Do you really know where your next blog post will come from? Mine kind of pop up like… driving down the road with a destination in mind, and an curious road sign appears. How can you not take that turn? Is that critical you get to Palookaville by 4? Mine started with (like many) a […]
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by postaletrice
Greetings from ds106! We are in the second week here of the Spring 2013 (yes in Canada, this is a winter semester, sigh) University of Mary Washington course. Last year, the first time through teaching this class in person, I attempted to do audio reflections á la the great Scottlo (where is that dude?). That was interesting, but time consuming.
So this semester I will start a series of reflections of teaching the class. I already gushed about the first impressions of my students.
The first two weeks is something Martha and I coined last semester as “Bootcamp”, where in week 1 and week 2 we focus on all the logistics and setup they should do to be proficient in their blogging and media producing the rest of the semester.
I tried a weak housebuilding analogy – week 1 is putting in the framing and foundation; week 2 is painting it and filling in the decoration touches, in in very short time, the neighborhood will not look at all like one of those cookie cutter housing divisions.
It’s a lot I throw at them and was even asking myself this week if it is too much. Maybe 6 students dropped (4 new ones added). They get frustrated. One thing I wanted them to do is have a better understanding of their UMW Domains control panel. usually once they set up a domain and install a blog, we never go back there. I hope to interject some tasks through out the semester to have them use other things there (this week I had them set up a forwarding email address).
Also in the house building analogy, I am making them set up their ds106 blog as a subdomain- after class, it makes little sense to have this as a primary site. I want them to understand how to create not just one online space, but to know how to do several. I am asking them to install a second copy of wordpress at their primary domain, and throughout the semester to go back and make that one more of a welcome card site (I suggested a few free themes that would work well for that).
By Monday when I was reviewing their sites, i could not be more pleased. Blog posts were titles like “phew” “Bootcamp Game Me the Boot” and “Why I Never Fit inside the Computer Science Department”. But after those first sentences, they all pretty much accomplished the set up, the blogging, the media embedding, using categories.
cc licensed flickr photo shared by cogdogblog I’ve milked this story plenty of times before- during a 2007 workshop in Tasmania, I used as an example of the power of unexpected connections, someone the year before had commented on a flickr photo I had tagged as “unknown” and told me the kind of flower it […]
cc licensed flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk Yikes, where did the time go? I’ve let slide the next piece in my now fractured series on using the custom post types added in WordPress 3.0. As a recap, what I am sharing is what I learned back in April (using the beta version of WP3) […]
It’s well over a week that my first experience attending SXSW Interactive ended, and a blog post is just wriggling out. I wavered, wafted, and decided on a different, lazy (lame) strategy… to just soak it all in and write something prophetic later. Well, this will likely fall short on most accounts.
And this is also a year when I am trying a few conferences out of the normal education technology realm, so I was wanting to be more reflective and… okay, I am lazy.
The idea of doing detailed sessions posts was not all attractive; earlier in my blogging I would try and do session blogging, but am not enthralled at being a stenographer. Second, I decided on a new tech strategy- I left the laptop in the hotel, and “lugged” (meaning slipped it in a pocket), my new iPod Touch. The hangup there was the wireless network at the Austin Convention Center got bogged down, so even a quick tweet was a long affair.
I never thought of this benefit when I set out to do things regularly on the web, be it actually writing in your my space (that thing that seems to be now called newslettering, WTF), posting photos, even spewing to some social media platform formerly known as something else). In some, not nearly all or […]
If you stay at this old habit of writing in your own space (rather then handing it off to whacky billionaires?) a side benefit is being able to tap into your own past experiences. It’s much more than nostalgia, especially as my human memory banks tend to get leaky over time. Or maybe it’s just […]
This post is here mostly as I expect to forget this tidbit. Human memory freshness dwindles exponentially. Over in my work at the OpenETC I wrote a guide for using the Display Posts plugin. This most handy plugin lets you take control of where and how to display dynamically a list of posts, rather than […]
As alluded to last week, some expansions have come to the SPLOTbox media collector theme for WordPress. It made sense to add support for image-type media, making the SPLOTbox perhaps a bit broader than TRU Collector. This was relatively easy, so a SPLOTbox site can accept uploads of images (JPG, PNG, GIF), or add them […]
It’s felt like maybe as long as a week since I blogged something about SPLOTs… that’s a long span 😉 But in that time I have been doing some major banging on the tubes and pedals to add big new features to the SPLOTbox theme. This theme was one of the later ones done, and […]
