So it’s 4:30 in the morning and I am nowhere near ready to go to bed. So instead I did the final quality testing for my “add user widget” WordPress Mu plugin.

This plugin eliminates the question that I’ve been asked plenty of times “what if a student who is not in the class adds themselves to a course blog?”. I think the answer is simple (and I think Jim and Brian would agree with me)… just delete and/or ban the user. However, in order to eliminate this barrier on implementing course blogs I modified the plugin to allow professors to enter a list of student emails. If the student’s email is in the list they can then add themselves to the list. This means that in conjunction with my Add to BDP RSS widget that Professors or institutions can decide whether anyone can add themselves, subscribers to the WordPress Mu system or only users that are in a specific list. This will now work for all three of the course blog types that I created.

This plugin is a modification of sidebar add user widget by DSader. It adds a whole bunch of control functionality that allows admin to change who is allowed to add themselves to a blog and also what type of permission is allowed. It also changes the way that the widget appears depending on the user’s status. It was developed primarily for course blogs.

Final, final update:

WordPress. org has started to show OLT some love and we are now rapidly publishing all of our plugins there. The new direct link to download sidebar add user widget is here and the plugin page is here.

Final Update:

Now that OLT has a place to house its plugins I will no longer be maintaining add user widget on this site. Instead it will live on blogs.ubc.ca. The direct link is here.

Update: V1.2.4

Fixed the problem with the plugin not reloading user’s status when they first add themselves.

Update: V1.2

Changed the way restricting users works. Now the admin can simply set a password in the widget control menu and users who know the password can add themselves to the blog.

Download V1.2.4

Download V1.2.1

Download V1.0

Installation:

Just drop into the mu-plugins folder.

Any problems/suggestions just leave a comment

Baruch faculty and students are making some unique and innovative contributions to the educational blogosphere this semester. Our goal in supporting course-based usage of weblogs over the past year has been to produce various models and prototypes that can be duplicated and built upon as the technology becomes more widely deployed throughout Baruch. In advance of the BLSCI’s rollout of WordPress MultiUser at Baruch, I’d like to highlight the blogs we’ve helped launch in the past two months.

Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

Diana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.

Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography

One of the great strengths of open source products such as WordPress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by WordPress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.

Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making

Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical WordPress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.

Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”

Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch

Few fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”

Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.

So here they are, examples of the three kinds of blogs that I outlined in this post, as well as explanations for how to create them within WordPress MU. Jon has kindly let me use his Spanish 312 class as and example, so some of my examples are actually fully populated and active courses. (click on the headings to see the actual blogs)

Ghost Course Blog

This blog uses BDPRSS to output the content of an aggregated feed of the class. I created a widget to add to the list in BDPRSS so students can auto-populate themselves into the course. The other feature that I developed for this blog is an auto-populating class list (with the heading our class). The class list is the reason that I took so long to get these examples up and running. I spent a good chunk of this week working on an “add to blogroll” widget so that students could add links to their blogs in the sidebar. I tried many methods, but just couldn’t get the plugin to work. Gardner Campbell was paying a visit to UBC and while he was showing me some of the successes and issues that he has been having with his course blog Rock soul Progressive I saw that he was using the BDP RSS widget to display comments. A light bulb went on and I realized that I could simply tweak the widget to show a list of blogs in the course. Here is what you have to do:

1. Create and output format in BDP RSS that contains the same blogs as the one that is being used to display entries in the course.
2. In the “output format types” section select the radio button that says “list by sites alphabetically”
3. In “about the items” set “maximum items per site” to 1, check “print site names” and “only display item’s title”. Uncheck “print the item’s age”

in the “XHTML formatting” section, add list tags around “title for each site” and comment tags around “each item’s title”. (see picture )

If you add the BDP RSS widget for the output to the sidebar then you create a class list.

Spam Course Blog

This blog uses a spamblogger (I’m using feedWordPress because it actually updates posts if they are changed in the original feed) combined with BDP RSS to quickly create the course. Basically what happens is a feed aggregated by BDP RSS is fed into the spamblogger and feedWordPress republishes it. I have three reasons why I run the feeds through BDP RSS before I feed them to the feedWordPress:

1. I’ve already created my Add to BDPRSS widget to add feeds to BDPRSS. If I wanted students to add their own feeds to the spamblogger I would have to create another widget (and the widget would have to be specific to the spamblogger).
2. BDP works really well with a large range of feeds as well as with a large number of feeds. It acts as a kind of normalizing process, ensuring that each entry is parsed in the same way.
3. It allows for the auto-generation of a class list as described for the ghost course blog.

Communal Course Blog

This Blog is the simplest to set up and is probably closer to what most faculty members will imagine when they think of a course blog. I simply use the sidebar add user widget to add authors and the Wp-Authors widget to display the class list. Quick and simple. My example isn’t as good as the others simply because all of the content had to be written from scratch (or copy pasted from Wikipedia). K1, one of the work study students at OLT was kind enough to post a few items under different authors to show how this kind of course blog would look.

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A fourth option is of course mashing the Spam Course Blog and the Communal Course blog together, thus giving students the option over whether or not they want to have their own course.

If there is anything that I am missing in my thinking here, please let me know.

Some notes on policy and where I’m going from here: As I have been making these ways for students to self-populate a course, the question keeps on coming up “what if people who don’t belong to the course add themselves”? At the moment the sidebar add to BDP widget gives three levels of permission, global (anyone), system (on the same MU system) and blog (subscribers to the blog). I will be working on changing the “add user” plugin to accept a list of people (I’m thinking student numbers or emails?) and check those against people who are trying to add themselves to a blog. This would mean that a professor could just paste a list in the control of the widget and not have to worry about people who are not in the class adding themselves. Then to close off the spam and ghost course blogs one would set the sidebar add to bdp widget permissions to “blog” and display the add user widget forcing students to add themselves as subscribers to the blog first so that they can be checked off against the class list before adding their feed.

Here is my first WordPress plugin. It is meant to extend the excellent BDP-RSS plugin by Bryan Palmer. This plugin allows users who are logged in to a WordPress MU system to add feeds to the BDP-RSS feed aggregator from the sidebar. It is primarily designed to allow students to add the feed of their own blog to a class aggregate blog.

Please let me know what you think.

Installation:

Just download, unzip, then drop the plugin into your plugins->BDPRSS folder and activate in the plugins menu.

Update: For some reason the control is not saving the options properly. I’ll fix it on Saturday morning.

Update: Version 1.2 released.

Changed the way that permissions work.

• Simplified things by only allowing registers users of the community to add their feeds.
• Gave admin the option of password protecting a blog so that only users who know the password can add feeds

Download V1.2

As always, let me know what you think of the changed.

Update: Version 1.1 released.

• Fixed subtitle bug
• Added control over what type of user can add feeds.
  • Global: Anyone can add a feed
  • System: Anyone on the Mu System can add a feed.
  • Blog: Only a subscriber to the specific blog that the widget is on can add a feed.
• Made it so that if a user cannot add a feed, they don’t even see the text box.

Download V1.1