I just completed the “rough” migration of my website into WordPress 3.0. I’m wrapping the weblog and the pages all in one blog. I’ll post the procedures once I finish tying up all the (very) loose ends on the project. For example, I just realized that I deleted the files that were controlling my CSS-switching experiment, a 4-5 year effort that I’d hate to lose just because I’m moving to WordPress for the site. Repairing the damage will take a little time. (Major ouch!)

What’s good about this move?

• I get Web 2.0 functionality and the database web moving forward.
• My weblog is integrated with the rest of my site.
• With WordPress 3.0 I can roll multiple sites/blogs into a single install, and manage them from one admin panel.
• This enables me to move all my course sites into WordPress (going forward). I experimented with WP-driven course sites in Spring 2010 and I mostly liked it.

What’s not good?

• My focus on content migration took my eye off design. I have a “designed” site, to be sure. But it has a very bloggy (or blocky?) look/feel to it.  In time I’ll push this issue, starting with experiments in course website.
• Lots of up front work to move things.
• Errors will be huge. (Let’s hope I don’t err.)

Last week my wife and I made the move from Palm to Android. It was sad to see my venerable Treo go, but it really wasn’t cutting it any longer. No wi-fi or GPS (in 2010!). And while it had good bluetooth functionality, the IR port on it just screamed retro. (People in IT literally laughed when I pulled it out of my pocket to schedule a meeting or check an email.) While I have yet to box it up and sell it back to Sprint (for $10 – ouch!), it’s done.

The new hotness (for me) is the HTC Evo, a candy bar of a phone with a 1 ghz processor and a 4.3″ display. It would seem huge to just about anyone in the market these days.  But it’s actually about 2/3 as thick as my Treo and not all that much larger. HD video, 8 megapixel camera,  GPS, wi-fi, and so, so much more. I’m still working my way around this beast, but it is so nice and super responsive.  I used the GPS (my first GPS experience, really) on a Maine trip and I might as well have a Garmin since the screen is about the same size.  Spoken turn-by-turn directions courtesy of Google.

And today, after discovering that my wi-fi will be a bit spotty in my Maine residence, I decided to try to use the phone to establish a wi-fi connection via USB tether. June Fabrics’ PDAnet on the Mac and on the Android. 5 minutes of installation and setup. Voila! (The image in this post comes from the June Fabrics site.)

You’re reading a blog post made from the Mac via USB tether. How’s that for cool? (Yes, I have the WordPress app for my phone and  I can post that way. But the point here is to test my ability to conduct “real” work from a 15″ screen  via my phone’s data connection. Done.)

Looks like it won’t last through the next OS update. I’ll have to think about that data plan add on, or find a reliable hotspot.

I took a test drive with WordPress 3.0 today. I installed it on my server, set up the Network capability, and took a shot at creating a couple test blog sites with the install. So far, so good. I also tried out the child theme feature recommended for theme customizations. That element also seems to be working fairly well.

After tweaking the CSS for the test “child” theme by mocking up a recreation of my main website, I’m now contemplating a wholesale adoption of WordPress for my entire website. I’m a little nervous about such a move, though I can easily see how it makes sense.

I have yet to push enough 3.0 buttons to decide if I really want to go “all in” on WordPress as a CMS for my site.  My current design is pretty tired, having been written back in 2007 and 2008.  If I’m actually going to write a new CSS for my site, I might as well consider doing it in WordPress. Hmm.

WordPress v.3 has now been released and I’m intrigued. This spring I ran two course websites in WordPress.  Previously, I had always built sites in Dreamweaver. The WP approach makes it much easier to build in RSS, and to add Web 2.0 functionality right in my single course site.  I no longer had to build the course site, and the blog as a separate site.

My success this past term got me thinking to the next 5 years, and to installing WordPress Multi-user (WPMU) on my server space.  This would enable me to build multiple course sites in a single WP installation.

With WordPress 3, it seems, I can simply upgrade to 3.0 and get multi-site functionality. The WPMU community that has grown up over the years may not be so happy about WP pulling multi-user functionality right into the core, and I can understand the sentiment given all the work in WPMU Dev, and elsewhere.

For me, this might be just the ticket. I wasn’t looking forward to getting WPMU running on my server, though I don’t expect it can be that difficult. WordPress’s “5-minute installation” just reduces all that worry – or so that’s the hope.

I was blown away at our last department meeting when it concluded with a farewell cake and much well-wishing as I prepare to leave York College for a new position at the University of New England in the fall. The cake was beautiful and delicious, and the card everyone signed left me sad to leave my colleagues. They’re just wonderful.

