I’ve been slowly tinkering on the Learning Communities concept, playing with the idea and starting small by facilitating a “blogging and student publishing” group. Today, I opened it up pretty wide, sending an email to over 2200 faculty members to invite them to identify topics that would interest them for potential learning community gatherings.
I expected to have to explain what I was intending, to describe what I mean by “learning community” and to reinforce that the groups are completely about faculty (and grad student, and staff) contributions, rather than The Official Presentation From the TLC. This is a faculty thing, inquiry in action. I’m just there to facilitate and provide caffeine and carbs (and whiteboard and any other support is needed to keep the discussions moving).
cd ~/temp
wget http://mu.wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
delete the wp-content directory in the freshly downloaded copy of WPMU 2.6.1 - I do this so I don’t accidentally overwrite any customized themes, or nuke anything in mu-plugins or plugins…
WordPress has supported Gravatars for awhile, which is great, but if you’re rolling out a site for a bunch of students to hammer on, it’s not ideal to have to send them to a third party service to set up photos. It’s awkward, and confusing, for new users to have to go somewhere else to add a photo to their profile. And profile photos can be very useful, especially at the beginning of a semester when everyone is just getting to know everyone else in a class, to put a face to a name.
I’ve got a better solution. Walk away. Do something else. Here’s my social network pause button, and it’s extremely effective:
It pauses everything. No inbox. No RSS. No IM. No friend requests. No followers. No super-pokes. No zombie bites. No updates. No is… Nothing but me, my bike, and the wind.
I was going to write up a post describing how to use the cool FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress to syndicate external content into a blog, and republish it in the context of a class or group. But, of course, Jim Groom has beaten me to the punch, and done a much more thorough job of documenting the process than I would/could have done. So, yet again, I’ll just refer to Jim’s work. What I can do is provide a demonstrating workflow to show how FeedWordPress could be used to pull content from one blog into others in the context of a group, project, or class.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to find where I heard a specific sentence about peace and peacefulness. I’m pretty sure it was triggered by this lost interview with John Lennon, although the exact quote isn’t in it. Either way, it’s a very powerful presentation of a student’s illicit interview with Lennon in 1969.
In my last post, I wrote about page 61 in Teaching as a Subversive Activity - where Postman and Weingartner asked the readers to contribute their questions to help shape an inquiry-based education, in response to their initial question “What is worth knowing?”
And now, I’m wondering… If you’re reading this…
What is worth knowing to you? What are the important questions? What are the unimportant questions that should still be asked?
I’ve been reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I’m finding myself extremely drawn into it. It’s the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn’t ready for. It’s the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it’s the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today - maybe moreso now than in 1969.
Mollom’s been doing a simply outstanding job of blocking spam lately, after the warm-up period. Unfortunately, it appears to be doing a bang-up job of blocking legitimate, breathing humans who are trying (and failing) to comment. I’m moving antispam back to Akismet for awhile, and am hoping it’s just a growing pain for Mollom - I really like the system and design, but can’t have valid people frustrated when they try to post comments. For now, it’s back to moderating comments through Akismet…
Cole wrote a post about how his Twitter network helped him solve a problem. His blog suddenly decided to stop accepting comments, and he wasn’t sure how that happened, or how to fix it. I was just going to post this as a comment on his blog, but, well, it’s still not accepting comments ;-) (and I apologize if this post comes across as snarky - not intended to - it’s just a pre-caffeinated response to a blog, first thing in the morning…)
