The tag cloud above was generated by participants at CUNY WordCampEd, which took place last week at the Macaulay Honors College (click to enlarge).  Mikhail and I co-organized the event with Joe Ugoretz of Macaulay and Matt Gold of New York City Tech, and we were astounded that we had to close registration a week ahead of time.  When we started planning, we thought we might get 50 registrants, bringing together the folks like ourselves who’ve experimented with WordPress throughout CUNY and who believe deeply in the core components of our mission on Blogs@Baruch.  Instead, we had well over 100 folks who wanted to come, and though we had an overflow room with audio/video connections to accommodate the hordes during morning and afternoon keynote sessions, we still had to turn some away.

The desire to take part in this event — and, even more, the energy palpable at Macaulay throughout the day — are testament that something is happening at CUNY.  This feeling was present in December at the CUNY I(nformation) T(echnology) Conference, which paid more attention to instructional technology than it ever has before.  I think some of the same spirit and energy infused the 9th Annual Symposium, which for the first time, in my opinion, captured the richness and opportunity embedded in our shifting modes of communication.  At all three events, the Twitter backchannel produced what Boone Gorges has called a “catalytic effect” on the proceedings: collective reflection on the presentations by those on Twitter filtered back into the participation of the audience, which found its way back into the tweets, and so on.  I felt very little passivity at these meetings. (Here you can see Tweets for the Symposium and CUNY WordCampEd).

But Twitter only deserves a splash of credit for the sea of enthusiasm present at Macaulay last Friday.  CUNY’s BlackBoard disaster this semester (which you can read about in this piece from The Clarion) no doubt shifted some energy our way as committed teachers and administrators look for alternative edtech solutions.

We welcomed that sort of attention.

In the morning presentations, Jane Wells, from Automattic, pitched WordPress (a bit tongue-in-cheekly) as a “BlackBoard Killer” and emphasized the openness of the WordPress community to input from its users.  Her presentation captured all that we like about experimenting with WordPress: embrace of perpetual beta, humility, the celebration of collectivist approaches to problem solving, and the constant striving to improve. Dave Lester, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, presented ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that map course management functionality onto WordPress blogs (doing what BlackBoard does, but much more elegantly and affordably), and also talked about integrating Zotero’s research tools into WordPress.  Baruch’s own Zoe Sheehan Zaldana then wowed the audience with her wonderfully imaginative use of WordPress in photography and digital animation courses, embraced the potential of “shame” on the open web as a pedagogical tool, and emphasized the useful energy created when students participate in a unique space whose aesthetic reflects the work of their course.

Our good friend Jim Groom returned to CUNY like a prodigal son to give the afternoon keynote (“Open By Design”), and spoke eloquently and powerfully about how the role of the instructional technologist should be refined in today’s university, the centrality of “openness” to the mission of CUNY and how that should be reflected in our approach to supporting teaching with technology, and the opportunities self-publishing offer universities to train their students for the future.  He also threw a few good shots at BlackBoard, and raised the very important and underexamined question of why CUNY pours millions– that’s right, millions– of dollars into this clunker of a software instead of investing in the people who build the relationships and the models that inject such powerful energy into events like the IT Conference, the Symposium, and CUNY WordCampEd.  Thanks to Dave Lester, Jim’s talk is archived here.

This was a generative event, and it represented the congealing of a community around the shared idea that our institutions’ weight should be behind a scaling approach to support for educational technology that necessarily goes well beyond BlackBoard.  That box is simply not enough.  Rather than helping us explore knowledge and identity, nurture community, and pass on to our students critical approaches to engaging with information  — core components of a liberal arts education –  BlackBoard argues that education is a marketplace.  Here’s my money.  Give me my single sign on and my learning.

Clearly, the participants at CUNY WordCampEd have had just about enough of this, and are looking to Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaualay, the CUNY Academic Commons, and each other for alternatives. With that in mind, I’d suggest that the next stage of edtech at CUNY hold the following core principles.

Instructional Technology is not Information Technology
For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology.  We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities.  Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff.  But it’s not about teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.

There must be a close working relationship between CUNY’s information technology shops and instructional technologists, and they must respect each others’ concerns and interests.  But they must be separate.  When information technologists choose instructional technology solutions, you may get something like BlackBoard, and a community that feels as though the only relationship to technology should be a client-service one.   When instructional technologists administer servers, you may get something like less-than-ideal load times, plugins that expose vulnerabilities, and a system that bursts at the seams when you scale.

