As I may have mentioned in the dim & distant past every second semester I roll out of consultation mode and into some genuine hands on teaching (oooo) in our Graduate Certificate of Higher Education.
So I’m limbering up the old ed-tech-pedagogy limbs and having what is now an annual crack at getting people interested in emerging technologies. And this year I’ve got WordPress MU and FeedWordPress to help out.
Basically what I’ve done is created a bit of a mini-blogger for the course, participants roll along, set up their blog (using WPMU) and each blog is then aggregated centrally (using summaries) through FeedWordPress. Simple huh :o)
What would be really cool though at this stage would be a little observational help from an outside perspective and also a bit of php assistance…
1. Imagining that you weren’t the savvy geek that you are ;) would this make sense to you? It’s an optional element with no compulsory posting… just the suggestion that you’ll be better off doing think kind of thing and I do get to ‘introduce’ it (30 seconds) face-to-face… otherwise it’s entirely online… any ideas how I could improve it?
2. Do you think I should give participants the option of subscribing by email? I kinda want them to get an aggregator under their belt but am worried that I’ll exclude the few that come aboard through this. (and do you think that Bloglines is the best suggestion)
3. I want to set the code in WPMU to email not only the person who has set up a new blog but also me. However, I’m not cluey enough with php to be able to figure this out… any idea what I’d need to insert into the code below to make this happen? (it’s in wp-newblog.php if anyone is that involved with this)
`< $message_headers = 'From: ' . stripslashes($_POST['weblog_title']) . '
$message = __(”Dear User,\n\nYour new WordPressMU blog has been successfully set up at:\n”.$url.”\n\nYou can log in to the administrator account with the following information:\n Username: “.$wpblog.”\n Password: “.$random_password.”\nLogin Here: “.$url.”wp-login.php\n\nWe hope you enjoy your new weblog.\n Thanks!\n\n–James Farmer\nhttp://mu.wordpress.org/\n”);
@mail($_POST[ 'admin_email' ],__(’New WordPress MU Blog’), $message, $message_headers);>`
Hi! This semester for my summer seminar (here) I’ve been using FeedWordPress to aggregate my seminar participants blogs..
Next step is to add an auto-enroll into the aggregator feed. So you set up a class blog, and students who click through from that (aggregating) class blog are automatically added to the blog. Cool, huh? I’ll post about it when/if it works.
James, do you want us to create a blog and give the system a bit of a drive? Do you have the 30 sec intro as an MP3? If yes to both let me give it to my 7yo and see what happens.
On your email, if it is going through a standard SMTP server then just add your email address to the line of code that sends the email.
In looking at wp-newblog.php it seems the message is sent on line 316 using the call to @MAIL, the first parameter seems to be the email address try this:-
$emailadd = $_POST[ 'admin_email' ] . ‘; james@somewhere.com‘
@mail($emailadd, __(’New WordPress MU Blog’), $message, $message_headers);
Wikisavvy as well, you are very savvy
Oh don’t forget the ; at the end of the $emailadd assignment
Alex, we’re on the same page. Very much so.
As far as I’m concerned the blog tools are here… now we need some serious aggregation ones. Your tools sounds v. good. I’m after a scraping device too for a particular domain or an auto-registration with WPMU.
Michael, thanks for the .mp3 idea… I should screencast it really shouldn’t I!
Also thanks for the php hints, much much appreciated, will try it now.
Alex, another question, if it’s not too much bother could you tell me how participants used the public aggregation as opposed to personal news aggregation… I’m guessing something like the learning blogosphere experience http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html
Am I right?
Do you mean what was the role, or what was the difference between the aggregated and non-aggregated? I don’t recall how the UM folks allowed for aggregation (I’d have to go back and re-read the article), but I just hooked up one category as a “capstone seminar” category and only aggregated from that category feed.
It’s too short a class to see what people decide to aggregate and what they keep private. Most students are aggregating *everything*, or at least a substantial part of their work. But that may be because it is a small, intense summer seminar.
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Thanks Alex, that’s pretty much what I was after. The way I figure is that if I can get them aggregating (perhaps using FeedWP as a lever for those totally new to this) then I’m going to be on a winner.
The issue is that they’re all existing academic staff rather than tech savvy young ‘uns so it might be a challenge!