging technologies to redefine our notion of conversation in the classroom. The number of questions and comments at the end of his presentation spoke to how he clearly engaged the faculty at UMW and our guest visitors. My favorite anecdote from his presentation was about the student who tweeted one evening that he had just realized his thesis was due the following day — a week earlier than he had thought. Out of nowhere, his classmates jumped in to assist — proofreading, helping with endnote formatting, meeting in the Library to discuss a draft. In the course of that evening, the entire class suddenly understood what Twitter could do for them.

And now, I’m sitting in Laura Blankenship’s workshop on personal learning networks where about twelve of us are brainstorming how to use lightweight web-based tools to accomplish all sorts of tasks and connect with the people who can help us to work, learn, and live online. Frabulous!

We’ll close the day with some wine and food and be back in the morning to start it all over again.

I wish everyday could be Faculty Academy.

It’s that time of year. Again. Tomorrow will mark day one of yet another Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington. Once again, we’ve got a stellar line-up of guest speakers and faculty presenters. This year’s conference planning has been particularly poignant and meaningful for me, and I’m extraordinarly grateful to my colleagues in DTLT and the faculty at UMW who are contributing to the program. Plus, it’s very exciting to have James Boyle, Laura Blankenshpi, and Cole Camplese coming to contribute to the conversation.

I truly believe that the innovative thinking and work that is shared at events like Faculty Academy can point us toward the future of higher education. I feel very lucky to have the opportunity every year to help showcase and promote the thinking, experimentation, and creativity that this event represents.

See you on the other side.

I have 1,965 things I need to get done right now, but I’ve decided to take a break and write about something that’s been troubling me. Consider this post my “true confessions,” if you like.

I like school.

There, I said it.

Now, tell me, why does writing those words feel like I’ve said something entirely unforgivable? These days, in the circles I travel in, I fear admitting that I like school may be enough to get me kicked out of said circles. I hope not. I’ve grown kind of fond of the people I’ve met here.

The thing is, since as far back as I can remember, I’ve liked school. I’ve gotten a kick out of not just learning, but learning in school — with great teachers, to boot. I’ll even go so far as to say I’ve been blessed with a number of amazing teachers in my life from grade school through grad school. I’m entirely aware that these individuals helped to shape me, helped me to grow up, and helped me to realize my own potential. Those may seem like trite, idealistic, simplistic concepts. But, for me, they’ve mattered.

It would probably be easy to surmise that I like school because I’m “good” at it. And, honestly, for much of my life I have been good at school. But that hasn’t always been the case. I spent four years at a high school that, basically, kicked my butt. It was a fairly new school, with fairly new, untested approaches, but it was also just plain hard. I wasn’t the smartest kid at the school, not even close. I wasn’t studying subjects that came to me naturally. Looking back on my experience there, I often felt like I was being asked to use a sense that I didn’t have in order to succeed. That was often frustrating and even disheartening. But it was also incredibly instructive. As hard as those four years of my life were, I’ve never been able to really write off that experience or shake a sense of gratitude for the time I had there. It’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve begun to think that the point of that passage in my life wasn’t to like school because it was easy or because I was successful but because it WASN’T easy and I WASN’T entirely successful.

All that said, I do think that there is much about our educational system that is broken: standardized testing, mindless drilling, limiting access to new avenues of information, endless infantilization of students (particularly college students), unwillingness to try new kinds of pedagogies, over-emphasis on grades and outcomes as opposed to process, etc., etc. etc.

All THAT said, I balk when I hear people suggest that everything about our schools is broken. Because many of the most tradition-steeped aspects of education were big factors in my own successful relationship with school: (great) lectures, the dreaded term paper, the “sage” teacher. (Also, I loved diagramming sentences.)