We need to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, to work with and learn from one another, and also to complicate our community’s understanding of technology.  Some components — like phones and networks — should be, above all, reliable.  Some others — like blended courses, or the integration of made multimedia into a course — require more thought, investment, and understanding from students and faculty.  Making clear the separation between information and instructional technology can help nurture this understanding.

But we must remember… the central mission of a university revolves around teaching, learning, and scholarship.

The Community is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
The most exciting component of CUNY WordCamp Ed was the connection and sharing that took place at the event, a feeling that’s also present on the Academic Commons.  There was the implicit recognition that we have much to learn from each other, that there are many interesting projects popping up around CUNY, and that we can only benefit from making public and sharing our work.  The Commons can provide a canvas for this, but it will not run on its own… it requires, above all, a commitment to sharing, to both taking and giving.  We also should harness and seek to reproduce the generative energy of events such as WordCamp Ed, not only with end-of-the-year conferences and symposia, but with meet ups and sharecases throughout the academic year that disperse that energy.

EdTech Solutions Should Grow from the Bottom Up and then Transplant
Experimentation with WordPress at CUNY has been a bottom-up process, which serves as a counterpoint to the imposition of BlackBoard, a top-down solution.  Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaulay, and the Commons each began small and grew as they integrated more users and diversified their functionality in response to the needs of the communities they serve.  As such, they each reflect those communities in certain visible ways.  Blogs@Baruch provides public space for Baruch’s strong journalism, writing, and arts programs, and is making inroads into the Zicklin School of Business and the Freshman Seminar; ePortfolios foreground the unique experiences of the Macaulay student; and the Commons is a vibrant and evolving location for all of CUNY to meet and organize.

A new edtech model for CUNY should acknowledge this progression from the bottom up, and imagine ways to project it outwards throughout the university.  One of the arguments for centralizing administration of BlackBoard was that the community colleges had fewer resources than senior colleges, and centralization of course management software was assumed to make resources more equitably distributed.  Of course, now every school has an equally bad solution.  But the notion that those of us with resources should share the wealth with the colleges who have less is an important one.  I can see a model where senior colleges host WPMu installations for community colleges (using domain mapping), and share support– though, the community colleges– many of which have as many instructional technologists as does Baruch– must pony up support and resources when they can.

Grow from the bottom up and then transplant.

End Users Need to Take Ownership of Online Teaching and Learning Tools
Let’s not be shy about reminding our users of their responsibilities, and our users shouldn’t be shy about asking for help, clarification, or if something is possible.  WPMu and other open source solutions not only benefit from a “do it yourself“ ethos, they require such an approach.  They can’t function and grow without the investment of the community.

A course management system — BlackBoard (at a fraction of the current price), or, preferably, Moodle — could be one component of a tiered support sytem for instructional technology.  Users should have access to an easy way to post documents, access class rosters, and keep a gradebook.  But this is not teaching and learning.  A second tier could exist via distribtued canvases like WPMu or Mediawiki or cloud applications like Flickr and YouTube, where faculty and students can maintain their own spaces and depend on asynchronous support– with a solid server and documentation, such a process can run itself.  A third tier would offer customized solutions for more advances users– Zoe’s rotating flash headers on Blogs@Baruch, or customized spaces to show off class projects or for special departments or programs.  A fourth tier would be a research tier, and entail the imagination and realization of native solutions (such as the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool) or the exploration of the next wave of innovations (semantic web comes to mind).  You could cover all of the edtech needs of your community with such an approach; all that’s needed, as Jim said, are the instructional technologists and community understanding to shape it and make it operate.

Integrate Digital and Media Literacy into General Education
Universities are constantly updating their general education programs. If they’re not, they should be.  Far too few clear out space for coursework that focuses on exploring how the ways that information is produced and consumed are changing in the digital age.  Such work is often outsourced to librarians, who are generally on the leading edge of a campus’s understanding of these trends, and do yeoman’s (and, often under appreciated) work.  Or students get trickling components of digital literacy spread haphazardly through their work in the disciplines.

Why not, at a place like CUNY, have 1st year seminars devoted to nurturing critical research skills, understanding online information and identity, learning to look and listen, and mastering how to negotiate the digital life of the campus and the city?  Set students up with eportfolios, and teach them how to cultivate their spaces.  Introduce them to scholarly uses of tools with which they are already familiar, but which they perhaps haven’t learned to use critically or with rigor.  Make them write; help them connect, share, and explore the visual, the textual, and the aural experience of the web.  This is something that will be useful to them throughout college and beyond.

