Agenda:

7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:45am WordPress Basics and Class Blogging Tips 
Speaker: Baynard Bailey, Academic Computing Consultant, Vassar College

This presentation will provide a brief overview of WordPress and examine features that have made it so popular as a digital publishing platform, especially in academic settings. The presentation will provide a range of strategies and best practices when using WordPress in support of faculty projects and class blogs.

9:45am – 10:30am Building a WordPress Culture on Campus One Blog at a Time
Speaker: Ben Harwood, Instructional Technologist, Skidmore College

WordPress empowers community members with its ease of use, flexibility and creative potential. Not only used as a handy tool to generate websites and blogs, but it increasingly draws faculty and students away from the cookie-cutter dullness of traditional LMS’s. This session will highlight examples of academic and administrative sites that represent how the Skidmore community has embraced and customized its self-hosted WordPress multisite instance. Since moving to WordPress more than three years ago, we’ve learned a lot about themes, plugins and hosting options and will share stories about the joys and challenges of maintaining a healthy WordPress production environment. Newcomers to WordPress and veterans alike will have the opportunity to chime in with their own experiences.

10:30am - 10:45am Break

10:45am – 11:45am The Personal Domain: Students as Authors and Administrators of their Education
Speaker: Michael Branson Smith, Assistant Professor of Communication Technology, Director of Academic Computing and Educational Technology, York College/CUNY

This presentation will analyze the implementation of a program, now in its third year at York College, that has Communications Technology majors register domain names and use a commercial web hosting service with a control panel allowing for easy administration of their web sites, including the installation of Wordpress. The explicit goal of using the domain is to develop an online identity in the context of their academic work, narrating their process, and networking with a community of peers to support their growth. This practice begins with students participating in the open online course DS106 – Digital Storytelling created by Jim Groom out of the University of Mary Washington. The experience continues through their academic careers as students revisit and refashion their websites reflecting their appreciation of the importance of managing their digital presence in a networked society.

11:45am – 12:30pm Lunch

12:30pm – 1:30pm The Threshold of Duckness: Evolving a WordPress Instance at an R1 University
Speakers:
Trip Kirkpatrick, Senior Instructional Technologist, Yale University
Pam Patterson, Senior Instructional Technologist, Yale University

In 2008, the Instructional Technology Group at Yale started using WordPress for and with some brave instructors. (Though WordPress and blogging were not the latest thing, we work in a pedagogically conservative environment, so "brave" was still apt in 2008.) Over the succeeding five years, we moved from using a one-off instance for each instructor to customizing a WordPress MU instance with home-grown plugins to having over 1400 sites including courses, labs, administrative entities, student groups, professional presence, and more. We've gone from doing it (almost) all ourselves to relying heavily on Yale ITS infrastructure and system administration. While there have been bumps in the road, we think that we've learned something about when to seek professional help.

1:30pm – 2:30pm Creating a Prior Learning Assessment e-Portfolio System on WordPress
Speaker: Steve Covello, Rich Media Specialist/Online Instructor, Granite State College

The Individualized Studies department at Granite State College (USNH) needed to develop an e-portfolio system for students to present their case for receiving degree credit for non-preapproved prior learning, including workplace training and other college-level learning from life experience. This presentation will show how a low-cost WordPress-based e-portfolio blog system was developed to simplify e-portfolio construction, centralize information, reduce labor intensity, and streamline access for all participants. The result is a highly focused narrative of student experience with minimized feelings of overload.

2:30pm – 3:00pm WordPress Round Table and Wrap-up

3:00pm End