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MediaWiki embed in WordPress

December 30, 2008 in Blogging, Technology, open source, wordpress | 4 comments

Matt Leifer commented on my post about the advent of BuddyPress wondering if there was some sort of integration with a wiki and WordPress. His question aroused my curiousity as I use WordPress and MediaWiki. Indeed there is a very interesting WordPress plugin that works MediaWiki.

Append Wiki Page by Enej Bajgoric at the University of British Columbia is a WordPress extension that allows users to actually embed a MediaWiki page within an individual blog post. Install this plugin and a new option appears at the bottom of the edit post page.

wiki-inc

Simply type in the url of the desired wikipage and it appears in the post when you publish it. Here is a screencast illustrating its use. It includes edit links to the wiki, so that a reader could actually move from the blog post to the actual MediaWiki page and edit it if they have those priviledges. I first saw this on Jim Groom’s post/wiki on installing BuddyPress and wondered how he did it. In a round about way, I found out how.

I like this plugin and it generally works well. I think that it has a great deal of potential in education and documentation. My only problem is that it, for some reason, will not work correctly when I use it with wikis on my server. If I link to any other wiki page, it works fine. I can only assume it is because of some setting on my server. I certainly would like to resolve this (any offers for help gracefully accepted) as the Append Wiki Page plugin is a great tool.

Tags: mediawiki, plugin, wordpress

BuddyPress user test drive part 1

December 29, 2008 in Blogging, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 25 comments

BuddyPress has a trial site in which you can sign up for an account and give it a test run, much like the folks at Curverider did many months ago. It gives everyone an opportunity to experience the user interface. I signed up for an account and gave it a quick test drive. I will look deeper into the details over time. This is an overview of the registration, progile, and the blogs.

Going to testbp.org presents the following screen:

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Click on of the registration links to set up an account. You are then prompted to give a username, email address, reply to a captcha and to provide some profile details including an avatar. You are also given the option of just creating an account, or an account with a blog.

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If you selected the option to create a blog, you are prompted to give a subdomain and title for the blog, and have the option of allowing search engines to index the site or not.

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Next you are prompted to look for an email to activate your new account. Once you activvate your account, you are assigned a password and asked to crop your avatar. Once you log in, your are brought to your profile page.

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Notice the navigation on the left side displaying menu options, the submenus in the next column. Clicking on the “Blogs” option brings up a new submenu. Note the ability to create additional blogs.

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When you click on your blog, up comes something that should look very familiar to WordPress users:

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If you click on the site admin link, you are brought to the familiar WordPress 2.7 blog interface.

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As in WordPress you can customize the look using themes.

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Overall, with BuddyPress, the blogs have an individual identity outside of the BuddyPress installation in that they have an independent subdomain, and that they can be customized like any other blog.

Clearly, Elgg and BuddyPress are very different. While this is more of an overview than a comparison, it is easy for one familiar with Elgg to see that these two packages take very different approaches to what might appear the same when one simply looks at a list of features.

I plan to overview more BuddyPress user features in the future and look forward to a discussion of the merits of each.

Tags: buddypress, Elgg, wordpress, wordpressmu

Edublogs inserts content link ads in free blogs

November 11, 2008 in Blogging, Technology, open source | 4 comments

The popular “free” educational blogging site Edublogs has begun inserting inline content link ads in the posts of their free blogs. Once users are logged in, they no longer appear, but anyone view the blog sees the ads.

To disable the ads, one must become an Edublogs supporter costing $25 per year. There are other benefits such as more server space and Twitter integration. Alternatively, schools can set up Campus subscriptions starting at $900 per year for 100 blogs.

On the popular Classroom 2.0 site, teachers are registering shock and dismay at this unannounced development, saying that they feel “bamboozled.” Concern has been expressed about control over the content of these ads. Teachers and students have invested much into this blog platform and suddenly find the landscape has changed.

In fairness to Edublogs, the potential for advertising has been in their terms of service for some time–I looked into it many months ago. (You DO read the TOS before clicking I accept, don’t you?). In this tightening economy, the flow of easy captial has been shut off. The free hosted social applications need to pay their bills to keep their servers up and running and to pay staff.

I have always expressed concern about hosted Web 2.0 solutions for these very reasons. There is also the issue of data ownership. If one of these companies goes belly up overnight as has been the case with so many major corporations of late, what happens to your data?

The solution is free and open source software on either rented web server space, or on in-house servers. No, these are not “free” solutions, but they are inexpensive. Webhosting accounts can be had for as little as $5 a month and most offer ample resources for hosting your own Web 2.0 solutions. Furthermore, you will not find yourself blindsided by changes in policies and terms.