As Jim has eloquently argued, CUNY is so well-positioned to harness the energy of the participants in CUNY WordCamp Ed, and to put it to good use.  Let’s keep working.

(IMAGE CREDITS: Thanks to Joe Ugoretz for conceiving, compiling, and sharing the CUNY WordCampEd Tag Cloud.  The other images are from Flickr, in order of appearance: Pip, D’arcy Norman, Ohad, and the Seattle Municipal Archives).

Over the past few months, the development team has been busy working on the backend of this site, trying to integrate its various tools into a single, seamless usability experience. Now that those efforts have begun to bear fruit, we can start to turn our attention to other pressing development needs.

One of the items that has been at the top of our to-do list for a long time now reads “Redesign the Home Page to take better advantage of feeds.” If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, check out RSS Feeds in plain English. Basically, RSS feeds are streams of data that an be incorporated into webpages so that those pages present constantly updated information. Examples of RSS feeds include the listing of “Recent blog posts” on our current home page and the “Site-Wide Activity” feed on the News page.

Right now, the top half of our home page is almost completely static. As we redesign it, we’ll want to use RSS feeds to showcase more of the activity going on across our site. One suggestion that came out of last Friday’s CUNY WordCampEd meetings is that the Commons can aggregate not only activity on the Commons, but also activity on other WordPress installs on various CUNY campuses. That would allow the Commons to be a true hub for the CUNY community.

We’re throwing around various ideas among ourselves, but this website is premised on the assumption that it will adapt to the needs and desires of its community. So: what would YOU like to see on the new homepage? What feeds should be there? What feeds do you want to see elsewhere (on pages other than the home page) on the site? How can the Commons best showcase the work, energy, and enthusiasm of its communities? Please let us know in the comments below.

Image by Kurtphoto

The CUNY Academic Commons, in partnership with Cast Iron Coding, is proud to announce a collection of MediaWiki extensions that will create a single sign-on system between WordPress Multi-User and MediaWiki.

With this extension, administrators of WordPress Multi-User will be able to add robust wiki functionality to their websites without forcing users to create separate accounts. Now, users will be able to sign in once to the home page of the system and have that sign-in carried over to the wiki.

We’re running this setup currently on the CUNY Academic Commons, a site that was conceived of as an open-source academic social network in which the members of the 23-campus City University of New York system would be able to connect with one another, share resources, and create new communities of interest. The site is built on the following platforms, which can now all be accessed via a single log-in: WordPress Multi-User + BuddyPress + BbPress + MediaWiki.

This integration builds on the fine work of Ciaran Gultnieks, the author of AuthWP, Daniel Kinzler, the author of LockDown, and Marcel Minke, the author RedirectAfterLogout.

We are delighted to release this extension under a GNU General Public License. Full documentation and files can be found here.

WPMu Single Sign-on is a package of extensions for MediaWiki that creates a single, shared login system for MediaWiki and WordPress Multi-User.

Developed and customized by Cast Iron Coding for the CUNY Academic Commons, and released under a GNU General Public License, this package includes and builds on the following extensions:

AuthWP.php, by Ciaran Gultnieks
LockDown.php, by Daniel Kinzler

and

LogoutLoginWP.php by Cast Iron Coding and The CUNY Academic Commons

Download the WPMu Single Sign-on package here. (zip file)

WordPress Multi-User/MediaWiki Single Sign On Setup Instructions

Tested on:
MediaWiki version 1.13.4
Wordpress Multiuser Version 2.7.1

Assumptions:
Wordpress Multiuser and MediaWiki are installed on the same server, in the same webroot. WPMu is installed in the webroot and MW is installed in a folder called wiki/. The locations of the applications relative to the webroot could be changed, but changes to several of the extensions and the htaccess configuration may be required to make it work.

MediaWiki Extensions
Lockdown

Lockdown is a MW extension which serves here to restrict user access to “Special” pages, in this case the Preferences page. Logout will continue to serve as the login, and Login will be redirected to WP using the LoginLogoutWP extension below.