All THAT said, I certainly believe that we learn in lots of venues other than school. I certainly have. (Many of the most valuable learning experiences I had in college came during my one-year tenure on the debate team. I can’t imagine more learning crammed into a single activity over the course of one year. )

I’ve had vital, life-altering learning experiences in all kinds of venues: staff meetings (!), conferences, airplanes, bars. I’ve had those experiences with and without the presence of great teachers. I’ve been alone; I’ve been in small and large groups. I’ve been eating. I’ve been drinking — sometimes too much.  And I suspect that this is nothing profound. I’m sure all of us can identify a myriad number of places and circumstances– some predictable and some unexpected — where learning caught us and wouldn’t let us go. Where we had one of those quintessential “learning moments” when suddenly it felt like a hole had opened up in the cloudiness of our brains and we could, just for a moment, see something entirely clearly.

And I deeply respect the people I know who have decided to forge out into new territories, leaving schools and traditional institutions behind. Because I do believe that these other learning venues are vital and need strong voices and vision. And I deeply respect the people I know who have decided to stay at these institutions and fight for rigorous reflection on our practices and innovation and adaptation (and even revolution). And I trust that both groups of people are fighting for the same goals and ideals and that they will do what they can to preserve the best of us and grow in the directions where we have atrophied. And I hope that we can all find a way to talk across these two groups because I don’t believe there is a great divide, only two passages to be built.

And I REFUSE to apologize for liking school. I don’t care if it’s not cool.

I suppose some people could just write me off as a victim of the very schools that I claim to like. I’ve been brain-washed by the system and what I really like is just the thing I’ve been told I should like. Whatever. I know that’s not true. Not for me, anyway.

I like school.

I believe I shall start my own EDUPUNK-inspired meme. I know I’m a day late and a dollar short climbing on this internet bandwagon (how’s that for a metaphorical soup?), but my mad Photoshop skills were just itching to be taken for a spin.

And so I give you. . .

EDUPUNKY BREWSTER

]]> http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2009/03/04/why-not/feed/ http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2009/02/16/learning-for-my-life/ http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/2009/02/16/learning-for-my-life/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:36:38 +0000 Martha http://wrapping.marthaburtis.net/?p=208 Stuff is coalescing. . .I’ve got a bunch of ideas tumbling around in my head, coming from a variety of directions. I’m trying to decide how to bring it all together, and I think the best thing is to attack it chronologically. About a year and a half ago, while attending my first NMC conference in [...]]]>

Stuff is coalescing. . .I’ve got a bunch of ideas tumbling around in my head, coming from a variety of directions. I’m trying to decide how to bring it all together, and I think the best thing is to attack it chronologically.

About a year and a half ago, while attending my first NMC conference in Indianapolis, on a whim one afternoon I purchased the domain name riskyu.org. It was a kind of cutesy reference to “Risky University” and it was inspired in part by what I was seeing at the conference as well as by what I had experienced a few weeks earlier at Faculty Academy here at UMW — particularly Barbara Ganley’s presentation, which I had felt was a “call to arms” to embrace risk in our shared missions of teaching and learning.

Before coming to UMW, I worked for a few years as director of Web development at the University of Montana where I got to think a lot about the nature of a University Web site. Since then, I’d had the good fortune of working with amazing people who had pushed my thinking about this subject in lots of directions, forcing me to consider how our public (web) presences needed to more transparently represent our institutions. Barbara’s talk also reminded me that we needed to find ways to demonstrate how our schools were/are taking risks and embracing the inherent messiness of education. So, that’s why I bought riskyu — my idea was to think through what a University should look like by modeling what its Web site should look like (with the idea that the Web site, in an ideal world, should reflect all of these values that were becoming increasingly important in my head: risk, transparency, messiness, connection, humanity). The site never went anywhere — it was an interesting project in my head, but I didn’t really know how to tackle it. I got as far as creating some really spiffy headers for the home page, and then sort of lost momentum. In fact, if you go to the domain now, there’s nothing there (although, I *think* I still own it).

Fast forward to the somewhat recent past. . .

Since moving into my new position at UMW last fall, I’ve been trying to tackle a number of projects, including redesigning DTLT’s Web site. Doing so requires me to dive into aspects of Wordpress that are, currently, beyond my ken. I’m not a programmer. I don’t speak php. I can sort of hack my way out of a paper bag — but it isn’t pretty. I’m decent with css, but, truthfully, most of my Web skills are a bit rusty these days. Wordpress, as a platform, offers me an “in” — I can use the core application and plugins to frame out some pretty neat stuff, but going any further requires, well, learning stuff.

