Monthly Archives: September 2009

New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription

BuddyPress and bbPress can be plugged into each other such that BuddyPress groups get their own discussion forums, which are powered by bbPress. Adding Burt Adsit’s bpGroups means that private and hidden groups can have their discussion forums private too. But a major hurdle is email notification: Certain kinds of BP communities simply won’t get rolling if there’s no easy way for users to get email notification of new discussions. There are solutions out there to assuage this problem within bbPress (notably Thomas Klaiber’s Post Notification, which served as the inspiration for the mechanics of my own plugin), but email notification remains hidden in bbPress favorites, instead of in an out-front toggle.

Group forum notification is coming in a future version of BuddyPress, but it’s important enough that I needed it now.

This set of plugins, called Group Forum Subscription, fixes that. Features:

  • Users can subscribe to individual discussion topics from within BuddyPress
  • Users can subscribe to topics on a group-by-group basis – that is, one can subscribe to all existing and future topics associated with a particular BuddyPress group
  • Users are automatically unsubscribed from a group’s discussions when they leave the group
  • Administrators can subscribe all users to the appropriate forums with a single click (potentially handy for first-time setup
  • Administrators can toggle whether email notification is turned on by default.
  • Administrators can determine whether the topic links in the notification emails will point to bbPress or to the BuddyPress forum interface

Installation instructions

  1. Download the package
  2. Upload the BuddyPress plugin bp-group-forum-subscription.php to the plugins directory of your main WPMU blog and activate it
  3. If you prefer for the members of your community to use the BuddyPress posting interface for discussions, add the following hook: [sourcecode language=”php”][/sourcecode] immediately after [sourcecode language=”php”]
    [/sourcecode] in /[your bp theme dir]/groups/forums/topic.php
  4. If you plan for your users to use bbPress for forum reading and posting, upload the bbPress trigger plugin bb-group-forum-subscription.php to [bbpress-install-dir]/my-plugins/ and activate it through the bbPress admin screen. Please note: the bbPress plugin changes the (IMO somewhat opaque) “Add to favorites” link on each topic page to a more straightforward Subscribe/Unsubscribe. If you like this change, open up [bbPress-theme-dir]/topic.php, and change
    [sourcecode language=”php”]user_favorites_link();[/sourcecode]
    to
    [sourcecode language=”php”]user_favorites_link( array(‘mid’ => __(‘Subscribe to this discussion’)),array(‘mid’ => __(‘Unsubscribe from this discussion’)));[/sourcecode]

You can configure the plugin on the admin page (Group Forum Subscription under Dashboard Settings. Members of your BP community can tinker with their subscriptions either on the individual topic pages (in bp or bbpress) or on their BP Settings > Notification page (where they can subscribe/unsubscribe to entire groups).

I’m in the process of setting up BuddyPress 1.1, which was just released today. Once I’ve got a dev instance of it up and running, I will do the necessary fixes to make the plugin run on the new version. (I don’t think it will be too hard, given the number of craptastic workarounds I had to do in this version because of the absence of all the nice 1.1 hooks.) Stay tuned.

Sitewide Tag Suggestion, Part II, Sort of

If you are interested in the Sitewide Tag Suggestion plugin that I blogged about a few weeks ago, you might like to know that I have finally found some time to write up some proper instructions and implement the changes on the CUNY Academic Commons. If you’re interested, you can download the bugger from the Commons dev blog, and let me know what you think.