Lockdown configuration

Add the following code to LocalSettings.php:

require_once( $IP.'/extensions/Lockdown/Lockdown.php');
$wgSpecialPageLockdown['Preferences'] = array('');

AuthWP

AuthWP is a MW extension that was created to create a single-sign on between WPmu and MW.

AuthWP Modifications

I found I needed to change require() calls to require_once(): [lines 38-39]


require_once($WP_relpath.'/wp-load.php');
require_once($WP_relpath.'/wp-includes/registration.php');

AuthWP configuration (in LocalSettings.php)

# Include the AuthWP.php extension
require_once('extensions/AuthWP/AuthWP.php');
$wgAuth = new AuthWP();

LogoutLoginWP

The LogoutLoginWP is a custom extension inspired partially by the RedirectAfterLogout extension. It’s purpose is to tie up some loose ends in the login / logout process. Specifically, it consists of two functions registered as MW hooks. The UserLogout hook is called after the user has logged out. Since some of our logouts will come from WP (via a mod_rewrite rule, see below), we want to continue to redirect back to the redirect_to URL from the query string. The UserLoginForm hook is called before the login page is displayed. Our code redirects the user to the WP sign in page at this point.

LogoutLoginWP configuration (in LocalSettings.php)

# Include the redirection extension for WP
require_once($IP.'/extensions/LogoutLoginWP/LogoutLoginWP.php');

.htaccess Configuration

The following mod_rewrite rule is added to the .htaccess file at the site root:

# Rewrite a WP logout request to logout from Mediawiki instead, which takes care of both.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^action=logout.*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} wp-login.php$
RewriteRule ^.*$ wiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogout [QSA,L]

MediaWiki Sysop
When these extensions are activated, the admin account of the WPMu installation must be manually set as the administrator of the MediaWiki installation. Admins can do this by manually editing the MySQL database. In the MediaWiki table “user,” set the user_name field of the WikiSysop user to the account username of the admin in WPmu. However, the first letter of the admin name must be capitalized in the MediaWiki user record.

I’ve been running a copy of WordPress MultiUser for over a year now. Comment spam hasn’t been much of a problem, thanks to Akismet, but if I leave site registration open (so students and faculty can create new accounts and blogs), the evil spammers find it and start sending their bots en masse.

I tried a few plugins, with varying levels of success. There’s an interesting one that attempts to limit registrations to a specific country, but it falsely reported some valid users as not being in Canada. Captchas work, but also block some valid users (and the signup captcha plugin I’d been using is possibly abandoned).

So, I did some quick googling, and came across the page on the WordPress Codex about using .htaccess files to stop comment spam. I made some modifications to the technique, and am now running it on UCalgaryBlogs.ca with apparent success. The apache logs show the bot attacks are still in full force, but not a single one has gotten through in order to register. And valid users have been able to get through. That’s pretty promising.

Here’s the technique – just drop a modified version of this into your .htaccess file for your WPMU server:

# BEGIN ANTISPAMBLOG REGISTRATION
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-signup\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*ucalgaryblogs.ca.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) http://die-spammers.com/ [R=301,L]
# END ANTISPAMBLOG REGISTRATION

I put that block above the WPSuperCache block in my .htaccess file.

Modify the part that says “ucalgaryblogs.ca” to be whatever your WPMU server is (you may need to do more if you run multiple domains…), and modify the die-spammers.com part to point to wherever you want to send suspected evil spammers. I send them here.

What it does is detect any POST requests (submitting a form) for wp-signup.php, that haven’t been sent from a web page on the WPMU site or have an empty user agent string (identifying the software making the request), and sends them to a page that apologizes for any false positives (and provides a contact to get around it for valid users that somehow got sent there) and scolds evil spammers for being evil spammers.

The beauty of it is that it doesn’t require anything from WordPress. No plugins. No mu-plugins. No hacking core files. Nothing. Apache steps in and kicks spammers out before they get in at all.

It occured to me this morning, as I woke from my slumber, that the work I’ve been doing recently with WordPress, could also be applied to a library catalogue using Scriblio.

Scriblio (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Which means that you can import your library catalogue into WordPress and the user can search for and retrieve a record for The Films of Jean-Luc Goddard. Have a look around Plymouth State’s Scriblio and you’ll get a good feel for what’s possible.

Anyway, taking Scriblio’s functionality for granted, you could easily add Triplify to the mix as I have discussed before. So with very little effort, you can convert your library catalogue to RDF N-Triples (and/or JSON). My questions to you Librarians is: knowing this is possible and fairly trivial to do, is there any value to you in exposing your OPACs in this way?