Deep took some pictures and sent them to me, and I’m posting them here so I’m reminded of my soon-to-be-former colleagues with each posting.

On March 3, I presented an assessment-based picture of writing at York College/CUNY. This talk was something I had been looking forward to for more than four months, and is a much more elaborated version of a talk I gave at the Provost’s 2010 Academic Leadership Retreat in late January. Following the talk, it was suggested that I make the talk available. So here it is.

I just learned that The Jump (Journal of Undergraduate Multimedia Projects out of UT-Austin) has accepted one of Anna Charles’ projects for publication in its upcoming issue.  Anna is one of the Communications Technology majors at York College, and I couldn’t be more excited for her.  I’m also excited for the CT program, and for Daniel Phelps, the Television Studio Director at York and Anna’s teacher for the project that will be published.

Her project is a great, short public service announcement-type film. I blogged about it a couple months back, as soon as I saw the film.Anna works as a studio consultant in the E-Writing Studio on campus, and assists students with their ePortfolio projects.

The work Anna has done in this film is actually work that is well within the range of our CT majors. I see this acceptance as a good sign that more CT majors can find publication venues for their work, perhaps even in The Jump.

Writing Across the Curriculum often purports to promote and develop a “culture of writing” on a campus. I’ve never really been sure what that sort of culture would look like on the ground.

• More students writing in more classes?
• The number of courses with some designation as writing intensive?
• Widespread faculty involvement in writing instruction in courses throughout an institution?
• Healthy submissions to on-campus student publication venues?
• Something else, or a combination of evidence?

I’ve always been somewhat uncertain about what I’d accept as signs that a campus has developed such a culture. At least until recently.

In 2008 I advocated for my school to participate in the 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the 27 supplemental writing questions developed with the Consortium for the Study of Writing in College. My aim was to get some comparative perspective on what our students do with writing in classes. Accustomed to seeing data showing that York is “not yet” on par with her sister institutions, I was not confident we’d find signs of a writing culture on campus. This despite a robust set of writing requirements for graduation, a decade of WAC, several student publication venues on campus, and more. Call it skepticism, I suppose.

In the words of Richard Dawson from Family Feud, “Survey Shows”

Freshman Writing Assignment Mean Scores

These are impressive mean score differences in some of the most important elements of the writing process, with most of them highly significant and all of them pointing in the desirable direction. On a potentially less upbeat note, York students seem to proofread their work at the same rate as freshmen across the country. (But I’ll take that finding any day of the week, and twice on Sunday!) The day I saw these data I started saying that York has a culture of writing.

When I looked at another set of responses, those having to do with good writing instructional practices, I really had no choice but to “feel” like the faculty teaching freshmen also participate in this culture of writing!

Freshman Instructional Practices Mean Scores

These mean scores are less dramatically different from the national mean than are the first set of scores.  But there is no denying that York freshmen report that their instructors employ best practice writing instructional techniques that meet or exceed the use of such practices nationally.

The strength and directionality of these mean score differences blew me away, and I’m paid to be a cheerleader for writing and for writing instruction. Live and learn.

I’ll be sharing these data with a group of campus leaders early next year. I hope they’re as encouraged and impressed as I am.  Faculty on campus are doing great things!

The 1 Train to City College

Friday’s WAC Professional Education event at City College was another great success.  The writing in the disciplines theme was perfect, and we had some very strong workshops.

The panel featuring four second-year Writing Fellows really illustrated just how much Fellows grow in their time with WAC. We saw some great examples of assignments that include “disciplinary writing” in sociology, psychology, history, and even comic book illustration.

I especially liked the way the Fellows did not present the standard “analytic” academic (or research) paper as disciplinary writing.  While not quite Alt/Dis in the sense that compositionists might imagine, these were nice assignments/activities that worked a little out of the traditional box.

The WAC Coordinators meeting that preceded the day’s event was perhaps less successful.  We’re working hard, and from behind the 8-ball, to reimagine the Writing Fellow roles in response to the Graduate Center’s decision to reconfigure the fellowships from a 2-year gig to a 1-year appointment that serves as the capstone for the 5-year funding package known as the Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Perhaps the high point of that meeting was the work done by the committee imagining ways to front load writing pedagogies in the early years of the fellowship.  While perhaps something of a pipe dream, such a reimagining holds the potential to enable CUNY graduate students to have a sustained, multi-year engagement with pedagogical theory and practice.  In my own group it was nice to hear that some of the other schools are adopting a model like the one we’ve moved to, a kind of project-based conception of Writing Fellow work. It’s a great group of colleagues, and we’re all committed to the work.