Automated and redundant Wordpress backup via email

The WordPress worm that was going around a few days ago got me thinking about backups. A lot of people harp about how you really ought to be backing up your data, but backing up something like Wordpress is a little more complicated than backing up local data, especially if you don’t know how to set up cron jobs. And even if you do, this only protects you from certain kinds of problems (malware, database corruption and the like), not catastrophic hardware failure (since it’s likely that you’re keeping the backups on the same physical machine).

backup

So I set myself up with with a very simple but apparently quite effective solution for Wordpress backups. Three parts:

  • The WordPress Database Backup plugin is a spiffy little plugin that lets you schedule snapshots of your entire WP database, with the option to include additional tables created by third-party plugins. Most importantly for my purposes, the plugin allows you to schedule backups to be emailed to yourself.
  • The plugin zips the database dump and sends it as an attachment to my Gmail address. I created a Gmail filter that takes all emails from that address, marks them as read, and archives them. That means that every day I have an up-to-date snapshot of my Wordpress installation on Gmail’s servers, instead of on the server where my blog is hosted.
  • Once a month or so (more frequently when the web interface goes down), I open up Thunderbird on my laptop, which grabs copies of all old mail via IMAP. Now I have copies of my WP database on my computer as well.

This is probably an obvious system that other people have implemented, but I haven’t seen many people write about it. Hope it helps someone.

WPMU 2.8, bbPress and cookie problems solved

Upgrading the CUNY Academic Commons from WPMU 2.7.somethingorother to 2.8.4 went quite smoothly overall. A big problem cropped up a few days after the upgrade, though: integration with bbPress (version 1.0 alpha 6) wasn’t working right. Shared user tables still worked fine, but sessions weren’t carrying over between the platforms – and, worse yet, you had to flush your cookies to be able to log into the other system at all.

A bunch of Googling turned up people with similar problems, but no real solutions (other than the standard setup procedures, such as making sure that the auth_salt etc matched in wp-config.php and bb-config.php). Then I found this thread, where a few people who are smarter than I am had a conversation about WP2.8’s new method for handling cookies. So I understood the problem a little better. Then someone near the end of the thread suggested upgrading bbPress. I did – to bbPress 1.0.2 – and the integration instantly worked perfectly. You don’t even need a plugin on the WP side for it to work anymore.

The moral of the story: The devs at bbPress are awesome. Also, upgrade to bbPress 1.0.2 if you can.

New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets

I just posted at the CUNY Academic Commons Dev blog about a new plugin I’m releasing for BuddyPress. The plugin adds two new widgets to your BP/WP install – Groups and Members – which duplicate the functions of the core widgets of the same name, with the added feature that users can choose whether the default view will be Newest, Active, or Popular.

If I can think of other ways in which those widgets could be enhanced, I might add them to the plugin in the future. If you can think of some ways, please let me know.

Why are you still reading this? Go download the plugin already, and enjoy having my name on your WordPress plugins page yet again.

The ethics of Turnitin, or How I Learned To Stop Detecting Plagiarism

Yesterday I was feeling sorry for myself with regard to Turnitin and the like. I ended up having an interesting discussion with @LanceStrate, @mattthomas, and @KelliMarshall about the ethics surrounding plagiarism detection service. It got me to thinking about why it bothers me.

My gut feeling is this: Turnitin, SafeAssign et al make big bucks off of their database. More papers scanned means a bigger database; bigger database means (in theory) better plagiarism detection; better detection means (in theory) more value and more profit. Forcing students to relinquish their papers to this machine feels exploitative.


John Stuart Mill – Awesome Guy | cc licensed flickr photo shared by netNicholls

But I wonder why this bothers me. I have no problem feeding different kinds of information-gathering machines. Take Google. I use Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and google.com extensively. The more I use these services, the more information they gather about my online activities; bigger database means better ad targeting; better targeting means more value and more profit. My “stuff” – information about me, writing I produce, records of my activity, etc. – is not sacrosanct. I’m willing to give it up in some cases.

So what’s the difference? Most obviously, I am choosing to use Google’s products in a way that students are not asking to use Turnitin. I will grant that there are different levels of “forcedness”, as @LanceStrate points out. Students can opt out of a class, or out of school in general. And if instructors make the Turnitin requirement explicit in the syllabus on the first day of class (or earlier), students will be reasonably well-informed about what they will be “forced” to do. But no matter how you conceive of the spectrum of requirement, the fact remains that my use of Google is far freer than students’ use of Turnitin.