Next, as I lay listening to my daughter chat to her squeaky duck, I thought about the other stuff I’ve been looking at recently with WordPress.  Once you think of your library catalogue as a WordPress site, there’s quite a lot of fun to be had.  You could ramp up the feeds that you offer from your OPAC, use the OpenCalais API to add semantic tags, plugin some more semantic addons if you wish (autodiscovery of SIOC, FOAF, OAI-ORE data??), and, perhaps most fun of all, publish OPAC records in realtime over XMPP PubSub.

Which brings me to JISCPress, our recent #jiscri project proposal, which we may or may not get funded (what are we, a week or two away from finding out??).  In that Project, we’re proposing a WordPress MU platform for publishing and discussing JISC funding calls and project reports (among other things).  There’s a lot of cross-over between the above Scriblio ideas and JISCPress. So much so, that it’s probably no more than a days work to transform the JISCPress platform, hosted as an Amazon Machine Image, to a multi-user OPAC platform where, potentially, all UK University libraries, publish their OPACs via separate Scriblio sites.

You could then, like wordpress.com has done, publish an XMPP firehose from every catalogue over PubSub for search engines or whoever is interested in realtime data from UK university library catalogues. Alternatively, instead of the WPMU set up, each University library could maintain their own Scriblio install and publish an XMPP feed to an agreed server (though that approach seems like more hassle than is necesary if you ask me. You’re bound to have some libraries falling behind and not upgrading their sites as things develop. For less than a collective £4K/year, we could all buy into commercial support for a WPMU site from Automattic to help maintain server-side stuff).

I dunno. Maybe this is all off the wall, but the building blocks are all there. Is anyone experimenting with Scriblio in this way? Don’t tell me, a bunch of you have been doing it for years…

Related posts

• Mashoop North!
• Open Education: Talis Incubator Proposal
• Scholarly publishing with WordPress
• JISCPress: Developing a community platform for the JISC funding process
• XMPP PubSub on WordPress.com

I just posted at the CUNY Academic Commons Development Blog about a plugin that I wrote for BuddyPress. Check it out if you are interested: http://dev.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/05/16/new-plugin-custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress/

Related posts:

1. New version of Custom Profile Filters for Buddypress
2. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin
3. Sharing hacks

Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress - click picture to download plugin

If you’ve set up a profile here on the Commons (or on some other site run on BuddyPress), you may have noticed that some of the words and phrases in your profile have turned into links that, when clicked, lead you to other profiles where those words appear. This tagging feature is a great way to find out about people in the community who share your interests, but the algorithm that BuddyPress uses to create links can be somewhat finnicky. I built this plugin to allow users to customize these tags, choosing for themselves which phrases should be linked by surrounding them in square brackets.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that, in a profile field called Academic Interests, I said the following:

I’m interested in philosophy, chewing gum, and mariachi bands.

What I really want here is for the phrases “philosophy”, “chewing gum”, and “mariachi bands” to become links. So I’ll surround them in brackets like this:

I’m interested in [philosophy], [chewing gum], and [mariachi bands].

I’m submitting the plugin to the WordPress repository for versioning, but for now you can download version 0.1 here. Comments are welcome - have fun!

Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress

In the past I blogged about using MySQL Qcache and how important it is, for those WPMU admins out there doubting this I HIGHLY advice you to get on this. After enabling the Debug Queries plugin I was more or less shocked at the number of queries some blogs were generating. If Qcache was not being used I am sure our processor would be working beyond overtime. I have seen total queries ranging from a low of 25 to 100+ to get this 823+ on a page, this shows how poorly some plugins and themes are written. This would crush our server if we were not using Query Caching…

For those developing plugins please keep queries consistent:

SELECT * FROM blogs WHERE blog_id = ‘1′
is different from:
select * FROM blogs WHERE blog_id = ‘1′

Both queries will be cached because they are different to MySQL (same goes to white space at the end of a query trim it!!!).

Just a quick nod to Andy Powell’s post yesterday about Identity in a Web 2.0 World. As I’ve said before, I’m trying to catch up with the issues Andy discusses and develop them into a blueprint for the Mozilla/Creative Commons/P2P University Open Education course, I am participating in.