And there’s the rub. I realized that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve forgotten that I can still learn stuff! That sounds ridiculous, given what I do and what I care about. But I realized that increasingly I’ve found myself throwing my hands up in the air and saying, “Oh well, this goes beyond my expertise. Guess I gotta wait until someone builds another plugin that does what I need.”

When I stopped to reflect, I realized how silly this was. I don’t actually believe that learning only happens at school (although I DO believe that schools can be wonderful places to learn — they were for me). I know that I actually learn things all the time; I just don’t reflect upon it very much. And I rarely set out to learn something. Learning is something that just happens to me as part of living.

I wonder how true that is for a lot of people. In our culture, once we’ve graduated and have that nice diploma to hang on the wall, do we actively think about how we continue to learn — and, perhaps more importantly, do we determine what we want to learn and when and how?

Around the same time that I was reflecting on all of this, I came across a this blog post on Michael Nagle’s blog. I don’t know Michael; I found this post because I was googling “intellectual identity” as part of another project that we’ve got brewing in DTLT. As it turns out, Michael sounds like someone who would get what I’m writing about. He runs an “alternative camp” for kids are “free to make things and play all day.” Cool.

Michael’s post was really interesting. Basically, he suggests taking “10 minutes, and writ[ing] down anything you’ve ever been really fascinated by (something you’ve had the urge to tell someone else about).” What follows is his own list, with everything from Burning Man to laser cutters to Thomas Pynchon.

I love this idea! When I read it, I realized how many things I could list, and, consequently, how many things I really want to learn about. And, honestly, I am constantly learning about new things from a list like this all the time. I bet a lot of people share this experience: I hear something on the radio (probably on a show on NPR) and make a mental note of it. When I get home, I tell my husband about it or I call my dad to talk about it. Later that night, I get online and search Wikipedia. Depending on what I find, I could spend 10 minutes or several hours reading about the topic (and not just on Wikipedia, of course — that’s just where I might start). I’ll probably mention it to one or two people the next day at work. It gets filed away in my memory (I may or may not be able to recall it later). This entire process is infinitely more possible because of my access to the internet. Twenty years ago, had I heard about something of interest on the radio, I would have had to make a much bigger effort to get myself to the Library to look something up. I’d like to say I would do that — that my commitment to lifelong learning is that strong. But the truth is, life is complicated — I’d rarely follow through. I would be a LOT less ignorant and informed.

Okay, that’s not a big revelation. The internt is a great source of information. Yeah, it is.

What’s sort of revelatory to me is what this says about my own identity as a learner, and about our collective identity as learners. Arguably, we should be the most “learned” society, well, ever! We have more opportunities to learn than ever before. We should know more and think more than ever before! But I don’t really think of myself that way. Do we think of ourselves, as a society, that way?

I think what’s missing is reflection. Sharing. Shared commitment. Re-telling our learning (would that be a form of “teaching?”).

So all of this has been rolling around in my head. Rolling. Rolling.

Then, last week, I came across the announcement of spokenword.org, which the Conversations Network is putting together as a huge repository of online audio about, well, anything. And then this morning, I was reading Dean Shareski’s blog, and I came across a link to Academic Earth in his del.icio.us sidebar widget. Maybe everyone else has seen this? I hadn’t. The site simply describes itself as “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars.” I thought about these two sites and they’re relationship to something like the Internet Archive, and how easy it is, really, for me to build my own learning out of the pieces that are readily available to me online.

But, more importantly, I thought about how vitally important for me to be an agent in my own learning. To decide that I am going to learn about something, to reflect on it, to collect what I find, to share it, to maybe even teach it.

And that’s really what Risky U. was about — building someplace to explore this kind of self-determining education. Not because I want to leave behind our institutions of higher education, but because I want those institutions to embrace these kinds of ideals. And the only thing I know how to do is to try and model the thing I think they should become.