Roundtable: The Future of WordPress in Education (11/14/09)

WordCampNYC 2009, held at Baruch College/CUNY this weekend (November 14-15) was a HUGE success, though I did find it to be something of a WordPress lovefest. I guess that’s to be expected when hundreds of folks who have chosen WordPress as their web publishing platform come from hundreds of miles to hang out and talk shop.

As an academic involved in advancing WordPress as an ePortfolio platform on campus, I stuck to the Academic Track in the program. The academics at WordCamp appeared to me to be dwarfed by the developers, newbies, and others.  The audience in the panels I attended hovered around 25 folks, and I got to meet some interesting faculty doing pedagogically valuable things with technology.  The entry point for discussions was WordPress, but we didn’t stay there.  As an academic, I often find that panels can get boring because they run on too long.  The opposite was true at WordCamp.  I regularly wished there had been more time for Q&A, though this was due to short sessions and an engaged audience, not rambling by the presenters.

Here’s a run down of some of the panels I attended, and some of the issues discussed.

Luke Walzer

It’s all about the FRO, man! Luke talked about how the Baruch freshman year experience folks got into the idea of blogs in the Freshman Seminar, about how 1600 Baruch freshmen are now blogging this fall, and about how their using what he called a “mother blog” to aggregate the individual posts in each seminar.  What a cool potential model for the York freshman seminar!  Diffusion of innovation, anyone?  That’s so cool!

Jeremy Boggs

Jeremy focused on ways to use WordPress for research and search management, and explored the possibilities that WordPress could become a vehicle to manage and aggregate online research. He also observed the ways that CommentPress, a WordPress plugin, might be used to encourage paragraph-by-paragraph critical reflection.  CitationAggregator apparently makes it possible to aggregate cites from one’s various accounts around the web. And while I do not know the plugin Headup, Boggs explained that this tool reads your post as you write and can pull in relevant content from the web.

Tom Woodward

Tom’s presentation on WordPress in K-12 contexts was a real eye-opener.  This was a presentation that got me thinking about publishing and elementary students, particularly my own children and their school. Hmm.  I’ll be talking with fellow PTA members.

Dave Lester

Dave Lester’s presentation focused on ScholarPress, a plugin that he and Jeremy Boggs collaborated on.  ScholarPress essentially turns course website development into a matter of completing form fields.  I didn’t find it particularly interesting for my own purposes, with the notable exception of the potential for the importing of bibliographic material into a 15-week schedule. Mostly, I’d just make my course website so that it looks the way I want it to look.

I did find both Courseware and WPBook to be intriguing tools, and I’ll definitely implement WPBook for my Spring 2010 course if I decide to go with a Blog-based course website.  I still haven’t decided if I’m moving from my 3 year exploration of CSS style switching, with a steady accumulation of themes as each semester comes around.

Serena Epstein and Shannon Hauser

These two former students from the University of Mary Washington, current stomping grounds of Jim Groom, gave a wonderful interactive presentation that cast WordPress as an addictive drug.  Their presentation totally fit into the general WordPress lovefestiness of WordCampNYC. I even found myself participating, though I don’t have a problem with WordPress.  Hmm.

Roundtable: Future of WordPress in Education

The engaging discussion in the roundtable just went too quickly.  Privacy, choice, the possibilities for integration, the future of Blackboard, and more.

Joe Ugoretz and Lisa Brundage

Joe and Lisa showcased the great work with eportfolios under way at the Macaulay Honors College.  What can one say? Truly exceptional students with wonderful financial and technological support, taught by some of the most engaging faculty CUNY has to offer.  There are some outstanding portfolios happening in their platform, and it’s really nice to see what they’re up to. Intriguingly, I learned that faculty are actually using the blog platform to focus course projects.  This is something I WILL use in Spring 2010.  I’m thinking of a synthesis of Boggs’ ideas and Ugoretz’s ideas in my Writing for Electronic Media course.  Now I just need the project!

Stepping Out of the Ivory Tower

I had a nice lunch with a couple web developers from DC. We had some interesting discussions about open source CMS platforms.  I was intrigued because they were working to move clients to WordPress as an alternative to static, Dreamweaver-based sites or other CMS platforms available. Very pragmatic web developers coming to WordPress because of ease of client use and not because of WordPress evangelism.  I actually saw their presence at the conference as a sign that folks are opting for WP because it’s just good, and easy. These guys were just discovering WordPress MU, and I think they had just heard of BuddyPress that day.