Shelley Keith

So I’ve gone into my WPMU project a little and briefly mentioned the BuddyPress university community site currently in process. Now I’d like to touch upon how these projects plus existing social media tools can be used to support online education initiatives at my university.

Today, we’re really just scratching the surface of online/distance education. Last summer we released a completely new distance ed support site that essentially offers some step-by step registration help, links to campus resources, and FAQ info. It’s not a distance learning recruiting tool or a hand-holding retention piece, but it is progress.

The existing distance ed site is in WP, so the migration to WPMU won’t be much of a stretch. The big bonus here is going to be the opportunity to get more of the faculty currently teaching distance classes involved in the day to day distribution of the information given to distance students/prospects. The act of migrating will allow me the chance to sit down with the committee again and pitch the use of Twitter, Google Calendar and the university community site (for starters). I’ll also get to dig into some WPMU only plugins and features that may help bring the University into this century.

The BuddyPress community site could see heavy use as a support/retention tool for the academic side. I’ve already seen incredible interest in using the groups feature to fill gaps in available campus services, specifically for non-traditional students. This group doesn’t operate the way traditional students do, and therefore aren’t able to make a standard campus group work (nobody can nail down a time for meetings). An online group will give this demographic the opportunity to interact and get to know each other on their own time. Similarly, distance learning students are literally all over the map. They get very little interaction from campus outside Blackboard and the generic swarm of student email, so an online group could bring them together for, at very least, moral support.

Another campus initiative I find myself involved with is the Staff Development committee. The purpose is as advertised, to find ways to offer a variety of support and training to the staff. We’re all over-worked, so getting a large group of staff together for regular face-to-face training is impractical. It’s been left to me to find ways to offer online professional development opportunities that don’t cost much anything. The intention is to send a bi-weekly email newsletter containing, among other things, links to a tutorial or video considered helpful to our staff. All hail YouTube.

The combination of the WPMU (with the customizable universal dashboard plugin) and BuddyPress projects will also allow me, as sole web staffer, to support and assist my faculty and distance staff by letting me introduce useful sharing tools like Google docs, Slideshare, Twitter, social bookmarking and a huge list of great YouTube tutorials…all with no budget.

Inspirational links:

• How to create and RSS-enabled micro-blog with Twitter
• How to use Google calendar
• Twitter in plain English
• Social Bookmarking in plain English

So I’m going to talk a little more about the overall plan, expected plugin use, and managing some of the known hurdles.

The homepage:

In the last post, I mentioned my homepage issue. The current homepage is housed at www on a Windows box. I currently expect I’ll do a permanent redirect to the default WPMU blog for just the default.php page. One of the reasons is Featured Content Gallery. This plugin gives me an easy way to do something I’ve long been hounded for, linked images and movement, without Flash. I hate Flash. It’s deeply personal. I’ve tried to implement SmoothGallery, the script that spawned FCG, but it’s got javascript errors in IE7 and I just can’t get past it.

An issue I have with FCG and a WPMU homepage is that I’ll need the gallery to show images for and link to various places all over the collective University site. It appears that I’ve found an answer with Redirect, a WP plugin that simply redirects the user to a different URL based on the content of a custom field. This, plus an automatic post expiration plugin such as Post Expirator or Auto Delete Posts could go a long way toward filling my need and making the daily cleanup/maintenance fairly painless.

Calendaring:

I recently implemented Google Calendar campus wide. It’s been a positive experience, but getting upcoming events to display on plain php pages the way I want them has been a challenge. The RSS feeds can be questionable. Luckily, there are WP plugins that do great things with iCal feeds. Specifically, AmR iCal Events List appears to have promise. I’ll be able to widget an upcoming events feed onto the homepage and be done with it.

Additionally, since our Google Calendar setup has included a lot of separate calendars for different departments merged into various configurations, I’ll be able to use the plugin for many lovely department specific feeds. It also merges multiple iCal feeds…very handy indeed.

