Monthly Archives: September 2012

Bebop is totally rocksteady

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File this under “WPedu is killing it right now”.

The team at the Centre for Educational Research and Development at University of Lincoln (UK) has just announced the first public release of Bebop, their new BuddyPress plugin. Read more about the release and about Bebop itself. (Disclaimer – I have done some consultation for the Bebop project, though I’m writing this blog post outside of that consultant role.)

I find Bebop compelling because of what it does, and also because of how it was built. In a nutshell, Bebop is an aggregator for Open Educational Resources, or OERs. ‘OER’ is a term of art among open education folks, referring to learning resources that are available for free use, under an open license. (See OER Commons for a longer definition.) In practice, this can mean anything from videos to lesson plans to games to websites. Bebop is designed to allow members of a BuddyPress community to collect their own OERs from various web services – Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc – for display on their BP profiles. It’s a nice demonstration of how BuddyPress can be used as a tool for aggregating work done elsewhere on the web. It also demonstrates another way in which universities can use a free platform like BuddyPress as a non-commercial, locally hosted home for students and faculty, while recognizing that valuable work happens in spaces not under the university’s control. And from a technical point of view, I like how Bebop uses BP’s Activity component and profile metaphors to creative ends.

Bebop was built as part of a “rapid innovation” project. To put the term “rapid” in context: In the context of universities, projects usually move forward glacially. Getting approval and funding may itself take years, and by the time development begins, the original idea/technology is already obsolete. Bebop, in contrast, was conceived and developed over just a couple of months. It’s great to see these kinds of (relatively) rapid projects happening in universities – they can demonstrate to funders the benefits that come along with a bit of agility and risk and freedom.

If you’re running a BuddyPress installation in a university, you might consider taking Bebop for a spin. Get it from the wordpress.org plugin repo or follow development at Github.

WordPress in education, meet the free software community. And vice versa.

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There’s a huge, amorphous community of people using WordPress in education. Let’s call it WPedu. There’s another huge community of people involved in the WordPress free software community. Let’s call it WPorg.

WPedu, meet WPorg. WPorg, meet WPedu.

WPorg should know that WPedu is killing it right now

I’d like WPorg to know that WPedu is kicking some serious ass. Take DS106 as an example. DS106 is a distributed course on the topic of Digital Storytelling (that’s the “DS”), where students all over the world – some of whom are enrolled in credit-bearing DS courses at their colleges, some of whom are just tagging along for the ride – use their blogs to complete assignments of various sorts. WordPress, FeedWordPress, BuddyPress, and a bunch of custom hacks are used to aggregate content from hundreds of participants into a single stream. The whole thing is built around the idea of openness: existing, open standards like RSS are being used to federate standalone instances of WordPress (alongside any other system that outputs RSS).

People working on free software – like you, WPorg! – should be flipping out over how awesome that is.

Similarly impressive innovations can be found all over the WPedu world. The innovation is motivated by the love of the work, and by principles: education should be open, individuals should control their data and their online identities, software should be free as in speech. These are the very same principles that are close to the hearts of free software enthusiasts.

People involved in the WPorg community should be spending more effort reaching out to WPedu people. The software developers, instructional technologists, faculty members, and other people working in WPedu are a huge, largely untapped resource for the free software project. People working in K-12 and universities, especially those working in public institutions, often have an incentive (even an imperative) to be sharing their work out to the larger community. (Contrast this with the fact that for-profit WP devs actually have a disincentive to contribute, an issue I wrote about recently.) People in WPedu are experts at piecing systems together, at writing documentation, at community moderation, and so on. They often enjoy flexible job descriptions and fairly loose oversight, and they’re less beholden to financial issues than people working in the private sector. Thus, for many WPedu people, it’d be quite concievable to shoehorn some free software work into their workweek. Most of all, WPedu people are totally awesome people – you have to be pretty awesome to put up with the lackluster pay and ridiculous bureaucracies that education folk have to deal with. Start talking to these awesome people. They have incredible ideas about where WP should go, and they have the resources to help get there.

WPedu should start tooting its own horn

On the flip side: WPedu, you are doing some cool shit, and deep in your heart, you know it. So don’t be afraid to talk about it. It’s true, ome of you are blogging, and that’s great. These blogs are usually addressed (understandably enough) to fellow WPedu people – “here’s a cool new way to use WordPress in a university”, etc. But you should stop qualifying yourselves: Lots of the stuff you’re doing is legitimately a cool new way to use WordPress, period, and you should be proud of that. Own your excellence and innovation.

I come from WPedu, so I say this from experience: there’s too much modesty, bordering on mousyness, among WPedu innovators. Many – most? – of you were never formally trained in software development (or design, or support, or documentation, or whatever). I know I never was. And being embedded in institutions founded on the very notion of Expertise – you can’t spell University without PhD – makes you too unsure of your own skills to reach out and get involved. Here’s a secret: Most of the people in the WPorg community came from non-technical backgrounds, too. (IMO, that’s one of the things that has made WordPress successful, but that’s a topic for another post.) You deserve to be involved, just as much as any of the current community contributors. Three-quarters of expertise is having the confidence to get involved.