There are many options for software. Multiple blogs can be hosted on WordPressMU, Social Networks on Elgg, and the list goes on.

Stay tuned for more such developments and start studying up on free and open source Web 2.0 applications. As has been said so many times before: there is no such thing as a free lunch!

Tags: edublogs, Elgg, open source, web 2.0, wordpressmu, WPMU

Moderation and Student Blogging

October 9, 2008 in Blogging, Policies, Technology | No comments

Karen Fasimpaur and I have been discussing student blogging recently as we are mulling similar issues. She just posted a request for comments on her thoughts regarding moderation and student blogging.

She posed her main question: Should all student blogging be moderated? My answer is: It depends. Let’s look at some of the issues raised:

I am really conflicted about this. I believe strongly in the benefits of student blogging. I think that if blogging is done in a closed (non-public) environment, it isn’t really blogging and doesn’t have the benefits of writing for an authentic audience.

I agree that blogging done in a closed environment isn’t nearly as beneficial as publishing to the world at large. This is a separate issue from moderation. Indeed, in many settings, the only way you could allow students to publish to the open Internet is by having the posts and comments moderated. Policy makers are more likely to object to students publishing to the world at large if they are unmoderated.

In general, I think that teaching students to be responsible is a far better approach than trying to block or filter everything that might be dangerous. We should more time talking about 21st century skills and how to act prudently in the world that is out there.

I can’t argue with any of this. Unfortunately, we face the reality of filtering. I think it is a lazy approach, but that’s way it is. We must make a case for what we know is right, yet work within our constraints.

Also when making a district-level decision about blogging policy, the feelings of the administration, board, and community need to be considered. Or do they? Is this a cop-out? This has been keeping me up nights.

When we are using school and community resources, we have an obligation go beyond the feelings of the administration, board, and community. We need to have policies formulated by stakeholders and approved by the school board which represents the community. To proceed without doing so is risky.

We also must consider that when blogging from a school website, what students post represents the school–not just the individual. This could become a source of community objections putting the whole enterprise in jeopardy.

One of the most important stakeholders are the parents. How do they feel about all this? Before we ask them to sign a document, we need to do our best to educate them about the importance and benefits of creating an on-line presence and navigating the Internet. Risks and benefits need to be put in realistic perspective and fears may need to be dispelled. We want them on side. It may mean compromise.

There are options regarding moderation and range of audience. We need to find a shade of gray that works for all. Different settings may be needed for different students for any variety of reasons.

Here is another option. Perhaps students and parents that prefer unmoderated blogs could be allowed to create their blogs in another acceptable setting. This may allay fears about student mayhem on the school’s website, yet allow those preferring more freedom another choice.

Decisions regarding moderation depends on many factors. With a wide array of options it is not a matter of black or white.

Tags: Blogging, policy, students

Security Matrix: WordPressMU

August 16, 2008 in Blogging, Policies, Technology, wordpress | 3 comments

In my previous post about Web publishing security, I proposed the following security matrix:

While this is an oversimplification of the options, I think it gives a framework for making decisions on what web publishing software to deploy, when to deploy it as well as how. As an illustration of how this framework can be used and the potential complexity, we will examine the popular multiple blog platform WordPress MU. Another reason is that we have deployed WPMU in the past and there has been some debate about how it should be used if it should be used at all.

Out of the box, WPMU has two options for access to content: Open to the world and open, but blocking search engines and archivers. It has four options for moderation: Unmoderated, Posts only moderated, comments only moderated, and both posts and comments moderated. With WPMU, then, our matrix looks like this:

As one can see, there are already eight potential options in terms of access to publishing and content. While all the content can be accessed by anyone in the world through both choices, blocking search engines and archivers would significantly reduce access unless one has a link, or goes to the site directly.

WPMU has a plugin that I discussed in an earlier post called More Security Options. This plugin offers three more content access options: Community members (all users with accounts on the WPMU installation), Blog (People who are at least subscribers of an individual blog), and Administrators (only the administrators of an individual blog). The security matrix with this plugin appears:

There are now 20 options in terms of publishing and content access! Arguable, there are even more. For example one could choose to allow unmoderated comments, but restrict comments to logged in members of a blog. Clearly there is enough flexibility in WPMU to accommodate a wide range of Web Publishing Policies.