Misc:

• I’ll use one of a variety of RSS widgets to feed “news” & a text widget or two to manage static content. Site search will utilize our existing Google Custom Search and I’ll feed Google the new urls with a sitemap plugin.
• Moving the sites back onto the University network means I may actually be able to get the LDAP plugin working…wouldn’t that be a slice of awesome? Today, since we’re running separate WP installs, we’ve got separate logins for each.
• Universal header/footer plugins exist for WPMU that will alleviate the current php include thing I’m doing and allow me to manage the files within the admin AND use WP tags in them.
• I can have customized universal dashboards for all site admins. So, for example, I can push links to the video tutorials we’re working on directly to the people who need them.
• Universal update capability means no more 3 days of single install upgrading.

I’m working on 2 simultaneous project using WPMU. One is a BuddyPress implementation for the “university community” project. The other is using WPMU as CMS for an entire institution. This is what I’m going to briefly address here… I’ll also be documenting the process along the way.

Where we were:

When I took over 4 years ago the University web presence was 16k+ disjointed static pages using html “templates” with FrontPage as the software of choice. Various departmental staff were occasionally getting online and updating information. The result was a set of template files (images and all) for each department, broken links, and outdated Word and PDF documents where site managers had downloaded copies from another department into their site content rather than just pointing to the appropriate place. Though, in their defense, with every file being named XYZ-form-2005.ext it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d pointed to the right place, so what was the point? Oh yes, and until me there was NO dedicated web staff…nada.

From then until now:

There have been a couple of versions of things since then. I initially brought everything together using .asp includes for a quick and dirty unified template, installed a document repository to organize all of the .doc, .pdf, .xls, etc. documents together in one place, and took content control away from the departments. I needed to get a grasp on what was really out there, what was really needed, and do *something*  while I researched more long-term solutions.

As is usually the situation in reactive institutions like mine, something happened that spurred a change. We had an orientation program come into being that was going to require a LOT of site updates. I chose to put that site in WordPress so I could train the appropriate staff to make the updates and free myself from the day to day responsibility. It worked beautifully…and someone found out. Long story short, I’ve been putting new departmental site builds in WP for a year and it’s been very well accepted. Most of the departmental staff again responsible for their site content have been very happy, easily trained, and not required much additional hand-holding. I’ve done software updates and the occasional support call…not bad. I did this knowing it was an interim step and I was essentially putting our site content in an exportable format for whatever CMS we chose in the future.

The problems:

First, our internal systems weren’t WP friendly for a variety of reasons. We’re a Windows shop with limited resources, pretty crappy bandwidth and no real PHP/MySql expertise available to us. This led me to buy external hosting for testing purposes which ended up hosting the majority of our web presence when the WP wave hit. It wasn’t intended to go that way, but it did. Our IT dept. has been very gracious about it, but the director has always wanted these sites moved back on campus…and back onto the .edu.

Second, I’m running individual WP installs. When I started this WPMU wasn’t ready and couldn’t do what I needed it to do…or at least I wasn’t ready to figure it out completely.

Third, our .edu has to point to our primary Win server for a variety of reasons. There are still legacy .asp apps out there that serve a purpose, as well as a lot of /directories that can’t just disappear. Today the homepage and a few other key pages site on this machine, with links out to the rest of the site. IIS on this machine also does a whole lotta virtual directory redirecting.

The plan:

In the last couple of years significant upgrades have been made to our IT infrastructure. We’ve upgraded our bandwidth, bolstered IT staff, setup virtual servers, and generally improved our ability to adequately serve and support the site(s). Today we’re in process of setting up a Linux virtual server, MySql server, and a duplicate test space upon which to install, test, and manage WMPU as a full CMS for the University.

