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BuddyPress user test drive part 1

December 29, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 28 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.

testbp2

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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.

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NYSCATE Presentation: Open Source Web 2.0 Applications

November 26, 2008 in open source, Technology | 7 comments

On Tuesday, November 25, I presented Open Source Web 2.0 Applications at the New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education (NYSCATE). I was very excited to share some of what I have learned in the past year regarding web based applications such as WordPress, Elgg, Pligg, Posh, Gallery, and many others.

I was concerned about the timeslot–the last session on the last day of the conference. I was delighted to find the conference room nearly full when I began to present. I was also pleased to see a few people that attended my presentation last year.

You can hear the presentation Open Source Web 2.0.

Click through the presentation as you listen. (It will toggle between the first two slides until it has loaded. It’s a large file, so give it a minute.)

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Distance Collaboration

February 19, 2008 in open source, Social Networking, Technology | No comments

I teach in a remote Adirondack school in which elementary classes typically have 10-12 students. While this may seem ideal, there are benefits to having larger groups with which to collaborate. With such small groups relations can become static. The same students have the same classmates year after year. Hopefully on-line interaction will lead to face to face collaboration as well. I hope to broaden students’ community of learners.

I have contacted the fifth grade teacher in a neighboring school district with a similar situation and we plan to explore ways for our students to work together using Web 2.0 tools. I’m considering a variety of tools:

WordPress using the Prologue theme gives a quick, clean, easy-to-use, microblogging format that makes communication spontaneous and fast moving. Students can figure it out immediately and dive right in. I think that it may be particularly useful in quickly creating discussion–especially with small groups as it keeps all discussion in one place. I’m not sure that it has all the functions that one might want for extended collaboration, although the tagging helps. It would be great to find microblogging within more comprehensive packages.

I’ve have tinkered with Moodle for several months. Moodle provides a wide variety of tools: forums, wiki, blogs, quizzes–a wide variety of tools. I think it might be too confusing for beginners. Yet Moodle is a great LMS and has a lot of collaboration tools built in.

I just created a new Elgg installation using version 0.9.1 . I’m experimenting with the user interface. It is more like the traditional social networking software with friends, personal spaces, etc. While the interface may be more complex, I think it may be more familiar to users already familiar to social networking software. I’ll post more about elgg soon.

Wiki represent a degree of collaboration I hope to obtain. It could be free standing, within Mooddle, or Elgg. I am most familiar with MediaWiki.

To begin, I’ll probably stick with Prologue/WordPress. We have relatively few participants, so the microblog might be an easier way to keep a critical mass of comments flowing. Whether we progress to Elgg or Moodle depends much upon my experiments with Elgg in the near term.

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Prologue and WP Hacks for School Microblogging

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

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Prologue and Student Twittering

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Social Networking, Technology | 2 comments

I got my students to try out the Prologue installation today. They really enjoyed it and took to it instantly. Conversation was wild and somewhat unfocused at first. Before I knew it, there were twenty odd posts. I directed them to feel free to socialize, but I’d want them to avoid totally frivolous posts that would be of little or no interest to the “community.”

As I see it, there are two ways to respond–either by creating a new post, or by creating a reply. They all started by just creating new posts until I pointed out that they could click the comments button to respond. Now that I reflect upon what has been done so far, I’m not sure what is best. By creating a new post, all information is right there on the page–more like twitter itself. By using comments, more “starting posts” are visible and you can click on comments if they interest you.

I look forward to seeing how much it is used after school and on weekends , and how the usage evolves over time. Of course, I will prod it in certain directions.

Here’s the promised zipped file of Prologue. It is the latest update. I will try to keep it reasonable current until it becomes generally available in this form.

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