So I’m rethinking that project, and I’d love any insight anyone has. I’m going to work on my “10 minute list” sometime soon, and I’ll post it here. Then, I’m going to try and figure out a way to tackle my learning and share it — so that I can make something for others but also so I can make something of me.

I’m also going to try and be more self-aware of those moments when I tell myself I can’t do something because I don’t know how. Really, with all of the resources, information, community at my disposal, I have no excuse to not learn.

(As I re-read this post, I see a bunch of holes and missed points. Like the importance of the teacher or a learning community to support the learner. I’m not trying to suggest I know how this all unfolds. Just trying to explore all of these ideas I’ve been mulling over. I know I’ve got more mulling to do.)

These days, I feel like I spend a great deal of my time figuring out how to tweak Wordpress to work as a simple but elegant content management system. In the fall, I worked on a site for a family member that finally got me thinking about the possibilities on this front. Then, in November, I turned my attention back to revamping the DTLT Web site in Wordpress and using a bunch of plugins to make the CMS thing work. At the time, I settled on installing it outside of UMW Blogs because I thought I was going to need to use some plugins that weren’t available in that environment. A lot of my attention was focused on Flutter, which allows for customization of WP’s internal write post/page panels.

In December, I was asked to fast-track a new site for the upcoming strategic planning process that’s about to kickoff at UMW. That site should get unveiled to the community later this afternoon. This time, I decided to use UMW Blogs because so many of the constituents (and those who will need to work on the site) already know and have accounts in that system. Thanks to Jim, I was able to install a few extra plugins that enabled me to do some more cms-y things there.

The most notable was a very powerful plugin called Widget Logic. Basically, it allows you to use WP conditional tags to govern when a widget is displayed in the sidebar(s). Used well, this means you can have dynamic, contextual sidebar content/navigation for different parts of your site. But there’s a downside to this widget. You have to be willing to delve into conditional tags. I love that kind of tinkering, but I’m not sure many other users in UMW Blogs are going to be willing to go there.

But the bigger challenge on all of these sites has been making sense of the page/post dichotomy. Jim has pointed out to me a bunch of time how broken he thinks pages are in WP, and I have to agree with him.

Take the strategic planning site for example. I knew that I wanted some content to use the features of posts: subscriable, able to be added to categories, displayed in rev. chron order. But, I also knew that the authors of the site would probably want to post some content that didn’t make sense in posts–content of a more static nature. Ostensibly, WP solves this by offering you posts and pages, but it is virtually impossible to get these two to play nicely together.

What I ended up doing was creating an information architecture twice: once in a page hierarchy (so the static-type content could be organized effectively) and once in a category hierarchy (so that posts could be assigned to the appropriate place). But when it came time to make those two hierarchies work together, I had to do a bunch of template massaging and widget logic-ing.

I can, for example, show a navigation menu of pages in the sidebar, that expands and collapses based on where I am on the site. But as soon as I jump out to a post, I lose that context and the navigation stops making sense. What would be nice is if pages could belong to categories! I have no idea why this isn’t a feature of pages now. I see enough people asking about it. I know there are plugins out there that kluge this, but I’m not sure that’s ideal in a WPMU environment. (Perhaps I’m wrong, but since categories exist across the entire WPMU environment, any tinkering with that feature would make me a little nervous).

Oh, and WP really needs a way for users to easily reorder pages without having to use the ridiculous page IDs.

With these two features: page categories and easily reordable pages, I think we might be able to get to a very nice CMS right out of the box. In the meantime, sometimes I feel like I’m jamming a square peg into a round hole. Again, I love doing all this tinkering and massaging, but I’ve got to build something that works well for the users who will be authoring the vast majority of content on these sites. If there’s too much kluge and not enough smooth, I’ll be hearing about it. (ouch)

In the meantime, for your viewing pleasure a bit of 80’s nostalgia:

I had such high hopes to do some serious blogging over our two week Christmas break. I have about a dozen posts brewing in my head, and I’m just trying to carve out the time to get them down. But, alas, holiday cheer, family visits, and a baby who decided it was time to give up our much-cherished sleeping through the night routine intervened.

Luckily, my task for work this morning involves one of the things I wanted to share, so I’m going to take the opportunity to document the process here.