The install will be on a subdomain, web.saumag.edu, with each site on a directory, web.saumag.edu/communications. I’ve been struggling with the state of the homepage, as there are some things I could much more easily achieve with WP, but a Windows install isn’t really the best option.  I’m seriously thinking of making the primary WPMU blog the homepage, and just setting a permanent redirect on the Win box default.php page. This will only affect the “home” page while allowing the random .asp pages and faculty site directories to function normally.

Next step:

I expect I’ll be installing WPMU in the next week or so, as soon as I get the access and go-ahead from ITS. I’ll post when I know how that goes.

HighEdWeb 2008 was amazing.

I’m glad it’s been podcast or I’d be in trouble since I was running around like a crazy person pretty much the whole time. Met some really wonderful people…shout out to my peeps.

WP update

I just updated to WP 2.6.2. Been using it at work since release, but I tend to be slow to do things with Eironae. I also applied a new theme and installed a Twitter plugin since I’ve now become officially addicted.

ff0000;">Note to self: must remove that default logo and upload some new header photos…in my spare time

Wedding news

Date: Dec 20, 2008
Place: Umsted House B&B, Camden, Ar
Time: 4 p.m.
Site: http://www.mywedding.com/shelleyandchris

Well after hours of poking and prodding at Facebook, here’s what I’ve got to show for it.

To setup your page, click “Businesses” in the Facebook footer.

At the Business Services page, choose “Facebook Pages”.

Then you create your page:

You’ll be asked to establish what type of page (Education) and the name of the page (Your School). It’s important to note here that at this point, you can create a page for ANY organization…there’s no validation of any kind. This is a scary scary thing.

Your initial view will look like this. Most of the interface is classic Facebook.

When you click “Edit my page” you’re presented with this:

You’ll notice a new Applications Menu option, “Page Manager”. It wasn’t initially in the top 5, I had to drag it up from the lower hidden menu.

There are 3 applications pre-installed on your page: Events, Photos, and Video. You get the same photo album capabilities that individual profiles enjoy, and the ability to create semi-robust events. My only beef, I want to be able to put a URL in the event creation screen somewhere to link to more information (like our University calendar or news).

I did add the Feedheads app so I could pull our news and calendar feeds into the Facebook page, but a glitch in it has caused the results to show up on my personal profile instead of the University page. Mario Romero, the developer of Feedheads, has responded that they’re hoping to get the bugs out by the weekend.

I created additional admins by simply inviting my friends (i.e. coworkers and student employees in my office) to accept admin status. The process was pretty easy on my end, but they all had issues either accepting the invite or finding their way back to the page if they hadn’t chosen to “Add to my organizations”. These additional admins are not getting the “Page Manager” menu item at this point, it’s only if you actually created a page. This is a usability issue they’re going to have to work out. The UWebD list reports similar problems. Also, the page doesn’t show up in searches. Someone indicated they’re read something about 3 days before search would work, but I couldn’t find that info anywhere. I’ve put up an announcement as a “Share” within my friends and anticipate a little traffic from the curious.

I did experience an issue where the University hours were “forgotten” once, and I’m pretty sure this was caused by simply clicking on the “Basic Info” edit box and then navigating away without saving. Stephanie Leary of A&M reports the same problem.

The photo album app is going to be great for us as it’ll allow users to comment, hopefully generating some activity we’ve been missing out with our lack of a robust photo album. The problem(s) with the albums: (1) users can’t tag, (2) the photo purchase option is only available for those with admin rights (as far as I’ve been able to determine). For higher ed especially, the ability to tag and use photos the same way as individual profiles would be key. It might be important to note that unless a user chooses to become a fan of your school, they won’t even be able to comment on the pictures, and there’s no instructions indicating this at the photo level.

All in all I’m very excited, but it’s still a little green. They’re going to have to offer us some clarification, and beef up some of the places they left out (tagging…seriously). I think most of it is simple oversight, you can’t think of everything. I’m looking forward to seeing how they overcome and/or compensate for these issues. Until then, take a look at what we built in a day.