If that’s not enough persuasion, here are some practical considerations.

  1. When you build systems using a piece of software – like, let’s say, a student blogging system using WordPress – you become dependent on the future development of that software. By getting involved in the community – submitting patches, doing beta testing, participating in support forums, writing plugins and themes, blogging, etc – you can earn a seat at the table where decisions about WP’s future are made. When your voice isn’t heard, someone else’s voice will be heard in your place. And, as someone who straddles WPedu and WPorg, I can say with confidence that edu and non-profit voices are way underrepresented in the WP project.
  2. Very Important People, such as your boss, your promotion committee, public and private grant committees, and so forth, will be Very Impressed by a list of contributions to free software projects. If you can tell funders that your software has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times (as we are unashamed to do with the CUNY Academic Commons project), and if you can tie this into a broader narrative about engaging meaningfully with a broader public, it can help to guarantee your financial continuance, if you know what I mean.
  3. It’s the right thing to do. The work that you’re doing at your institutions is helping your students in a huge way. If, by putting in just a bit of extra work, you can increase the potential beneficiaries of your work by ten- or one-hundred- or one-thousand-fold, why wouldn’t you do so?

I shouldn’t make it sound like there’s no overlap between WPedu and WPorg. There is. But it’s much smaller than it should be, given the direct parallels between the ideological goals of the free software project and the ideological goals of the educational enterprise

I’m working on a couple ideas that I think will help to bridge some of the gaps between WPedu and WPorg. I’ll share more about them when they become more well-formed. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts about how to move these mutually beneficial connections from the realm of the practical to the actual.

Blog, come forth!

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This blog has gone unloved as of late. I’ve been working too much, and not taking the time to sit back and think about the work I’m doing, and I think that’s a bad thing. Reading Alan Levine’s call-out the other day reinforced the feeling that I should devote more attention to reflecting in this space, if only for my own sanity.

So, as a starting place, I made a new theme – my first revamp since I started this blog in late 2008. I ripped off Mark Jaquith’s idea and used Twenty Twelve – the new default theme that will ship with WordPress 3.5 – as my parent theme. It’s much easier on the eyes than my old theme, and its responsive nature allowed me to uninstall WP Touch. (WP Touch, you served valiantly lo these many years. RIP.) If you’re interested, I’ve made my (very modest) child theme available on Github.

BuddyCamp – it’s about time

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Yesterday the first ever BuddyCamp was announced. BuddyCamp Vancouver 2012 is the brainchild Cyri Jones, a Vancouver-based educator and entrepreneur who works a lot with WP and BP. I think it’s going to be a very cool event.

The idea of a BuddyPress-specific event along the lines of WordCamp has been tossed around a lot in the past, at least between the most active members of the BP community. Some have argued that BP is a bit “niche” to serve as the foundation for an event like this (see some of the comments in this WP Realm post, for example). However, while it’s clear that BP has far fewer users than WP, those who do use BP on an everyday basis are often very passionate about it. I think that the community is plenty large at this point to support local events of this type.

In the past, John Jacoby has suggested that a more general “WordPress Plugins Camp” might be a logical precursor to a BuddyCamp – after all, there are lots more plugins than just BuddyPress, which translates to many more potential attendees. I think a general Plugins Camp is a pretty kickass idea, and devs/designers working with BP would have a lot to bring to such an event. But it’s worth noting that this first BuddyCamp will be about a lot more than just devs and designers. I’d wager that over half the attendees will be people who are using free software to build online community space, from a non-technical point of view. These people may not know the first thing about building a WordPress plugin, but they have lots to say about how software can facilitate community – and this is something very specific to a BuddyPress event. So I think there’s really a need for something like a BuddyCamp, where the people who are building the software can get in the same room with the people who are pushing it to its practical limits in real-world scenarios.

Also, while I wish that the whole thing had been arranged a few months sooner (sometimes the best ideas happen at the last minute!), I think the timing of BuddyCamp Vancouver is really great. It’s sandwiched between two events, also being held in Vancouver, which should have huge overlaps in terms of interested attendees: WordCamp Vancouver and Open Ed 2012. I’m hoping that, in particular, a lot of people coming into town for Open Ed will think about coming a day or two early to talk about BuddyPress and its uses in supporting online learning communities. Spoiler alert: I may be talking about this very topic in my own BuddyCamp Vancouver session 🙂

I’m hoping that this is just the first of a series of BuddyCamps. I can easily imagine that there’s enough interest in BP to support a handful of similar events around the world each year. If you’re a motivated fan of BuddyPress, you may want to think about planning such an event in the future!