About a year ago, DTLT was tasked with leading a project to complete a “Functional Inventory” of our teaching spaces. The point of the inventory was not to document serial numbers, models, or other typical physical details about equipment, but rather to describe what kinds of things a faculty member could generally expect to find in a room (and, thus, what they could expect to be able to DO in the room). The hope was that this could become both a resource for planning our strategy for upgrading classrooms/labs as well as a tool for faculty and department chairs as they developed schedules. (We currently have no enterprise scheduling tool at UMW.)

As I tried to tackle this project, I did a survey of the landscape in terms of tools I could use to collect and present this information. In the absence of a big scheduling application, I was looking at free, open-source products, and I quickly discovered that I was probably going to have to glue several pieces together in order to do what I wanted to do. I knew I needed some kind of Web-based mechanism for collecting the data (so that various individuals around campus could easily collaborate on collecting and maintaining the information). I also knew I need a fairly intuitive interface for faculty to use to browse, filter, and use the data.

I figured the simplest, most readily available tool for collecting the data would be a Google Spreadsheet. With it’s similarities to Excel, it’s a tool just about anyone could master immediately. Unfortunately, with about 160 rooms that needed to be recorded and about 30-40 fields for each record, entering data into a flat spreadsheet interface could quickly get unwieldy (and lead to errors).

What I really needed was a way to build a form to collect the data. Right around this time, Google introduced their form feature, which looked promising. But a closer examination proved it wouldn’t suffice. Information about rooms could potentially need to be modified by several people, and we needed a mechanism to update information once it was entered. Google forms don’t allow you to edit existing records.

I knew from previous experimentation about an online database service called Dabble, and that’s where I looked next. Dabble is a pretty powerful application that essentially allows you to create relational databases. Frankly, it’s a bit of overkill for the data I needed to collect at this point. I really just needed a table of information with a clear Web form for adding and editing information (no relationships really need to be defined), but Dabble looked like the best bet.

At this point, I started to settle on how to present the information once it had been entered. Dabble has a couple of options, but none of them was really right. There is a “raw” view that allows you to edit, filter, and view the data in a more-or-less spreadsheet form, but it would be way to confusing to ask all of our faculty to navigate. There is a form/page view, but that’s really designed more for entering and editing information more easily, not filtering and viewing it — at least not the way I wanted to filter and view it. And there is also a public data view that is just a spew of everything in the table — again, not very helpful.

Well, one of the great things about working in DTLT is that I have this amazing group of colleagues who regularly introduce me to technologies that capture my imagination. So at this point, thanks to Patrick’s previous work and evangilizing, I had a feeling I wanted to use Exhibit to do the presentation of the data. I love the way Exhibit allows you to easily put a nice visual front-end onto a set of data, and I was intrigued to learn more about how to customize the presentation of that front-end.

Now I needed to figure out how to get the data out of the tables in Dabble and into Exhibit. I knew that Exhibit could consume data from various types of sources, and I knew that Dabble could export data in a variety of formats. Surely, I could find some way to get them to talk to each other?

I started with what seemed like the simplest option. According to Exhibit’s Web site, it’s possible to use an Excel spreadsheet to feed data into the application — well, Dabble exports in Excel format! But, closer examination showed that Exhibit would require me to use the Babel translator on a copied selection of data, essentially converting a snapshot of Excel data into JSON. I wanted the data to be updated in real-time and reflected in the front-end presentation. Not because the data is to variable or time-sensitive but because I know everyone gets busy and more than likely we’d forget to do the snapshot uploads as often as needed.

The other format that Dabble exports to that looked promising was JSON, which is actually the data format that Exhibit requires. But closer examination of THIS option revealed that there is no one single flavor of JSON, and the kind that Dabble spits out couldn’t easily be converted to the kind Exhibit wanted. Rats.

The final option was a Google spreadsheet. Dabble exports to Excel, and that format can be uploaded into a Google spreadsheet. Also, it’s possible to fairly easily use a Google spreadsheet as the data source for Exhibit. However, my initial assessment of this (last spring) suggested that it was still going to require someone to regularly export the data out of Dabble and upload it into the Google spreadsheet. And the process for doing so wasn’t easy — cutting and pasting the data was cumbersome and often didn’t work properly in the spreadsheet interface.

