The always innovative George Mason University Center for History and New Media has released a new plug-in: Anthologize. Which is a platform/plug-in that allows the use of a WordPress 3.0 site as a book publishing tool. The plug-in is still in a 0.4, alpha stage release, but I figured “what the heck” it is worth a try. After installing and activating the plug-in you start by creating a Project – this is the book. The Project has parts – sort of like chapters. And in each part the interface makes it easy to filter your listing of posts by tag or category to quickly narrow down your listing of posts (if you’ve been organized in your tagging and categorization!). You can even import content from external sources via an RSS import. After you have everything organized the export functions creates a nicely formatted PDF or other format – it even includes a table of contents.
Regular writing in a WordPress-powered blog can be a useful discipline to start a writing project. Sure you could do it in some private format, but I find the idea that other people might be reading it provides a little extra incentive to actually keep to a schedule and do the writing. Been thinking of writing a book, but never quite get around to it – a blog with the Anthologize plug-in might be just the trick to get things moving.
Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.
Brown University switched students to Google Apps for education a little over a year a ago, and recently completed a similar transition for faculty and staff. In the interviews with CIO Michael Pickett one primary reason for the switch is requests from staff for collaboration tools, and a common platform with students. In traditional education structures there often are silos for student systems and business systems. Why the artificial divide? And who made the initial decision? According to Pickett student behavior led the charge. The majority of students were already using Gmail – what better way to ‘listen’ to users than to observe their behavior and be guided by those choices. Another shift from traditional IT top-down decision making. And integrated video chat? No more schlepping cross-campus for F2F meetings? Sign me up!
Brown’s CIO, Michael Pickett, told me that student adoption of shared documents and the collaborative features… Now … faculty and staff have come on board as well…He was also quick to note that both Google’s and Microsoft’s solutions in this space were quite good and he recommended that universities evaluate both to see which might meet their needs better.
Our students were really the ones that led us down the Google path… We also decided to go this direction because of the functionalities that we believe will bring our university together, namely tools like collaborative documents, better email (with nearly 30 times the storage space we had with our previous system!) and video chat.
Over 60% of Brown undergraduates already use Gmail to read their Brown email. Moving undergraduate accounts to Gmail is a win/win situation: a great opportunity to give undergraduates the mailbox capacity they need, while also helping the university reduce expenditures.
I have lived through several eras of business communication and the most important lesson I have learned is to not cling to the past. Outlook and Exchange mail haven’t changed much in over a decade and it was time for me to move on. I won’t miss Outlook any more than I miss the typing pool.
I attended a day-long workshop yesterday on Google analytics, run by LunaMetrics. For those of you who may not know, Google analytics is one of their free services that let’s web site owners gather website visitor statistics which can be used to provide more effective sites. It was a great workshop, and I’ll be incorporating the ideas into some web-application re-writing I have planned for the summer.
One of his quick tips was for this Firefox add-on, which makes it easy to include some of your site tracking tags into shortened URLs used on services like Twitter and Facebook.
A Firefox sidebar to easily shorten URLs, plus add Google Analytics tracking tags. Great for measuring traffic from Twitter. Snip-n-Tag currently supports five of the most popular URL shortening websites, including tr.im, bit.ly and tinyurl.
“This is a point of confusion for many of our customers.” So began a tech support response that was the latest in a string of messages. The good news is that this was the message that actually helped me solve the problem. The bad news is that came at the end of almost a day and a half of frustration and confusion on my part. I searched the help system. I consulted knowledgeable colleagues (and got them confused and frustrated too.) This was for an initial setup of a new system, so I expected there to be some annoying setup issues. But I’m left wondering “If so many customers have the same issues, how about altering things so we don’t all experience this problem.”
We in technology often fall into this trap — this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this type of response to an issue. Why do we do this? Because for the most part we’re focused on the technology. Which isn’t a bad thing. But how about a focus on the customer and what they need? Which is easy to use, quick to implement technology. Some thoughts:
Find the shortest way to accomplish standard customer tasks. Then invest time in making them even shorter and easier. Time is money for your customer and every second counts.
Make furniture and fixtures fade into the background. For instance they don’t need to be able to change colors and layout on their control panel interface — that’s furniture. What they need is an easy streamlined way to add and edit content.
The customer is not always right. Listen to what the customer asks and solve their problem, don’t just answer their questions. In my tech support issue mentioned above I received a solution which involved accessing another control panel with its own different login and a whole different toolset. While it did answer my questions, upon pondering the situation anew I realized my whole approach was incorrect, and there is actually an easier, more direct way to accomplish the task. The answer I receive stated essential “If you want to do it that way you’ll need to log into this other tool and do this other setup task.” What they should have said is “Why are you doing it that way? (Customer is not always right) And “we normally see people have better success doing it this way.”