Andy writes:

…identity in a Web 2.0 world is not institution-centric, as manifest in the current UK Federation, nor is it based on the currently deployed education-specific identity and access management technologies.  Identity in a Web 2.0 world is user-centric – that means the user is in control…. The important point is that learners (and staff) will come into institutions with an existing identity, they will increasingly expect to use that identity while they are there (particularly in their use of services ‘outside’ the institution) and that they will continue using it after they have left.  As a community, we therefore have to understand what impact that has on our provision of services and the way we support learning and research.

I am therefore reassured that my blueprint outline is not completely off the wall:

University students are at least 18 years old and have spent many years unconsciously accumulating or deliberately developing a digital identity. When people enter university they are expected to accept a new digital identity, one which may rarely acknowledge and easily exploit their preceding experience and productivity. Students are given a new email address, a university ID, expected to submit course work using new, institutionally unique tools and develop a portfolio of work over three to four years which is set apart from their existing portfolio of work and often difficult to fully exploit after graduation. I think this will be increasingly questioned and resisted by individuals paying to study at university.

My proposal is to show there are existing technical solutions which would allow an individual to register as a student at a university, provide the institution with their Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, OpenID, etc. identification and from then on, the student uses their existing ID to authenticate against any university online resource. There’s an example of how this might happen in the JISC Review of OpenID, which describes one of the project aims as the development of

bridging software that will allow OpenIDs from any source to be used as identities within the production UK (SAML) federation.

The University of Kent host a demonstrator of this OpenID-to-Shibboleth bridge.

The other aspect of my blueprint is institutional support of a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). I am suggesting that the WordPress Multi User platform is one technology that could support the characteristics of a PLE, being:¹

• Focus on coordinating connections between the user and services
• Symmetric relationships
• Individualized context
• Open Internet standards and lightweight proprietary APIs
• Open content and remix culture
• Personal and global scope

The PLE implementation which I have in mind is not, like the VLE, a monolithic system but rather a platform which aggregates and co-ordinates external user-centric services into a coherent learning environment. It is a parasitic system, feeding off content from existing online services such as blogs, social bookmarking, wikis and social networks, but also a rewarding environment which supports and develops the student’s existing portfolio² throughout their period of study.

I’ve shown how WordPress can aggregate and archive course activity, how it can enhance the discovery and connectivity of an individual’s and institution’s online profile through the addition of semantic-web-enabling plugins, how it can syndicate filtered content to other internal and external systems (through the use of feed2js, it can also syndicate content to legacy systems like Blackboard, which don’t support embedded web feeds). I’ve also shown that it can support a lightweight social network that integrates with an institution’s LDAP/Active Directory authentication system, and that social network can be OpenID enabled, allowing users to optionally link their OpenID to their WordPress/LDAP account and login via OpenID instead.³

Finally, the institutional and wider benefits to the public can be found when the cumulative data of the platform is itself aggregated into a structured site that enables discovery and re-use of content. An example of this is our Community Posts site, and I have also previously discussed the potential development and exploitation of this resource. Designed and licensed carefully, such a site could provide open educational resources at both user and programmatic levels.

So what empowers the user/student and puts them in control? Data-Portability and Creative Commons licensing?⁴.

1. Taken from, Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the dominant design of educational systems. Scott Wilson, Prof. Oleg Liber, Mark Johnson, Phil Beauvoir, Paul Sharples & Colin Milligan, University of Bolton. 2006
2. In many ways, I am thinking of ‘Identity’ and ‘Portfolio’ as being largely synonymous during the student’s period of study.
3. I’ve tested this with DiSo’s OpenID plugin, which works in principle, but I suspect that once set up, the OpenID login for the specified account, completely bypasses the LDAP authentication. Surely just a small amount of development would provide tighter integration. Incidentally, a Shibboleth plugin (by the same author of the OpenID plugin) for WordPress also exists.
4. Actually, I’m starting to think that CC licensing is little more than an interim step to a better understanding of ‘data’. See ‘You don’t nor need to own your data‘ When knowledge is transmitted online, every aspect of its representation is in a form of data. Both information and instruction become ‘data’ – isn’t it backwards to think of knowledge in terms of something ‘owned’ Do you think of instructional methods as ‘yours’?

Related posts

• Open Education Project Blueprint
• Pimping your ride on the semantic web
• Facebook’s transparent use of OpenID
• OAuth, OpenID, XMPP with WordPress
• Jailbreaking WordPress with Web hooks