On the drive home from VCU today, Gardner’s wife Alice was sharing some research she was doing on old music manuscripts, some of which had markups written on them. She asked if we knew where the word “rubric” comes from – as we should, since rubrics are those necessary instruments (to some) for teaching. Well, […]
creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Holbrook
Now that the Thought Vectors site is out and running (36 blogs syndicating in, 11 of them from registered students, not bad for the day before class starts), it’s time for a bit more of the techie WTF does that do post, in line with previous posts on such syndication hub sites.
WARNING: This post is long and full of jargon. I would like to explain it in a style to be universally understood, but life on this planet is only so long. And hey, did you think I was writing thix blog all these years for you? Silly reader, this writing is for me me ME ME.
In response to the idea that a flow of posts from a large community is more than anyone can digest, I’d been contemplating following up on Martin Hawksey’s brilliant work on the octel site and others to make something more like Google Reader (RI) (/me shakes fist and curses at Google, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL). My interest in being able to do this clouded what Gardner Campbell reminded me, smacks head on table- a Feed Reader is not a beautiful site, one that leverages the media and payout of sites that get people interested in reading.
So less than two weeks ago, Tom Woodward and I got on a Google Hangout and started going through themes they already had available– they have a subscription to Woo Themes. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with modern WordPress themes- they have come with a huge amount of overhead to make admin interfaces. I counted and one I used for another project had over 250 files in it- the crusty old Headspace theme here has like 35. They also can make it hard to do customization (let me tell you how inelegant Elegant themes are).
I blame ds106. Three years plus in and out of the open digital storytelling course and my free floating mind goes to visual association. Seeing the Thought Vectors site starting to light up (24 blogs in the mix now, and first wave of students Hello Worlding into the mix) – and I saw a cartoon […]
creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by dvanzuijlekom As a kid my Mom would ask me what present I wanted for the holidays or a birthday. “Present” being so singular, I thought I gamed the system by asking for a “big box full of a whole lot of little toys”. She always […]
The lights are on, flashing, and content is spinning around. On Friday afternoon, Tom Woodward flicked the server lights on a site we have been co-building over the last few days, maybe 2 weeks. We were able to use a staging server on wpengine which meant we had a public facing “coming soon” site, and […]
Tom Woodward and I pressed the liftoff button a few hours ago and set out the Thoughtvectors open course site into the web breeze. We have been making a lot of iconic use of the classic Doug Engelbart photo (circa 1968) where he is making an emphatic point: So.. we not have some fun and […]
creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by — Slavin More tinkering goes on with the ds106 Assignment Bank as a wordpress theme (watch it change as often as flickr at http://bank.ds106.us), thanks to the work being done by Karen and Brad on a new version for the Making Connected Learning MOOC. Again […]
creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Rochelle, just rochelle What are you saying when you are not saying anything? It’s among many complicated things we tend to oversimplify. I missed the incident that spawned #YesAllWomen — One might make akin to Faking Cultural Literacy, but my tea leaves are generated from […]
I’m not quite sure anyone will ever end up using the DS106 Assignment Bank WordPress theme, but that won’t stop me from working on it. My big takeaway from the experience that its one thing to build a site or tool for yourself or someone for a single purpose, but creating something that other people […]
creative commons licensed ( BY-SA ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog As part of my fellowship for the OER Research Hub at the Open University I am sharing these excerpts from conversations about OER use/creation recorded in April 2014 with faculty at the Maricopa Community Colleges. This is the third of the six that should/will […]