That a professor requires students to do certain things that they wouldn’t otherwise do is not, in itself, an indictment of the requirement. I doubt that my own students would write about the Nicomachean Ethics if their grade didn’t depend on it. But, in this case, I as an instructor am obligated to exercise my power in a responsible way. (Heavy is the head that wears the crown.) Requirements should not be arbitrary, but should serve the goals of the class and the best interest of the students. Requiring a paper on Aristotle has negative effects on students – it takes away from the time and energy they could be spending on other things that are valuable to them – and it’s my responsibility to ensure that these negative effects are outweighed by the benefits bestowed by such an assignment. A well thought-out term paper assignment will, in the long run, have positive utility for the student.

Is the same true for plagiarism detection? Are the negative effects of such technologies (being forced to enrich a corporate entity, losing control over one’s intellectual property, feeling a presumption of one’s own guilt in the absence of supporting evidence) outweighed by some benefits? It’s at this point in the thought process that the pedagogical implications of Turnitin should be considered.

  • Is Turnitin good at detecting plagiarism? My experience says: Not really. While Google’s database doesn’t include as many student papers as Turnitin’s, Turnitin is in turn pretty awful at identifying plagiarism from the open web. Thoughtful reading and Googling has been more effective for me. I’d like to see data on the larger trends, though – for example, what percentage of student copying comes from the open web (Google’s domain) versus for-sale paper databases.
  • How much harm does “plagiarism” really do? This is really the more important question. Even if it turns out that Turnitin is very, very good at plagiarism detection, there is very little benefit from the software’s use if it turns out that plagiarism, as defined, isn’t really that harmful. This question is tough to answer, though. For one thing, there are lots of different kinds of plagiarism, certain kinds of which are more harmful than others. A student who copies a paper wholesale from Wikipedia is doing more harm than one who synthesizes a coherent paper from a bunch of different sources, or one who fails to cite a paraphrased argument. Surely the second and third students are getting more out of the assignment than the first. Furthermore, I have an untested gut feeling that the most harmful types of plagiarism – where a student steals wholesale – are easier to detect without using Turnitin, since they’re more likely not to be even approximately in the student’s voice or level of expertise. If this is right, then it might be the case that Turnitin is most necessary for the least harmful varieties of “plagiarism” – varieties whose ethical implications, some might argue, ought to be reassessed in light of how new technologies are affecting knowledge creation. (Too big a topic to address here, but you get the idea.)
  • Are there less troubling alternatives to Turnitin? Let’s grant that Turnitin is very good at detecting plagiarism, and that plagiarism is hugely pernicious. All things being equal, if we could avoid plagiarism by means that have less of a downside, we should choose those other means. In my experience (again, I have no comprehensive data to back this up), the answer is yes, there are far better ways. @KelliMarshall suggests assigning unique paper prompts, making plagiarism more difficult. I’ve found that the scaffolding of assignments – such that students write early, write often, and write in a low-stakes milieu – is extremely effective at lowering the tempation to plagiarize. To be more specific: When students are writing in journals or blogs – spaces where they are not harshly graded – and when their formal assignments allow students to pull from and build upon the ideas that they’ve already put to paper(/bits), cheating simply doesn’t happen very often. That initial moment – when a student sits down at the computer the night before the due date, not having written a single word, not knowing where to start, and copying out of desparation – is averted altogether. In the semesters I’ve used blogs and structured assignments in this way, I’ve had to deal with plagiarism maybe once per semester (out of 70+ students writing hundreds of papers). Another thing that’s worked really well for me is having frank discussions with students about why plagiarism is so demonized in academia in the first place (perhaps this conversation is a little more justified in an Ethics course). When they understand the motivations, and are not simply handed seemingly (and perhaps actually?) arbitrary rules about the Evils Of Plagiarism, they’re more likely to grok.

On balance, then, it seems to me that there is very little, if anything, to be gained from Turnitin et al that cannot be gained through other, less harmful means. Now I have to work up the guts to start sending links to this post whenever a faculty member asks me how to do plagiarism detection! But I suppose my lack of intestinal fortitude is a topic for another blog post.