It is up to school tech committees to consider the ramifications of all of these options in terms of security, audience, and ownership and weigh the pros and cons of each before committing to a particular configuration. Teachers can then decide within the constraints of the school web publishing policy which option best suits their class. Publishing student content to the web is not simply as choice of yes or no. There are several shades of gray. These are not the only considerations and options for deploying this software. For further discussion, refer to my other posts about WPMU for more information on managing and securing the software.

Tags: policy, security, students, wordpressmu, WPMU

Experimental Prologue Microblog

February 14, 2008 in Blogging, open source | No comments

My students now have a Prologue microblog that they are using actively. I thought that I would also set up a microblog as a companion to this regular blog site for my own use and that of others.

Unlike the student microblog, this one is open for public viewing and comment. In addition, I set it up so that anyonce can register and post as well. I’ll leave it this way unless there are any problems.

Take a minute to view the Prologue counter-part to this site. Feel free to register and post yourself, if you would like to get a feel for microblogging.

Tags: blog, education, microblog, open source, prologue

Prologue and WP Hacks for School Microblogging

February 8, 2008 in Blogging, Social Networking, Technology, open source | 2 comments

I remain enthusiastic about using Prologue for school “twittering.” I was disappointed when it came to my attention that a regular self hosted version of WordPress did not have the option to keep the blog private by requiring a login to read. This is an important function for privacy of students in a school setting. I found a way to hack the wp-blog-header to make this possible. I tested it on a WP 2.3.2 installation and it works great. If you go to the blog’s url, you are presented with a login screen. Once a user has logged in, it brings them to their backend. While, I’d rather it bring them to the frontend, all they have to do is click the prominent “View Site” button. I’ll see if I can change that at a later time. Simply download the file wp-blog-header.php.zip, unzip it, and upload it via ftp to the blog’s main directory (public_html/wheveryourblogresides/

I also changed the Prologue user interface a little. The build I downloaded had a number and an “e” next to the title of the post. The Number reflects the number of responses. You have to click on the number to make a comment–not very obvious to my fifth grade users. I modified it so the word comment or comments appears next to the number. The “e” stand for edit. I simply changed the file to say edit instead. Download index.php.zip, unzip, and upload to public_html/wheveryourblogresides/wp-contents/themes/prologue. Make sure don’t put it in the main blog directory because it will overwrite the wrong file.

Another hack to create a more appropriate opening message was mentioned in the previous post.

Here’s a link to the files and the zipped Prologue. Just push the log in as guest button and the next screen will have links to the files.

Please let me know what you think. If there is interest, I’ll package the whole WordPress set of files up. I’ll also to continue to look for more ways to make this great theme work even better for those in a school setting.

Tags: education, prologue, twitter, wordpress

Prologue and Microblogging

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, Technology, open source | No comments

I have been intrigued by Twitter since going to our state Educational Technology conference. I know it has potential and I’ve been eager to give it a try. When Will Richardson blogged about the WordPress theme Prologue, I was excited. First, I am reluctant to use “hosted solutions” especially with elementary students. Secondly, we already have a WordPress MU installed on our server space.

The first obstacle was that the theme was not packed into a zip file as most templates are. I had to learn to use a subversion client to gather the file for the template (Subversion or SVN is very cool as I have discovered and I plan to explore this avenue more). Once I put the files into a folder to ftp up to the server, it is a simple matter of selecting the Prologue template. Next, I wanted to change the opening message. After a brief look through files, I found the text in line 13 of post-form.php in the template folder. I created accounts for my students and I was good to go–or so I thought. To make this work, users had to be set to “author.”

It is all working now and my superintendent has given me the go ahead to try this out with the provision that I keep it out of public view. Only the students and I can view the contents (Using the “More Privacy Options”) extension for WordPress). Students will give it a test run today. I’ll post later along with a link to a folder with all the Prologue files for easy download.

Tags: blog, education, microblog, subversion, twitter, wordpress

Gender and Blogging

February 4, 2008 in Blogging | 2 comments

While the sample is miniscule, I noticed a tremendous difference in the amount of blogging among my students along gender lines. No matter how you cut it, the girls create more blogs, longer posts, and more comments than the boys. This was surprising because the majority of the blogs that I have encountered were written by males.

I wondered whether this was a quirk in my classroom, or did this reflect a larger trend. Searching the Internet I found a research paper: Effects of Age and Gender on Blogging. This little tidbit summarizes their findings:

We have assembled a large corpus of blogs labeled for a
variety of demographic attributes. This large sample
permits us insight into the demographic distribution of
bloggers. We have found that teenage bloggers are
predominantly female, while older bloggers are
predominantly male.