A customer focused approach in tech support, application design, and other technology implementation creates value and will be seen as an asset. Too much of a technology focus creates hassle and a perception of technology as a cost — and these days we’re all trying to cut costs. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather been seen as an asset.
A physical object these days, from a car to a camera, is more defined by software than hardware. For instance the gas pedal in your car is not actually attached to the engine. In the old days is was attached to a cable that controlled a valve in the carburetor – push is hard and the valve let in more gas and the engine ran faster. How it functioned was defined by the hardware components and their mechanical adjustments. Today your gas pedal controls a switch that feeds information into a computer which based on its programmed responses will tell different parts of the engine to react based on your input. It is possible to change the programming to make your car super gas-efficient or a race-ready speed rocket – still within the larger limits of the engine and other components, but there can be a considerable range of software variability possible. Other hardware has the same issues – for instance the shutter button on your camera isn’t actually attached to the camera shutter – again it triggers a stream of software cause and effect.
This change from a mechanical/hardware driven function to software control has been subtle, gradual, and I think largely unnoticed by most people unless something goes wrong – as the recent Toyota cars running out of control with suspected software malfunctions. For most consumers this change has been a good thing, resulting in cheaper, better functioning products – the iPad has certainly garnered plenty of attention. But as Richard Stallman pointed out almost 25 years ago, software is policy – and manufacturers will always favor their needs (control, earn a profit) over the end-user’s needs (make my stuff do what I want.) Hardware can be open source – like the Arduino controller – which is a supportable business model. Or manufacturers can ignore, or even actively encourage open source hardware hack projects to evolve – as with the Canon Powershot camera. Many will argue that we should let the marketplace reward and encourage these enlightened approaches (I will not longer consider iPod or iPad purchase due to the closed proprietary platform). And not use legislature to pressure the more closed, and outright hostile to end-user control (as with Apple) manufacturers to open up. I’m not quite sure what the answer is, but I do think an active, public debate is needed. I support calls for the US Department of Justice to open monopoly investigations into Apple’s practices around the iPhone and iPad apps support. There may not be enough there to justify prosecution, but it is worth the time to look.
The need for Right to Repair legislation has become a necessity in order to protect the rights of car owners to decide where and how they have their vehicles serviced, whether at a new car dealer or an independent service facility.
Google has done it again, and created a cool service to make the web better. In this case it is an API that gives access to a range of text fonts. Many of you may not know this, but traditionally web page design is limited to a handful of fonts.
This new service from Google is quick and simple. Although at the moment I can’t seem to get it working with my current blog theme. Technology — its great when it works!
The Baruch College community has begun to see Blogs@Baruch not just as a blogging platform or substitute course management system, but also as powerful tool for meeting a wide range of self-publishing needs.
A variety of constituencies at the College have begun using the system for a range of internal and external communication. We have some fantastic librarians at the Newman Library, and they’re using Blogs@Baruch for a Reference Blog, an Idea Lab, and a Graduate Research Blog. They’ve also begun using CommentPress to discuss a Library Planning document. The Institute shares many interests and goals with the College’s librarians, and we have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in collaborating with them to explore the role of technology and self-publishing in cultivating digital literacies among our students. This semester’s conversations were a great start.
The Baruch College Honors Program has begun using Blogs@Baruch this semester for a number of projects. They’re now hosting their homepage on the site, taking advantage of WordPress’ elegant content management features, and offering the staff an easy way to stay in contact with students (current and prospective). Also, first year Baruch Scholars have been given their own blogs to cultivate over their careers here, and their posts aggregate here. This is envisioned as a kind-of low stakes eportfolio project: give the students the space, and encourage (but don’t require) them to explore it. Another interesting Honors publishing initiative is the Change For Kids blog, where students working as reading tutors in a number of New York City elementary schools are blogging about their experiences, taking advantage of the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on and work through the challenges of working with children. Kudos to the Baruch Honors Program!
Frank Fletcher, the Executive Director of the Graduate Programs at the Zicklin School of Business, has been spearheading the business school’s move towards self-publishing. Frank has been encouraging his colleagues in Zicklin to explore a variety of initiatives on Blogs@Baruch over the past six months, and is now publishing to Lexington 24:25, where he’ll highlights developments in the MBA program and “identify emerging needs and trends in management education.” We look forward to supporting Zicklin, particularly in their efforts to connect Baruch students with potential employers and alumni.