At this point, sometime in mid- to late-March, events, so to speak, overcame the project. For various reasons it got put on the backburner, with information for about 98% of the rooms collected and languishing in the Dabble database, I was more or less stuck with figuring out how to get it out of that source and into a presentation that worked and, possibly, a different data environment for better management and upkeep.

Last month, I finally turned my attention back to this conundrum, determined to figure out a solution that would meet all of my requirements. This time, I focused my attention primarily on the Google spreadsheet middle layer. I believed that there had to be a way to use this tool to do the “translation” from Dabble to Exhibit, and I finally cracked the puzzle a few days before the holiday break.

The magic comes with a function in Google spreadsheets that imports data into the table from another source. There are a variety of formats that it accepts, but the one that ended up working for me was .csv (as it happens, another format that Dabble exports into).

I plugged the following formula into the A1 cell of a table, and voila!, I had data populated into spreadsheet cells.

=ImportData(”http://mburtis.dabbledb.com/publish/umwspaces/16435eb1-4dd8-4341-958c-5bbaea120140/spacesalldata.csv”)

At this point, there were just a few remaining questions.

First, I had no idea how “live” the data would stay. The Google documentation didn’t make clear whether the formula maintained a live connection to the data source, or whether it just grabbed the data once, dumped it, and was done. To test, I left the spreadsheet open and began editing the originating Dabble database. Lo and behold, I found that after a while the spreadsheet reflected changes to records as well as new records I added.

The next question was a strange one — and a bit existential. What would happen when the Google spreadsheet was closed. Or, to be cute, if a Google spreadsheet is closed does the imported data still make a sound? I wasn’t sure if what prompted the spreadsheet data to update was dependent on me actually having it open in a browser. Since I was just planning on using Google as the middle-layer in my Dabble/Exhibit sandwich, I didn’t really want to regularly mess with (or even open) it.

So, I closed my eyes and my spreadsheet, made some more Dabble edits and waited to see what would happen in Exhibit. To my delight, Exhibit picked up on and began displaying new and edited records. Things were looking good.

The last problem I needed to solve was sort of a nit-picky one. In order for Exhibit to know what to do with the data, it needed to exist in fields that were labeled with a particular field name. Basically, the field name has to live between two curly brackets: {field1}. When I imported the data from Dabble, it was getting assigned the field names from that application and I didn’t have that generic {label} field. I guess I could have changed all the field names in Dabble, but I didn’t really want to do that — I thought it would make Dabble less user-friendly for users entering information.

So, I decided to do some transformations in the Google spreadsheet. I simply created another sheet, put the field labels I needed in the first row, and linked the cells on the second sheet to the appropriate cells on the first.

The final step in this Dabble-Google-Exhibit dance was to publish the Google spreadsheet and use it as the data source for my exhibit.

If you’ve followed along so far, well. . .wow. I’m impressed. Here are some links as a reward:

* The original Dabble DB public data view: Currently, I’m using Dabble’s default, free account. You get a limited number of users with this kind of account and your data has to be public (CC licensed). That’s fine because I didn’t need a lot of user accounts for the data entry and I’ve got no problem with the licensing because the final product is public.

* The public Google Spreadsheet : With data imported from the Dabble DB via a .cvs export.

* The Exhbit presentation: Based on the data in the Google spreadsheet (via RSS/JSON) with few modifications (fields names, etc.)

There still a bit more to do. I need to finish tweaking the Exhibit front-end, and we’ve got a bit more work to do on the data. I’d also like to create parallel presentations for labs and computer carts (we have the data in Dabble; I just haven’t gotten through the other steps).

In the end, I’m really glad I was able to figure out how to make this work. I feel like I’m using each of the tools for what they do best (for my purposes). That said, there are now multiple points of failure and it feels a bit like it’s held together with shoestrings and duct tape. Also, my testing was on a small set of data; I have no idea how this is going to hold up under the increased pressure of a larger data set. Time will tell.