This is consistent with what I have observed in my fifth grade classroom. While they each have a blog, the girls’ participation is clearly greater. They are more likely to comment upon their life in and out of school. They clearly view it as an extension of their existing social network–a way to keep in touch with their friends beyond their face-to-face time. This is particularly important as we are very rural and many students have limited opportunity outside of school. The research also reflects some of my observations:

Male bloggers of all ages write more about politics,
technology and money than do their female cohorts.
Female bloggers discuss their personal lives – and use
more personal writing style – much more than males do.

While the boys are enthused about having blogs, many seem to view it more like graffiti. They enjoy making their mark and showing everyone they have been there and are capable of showing it. The challenge is to increase their meaningful participation.

I wonder if other educators whose students have blogs have noticed the same trends. If so, then what strategies facilitate greater participation among the males in the classroom.

Tags: blog, gender

Students Start Using RSS

February 2, 2008 in Blogging, RSS, Technology, open source | 1 comment

I was satisfied with my trial of the open-source RSS reader Rnews. While it is not perfect, it has a very simple interface that was easy enough for my students learn. I installed the program on our school shared server space and set up accounts for them. Thursday, they started populating their account with feeds from their classmate’s blogs.

Rnews has a very simple, clean, no-nonsense user interface. It is not as cool as some might want it and it does not support themes. Changes of appearance can only be done by editing the css file. Students add feeds by clicking the blue plus sign on the upper right side (see below). There are a few other controls that are straight forward and students are unlikely to get themselves into trouble.

One problem with Rnews, is the lack of an administrative interface. To an extent, this program is so simple, there is little need for it. On the other hand, there is no way of monitoring the feeds to which the students have subscribed within the program. This can be worked around by examining the MySQL database through phpMyAdmin–which is fine if you have access. It works for me, although, it would be nice to be able to browse all accounts as an admin. Of course the lack of such features keeps this program nice and lean. Registration requires a secret pass phrase. Student must log in to their individual readers. There is no access without a log-in.

Students thought the RSS reader was very cool because they were able to see all the blog posts at once. After they logged into their readers, I modeled subscribing to feeds. Feed URLs must be typed in. Many students had errors with their first attempts, but soon became much more attentive to details and began typing more carefully. Since each feed required a url for the blog and one for the feed, students got plenty of practice with cutting and pasting shortcuts.

The kids see the utility of the RSS reader. They also like having their own personal account to manage. Between this and their blogs, they feel empowered. Students can publish and control a part of the web plus they can show their friends and parents. Next, I plan to give them some feeds beyond those of our class. I also plan on creating a class RSS reader using a more full featured platform. I hope to demonstrate the benefits of a class RSS reader to other teachers.

Rnews works fine–it gets the job done. I will continue searching for and testing other open source server side RSS aggregators for future applications. I look forward to seeing how this impacts my students.

Tags: blog, classroom, open source, rnews, RSS, Technology

RSS Readers for Elementary Grades

January 28, 2008 in Blogging, Technology | No comments

Now that the students have blogs, I think they will soon see the benefits of using rss readers. Instead of hunting through blogs that may or may not have new content, a rss reader could deliver any new content to the reader. Unfortunately, all the web based rss readers such as pageflakes and bloglines that I have encountered require a minimum age of 13 because of CIPA regulations.

Alternatively, local computer based readers would not be individualized. The only remaining option I can see is installing a server based rss reader that supports multiple accounts.

I’ve looked into a few possibilities for the open source community. Rnews looks like a good candidate because it has multiple users accounts allowing students to customize the feeds. It must be installed manually in that one must upload the files via ftp, create a database, and run an installer through a browser. The installation went smoothly, but I got a 500 error because of the .htaccess had a php override turning magic quotes off (not Kosher on my server). I tossed it out and all works fine. If I find there is an issue in the future, I’ll run a php.ini override.

The Interface is simple. It does not require an email address or any other personal information. Those wishing to register must type in a pass phrase to create an account. One issue is that it reports a permissions error even after I corrected it. Knowing that the permissions were correct, I hacked the error message oout of the file and it now looks fine.

There is plenty of research and testing to undergo before I settle on a solution. There is also the issue of how it will work with our school’s Internet filtering. Hopefully our filter will block the feeds coming in through the reader.

Tags: blog, classroom, open source, RSS. rnews

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Blogging

MediaWiki embed in WordPress

Edublogs inserts content link ads in free blogs

Moderation and Student Blogging

Security Matrix: WordPressMU

Experimental Prologue Microblog

Prologue and Microblogging

Gender and Blogging

Students Start Using RSS

RSS Readers for Elementary Grades

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