Three journals are now hosted on Blogs@Baruch. Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics is edited and authored by Baruch undergrads, launched last month (see details here), and we look forward to seeing that project continue to evolve. Dollars & Sense, which used to publish the selected journalism of Baruch students once a year as a beautiful (but costly to produce) magazine, now publishes on a rolling basis, for free, using Blogs@Baruch. While I myself miss the bound hard copy version, and see this transition as a microcosm of the larger troubles facing journalism, I’m happy that the faculty members who oversee the project– Josh Mills and Andrea Gabor– see the opportunities that are made available by self-publishing. For instance, student work produced in the fall doesn’t need to wait until the spring for publication; a wider range of work can be featured; and it’s now easier to share the work of our students with a much broader audience. Finally, iMagazine, the journal of student writing overseen by the Baruch College Writing Center, is in the process of migrating to Blogs@Baruch; stay tuned for a launch early next calendar year at this url.
There are other ongoing initiatives: the journalism department is using Blogs@Baruch to plan a new The East 20s, a food news site being created by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch, and to serve the multimedia reporting of its students. The Baruch College Teaching Blog remains active. And, well, we can even include Cac.ophony.org as a Blogs@Baruch initiative; our fellows have simply been killing it this semester.
These are just a few of the most exciting non course-based uses of Blogs@Baruch; there are others in the planning stages that promise to take advantage of the power of this publishing platform to create unique opportunities for members of the Baruch community to interact with each other and audiences beyond the campus. One is our plan to support selected student bloggers who’ll be tasked with chronicling their lives at the College for a broader audience. I’ve often said that we have the most interesting students in the world, but few of them know just how interesting they are. Blogs@Baruch, by providing multiple paths into the work our students and faculty are doing, makes the case more powerfully than I ever could.
Blogs@Baruch was used in approximately two dozen courses this semester, in disciplines that included Fine and Performing Arts, English, Sociology/Anthropology, Journalism, Library Information Systems, Communication, History, and Management.
WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.
One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.
Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.
Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!
We’re winding down another eventful semester on Blogs@Baruch, and over the next few days I’d like to offer some reflections about where we’ve been and where we’re going. Our usership has tripled, and we’ve also expanded to serve a much broader range of constituencies at the college. This broadening and deepening has taught me much about the opportunities and challenges of supporting Baruch’s use of this powerful open source publishing platform.
Mikhail Gershovich accepts the Mike Ribaudo Award at the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference
Two events over the last ten days drew into sharp focus what we have accomplished and also some of the challenges we face. At the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference, the Schwartz Institute was awarded the Michael Ribaudo Award for Innovation in Technology. Mikhail, Suzanne, Tom, and I were recognized along with administrative teams from John Jay and the CUNY First project, as well as our good friend Matt Gold, Project Director for the CUNY Academic Commons. The Commons is like a sister project to Blogs@Baruch, since we’re using the same software, and we share ideas, labor, and a philosophy about what support for technology at the university level should entail.
It was an honor to be recognized for our innovations and, especially, to share the honor with Matt, since it signaled to the broader CUNY community that the work we’re undertaking is not only viable, but forward-looking and vital to the work of the University. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, though, I noted that the certificates we received read that this was an “Information Technology” award. I’ve made the point before, and will make it again: instructional technology is not information technology. This is actually acknowledged in how the Ribaudo is awarded, as it’s split between the two areas (even if the split is not represented on the certificate). This is more than a semantic argument: we need to encourage our communities to understand the differences and to constantly reexamine how the University’s information technology architecture relates to and interacts with the deployment of technology in the service of teaching, learning, and scholarship.
It’s always nice to get an award, and last week brought hearty congratulations from inside and outside the Baruch community. In the midst of these pats on the back, however, I learned a little bit more about the difference between information technology and instructional technology. At approximately 7pm on Wednesday evening I happened to look at one of our blogs, and saw the dreaded:
The error appeared on all subdirectory blogs, while the main blog was completely white. I logged into the command line, verified that MYSQL was running, and saw that the load on our server was fine. The documentation I was able to find suggested either a MYSQL problem or a plugin conflict; I deleted all plugins, with no improvement. Now, instead of the “Error Establishing a Database Connection” I was getting what geeks refer to as the “White Screen of Death” across the entire installation. Having exhausted pretty much the extent of my command line knowledge, I sent out emails to our contacts at BCTC, and waited for a response.
A couple hours later, I was contacted by a sysadmin at BCTC; he had gamely returned to work on his way home from the gym to take a look at our server. He immediately noticed that the directory that holds Blogs@Baruch was about 98% full. We knew that we were approaching space limits, but I had (mis)calculated that we could make it to the end of the semester (when we’ll be moving the entire installation over to a new server). I was puzzled, however, because we had this issue once before and it didn’t cause an outage– it just caused an error in our database backups that resolved as soon as we opened up space. I hoped opening space would clear up our problem, but it did not.
We both thought that the database needed to be repaired, but neither of us were comfortable issuing the repair commands. The admin at BCTC contacted MYSQL, and got assistance repairing and then restarting MYSQL. 1 am, no improvement. We’d have to wait until morning.
At 6 am I took another look at the server to see if I had missed anything, and began to respond to users who were emailing about the site. I posted a query to our premium support forum with Automattic describing the problem, and got a quick response from Donncha, the lead developer of WPMu. Unfortunately, my question included a distracting error that I found in the log that was caused by a bad Phpinfo file I had put on our server (in my haste I wrote the file in Text Edit at home, which put additional characters into the file that I wasn’t able to see). Donncha thought we might have been hacked, and asked me to check our .htaccess files, which looked ok. I caught my mistake, and explained it (along with a note apologizing for not being a system administrator). Apparently I wasn’t clear, because Donncha kept pursuing the PHP error… we weren’t communicating well. He suggested I use error_log() to track down where the PHP problem was.
In the meantime, emails and phone calls from users were flowing in, and I did my best to explain to as many as possible that we were investigating the problem and should be live again soon. Internally, though, I wasn’t so sure; we had exhausted our knowledge and the knowledge in the free forums, and the premium forum to which I was posting wasn’t yielding results. Jim Groom suggested we contact Ron and Andrea Rennick, who I refer to as the “WPMu Wonder Couple,” to see if they might be able to help us out.
Within 3 hrs of Jim’s suggestion, BCTC had vetted Ron and granted him temporary access to our server; he located and fixed the problem in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, Barry Abrahamson, who runs the servers for WordPress.com and also posts to the premium support forum, had offered to do the same.
Turns out the problem was one that I had caused while trying to fix the space issue. When I deleted the plugins in mu-plugins, I failed to delete the Supercache file that sits outside of the plugins folder, inside of wp-content. I also deleted the existing cached pages. Ron concluded that:
Once you ran out of disk space, pages expiring in supercache were being refreshed as empty files. Eventually nearly all of your pages were cached as empty files. I disabled supercache by renaming advanced-cache.php in wp-content. MU checks for the file and includes it in the processing if it exists.
He later added:
I did some testing locally and reproduced the white screen by deleting the contents of the cached version of the index.
Here’s the rub: we got through it. Ultimately this was two small problems masquerading as a big one. We ran out of space, then I failed to properly disable a powerful plugin running on our system, which disabled the entire install. We were down less than 20hrs, and that was only because I wasn’t systematic enough to pick up on the way Supercache works. To a certain extent, something like this was inevitable. All sites go down, even the Big G. It’s the risk you run when you work online, and reasonable end users can accept it– it helps if those running the site aspire towards transparency.
The outage confirmed my belief in open source applications, and particularly the communal ethos that (often) animates them. Three friends: Boone Gorges, Jim, and Zach Davis, offered assistance as soon as they learned of the problem, and moral support because they’ve each been in similar situations. The offers of hands-on help were reassuring, but I didn’t really need them because I was already in contact with the three most knowledgeable WPMu people in the world.
The outage also reminded me that being able to type stuff at the command line and get stuff in return does not make one a system administrator. I’m a humble educational technologist, and I depend on information technology to get my work done. When the lines are blurred– and I blurred them here more out of necessity than conceit– trouble may ensue. Had I been able to look holistically at the problem and troubleshoot it methodically, I probably could have caught the error. But inexperience and the pressure of supporting 3k+ users clouded my vision and convinced me the solution to the problem was out of my reach. These are valuable lessons to carry forward on this project.
Within an hour of Blogs@Baruch going backup, Baruch College’s enews arrived in my mailbox, containing a congratulations to the Institute on the Ribaudo Award. I clicked on a link and landed happily at our pretty little homepage, which was humming nicely along. When I closed my laptop, I still managed to feel pretty good about the week.
PS: I’ve learned that the following cultural artifact can help one oversee an enterprise publishing platform:
I am finding the open source NetBeans development tool really great for my PHP programming work. It really saves time by catching the simple typo and syntax mistakes I commonly make. Please to code suggestions and other elements are helpful too. Part of what makes it so great is the connection that the project developers have with the programming community — as an example of that read this post. It is exactly this type of close connection to a user community that makes open source so powerful.
I spent talking about PHP development in NetBeans almost whole session. After the session there was a long discussion (more than 1 hour) and some people complained about formatting…As a result I have decided to look at this and to try to fix as many bugs as possible. Because there is not much time for NetBeans 6.8, I would like to ask you for help.
