Author ArchivePreview of Next Version of Shadowbox ThemeNovember 18th, 2009 by Alex ChapinI attended part of the LIS website team meeting today and gave a presentation of the ShadowBox theme and some of the new features that will be available in the next version including updates to author pages, more custom header options and most importantly, higher contrast text in comment fields. I also gave a preview of some new ShadowBox variations based on the new college website design. Below is a screencast from that meeting:
Towards a Unified Curricular Technology UXNovember 16th, 2009 by Alex ChapinI recently created a version of the ShadowBox theme for Measure, an instance of Moodle used at Middlebury for online assessments. As a starting point, I used the Anomaly Theme Pack, created by the Patrick Malley, the Themes Manager for Moodle.org and the Creative Director of the NewSchool Learning design shop. I merged some of the styles and markup Patrick had developed with code from the WordPress ShadowBox theme to create a similar look and feel to the WordPress version. This is a great example of the power of open source to build upon and synthesize the work of others (much of this theme designers current work in no longer open source…)
The goal is to create a more unified user experience (UX) and make it easy for faculty and students to move from one platform to another. You’ll noticed that Measure has links to WordPress and Segue in the upper right corner. These same links can be put in the same place on WordPress blogs that use ShadowBox. I’d also like to put these same links on all Segue sites to help with the transition away from Segue to other platforms.
For more information about Measure, see the Measure Blog. Seminar for Academic ProfessionalsNovember 13th, 2009 by Alex ChapinAs libraries and technology services merge, librarians and technologists also need to merge, at least what they know. Mike Roy and David Wedaman (Brandeis) have organized a seminar whose objective is to develop a curriculum for academic information professionals. Librarians and technologists from Middlebury, Brandeis and Mount Holyoke are currently defining that curriculum through a series of presentations that make up the MBMH Seminar. Joy Pile and I, along with Chrissa Godbout from Mount Holyoke and Karrie Peterson from Brandeis gave the first presentation of the seminar on “Blending Education and Entertainment” in late October. A summary of the presentation is posted on the MBMH Seminar blog and slides are available from Google Docs. Bryan Carson along with Mary Glackin from Mount Holyoke, gave a presentation this afternoon on the topic of “Do Students Learn Differently?” Capture Quick StartNovember 6th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Curricular Technology team is working on the figuring out how to document technology, no small task… We are all in agreement that it would be good to have some sort of “quick start” documentation that provides people with the basics to get started with a given tool or a given task/objective. Below is a screencast of a “quick start” demo I did for how to capture. See: Capture > Presentation > How to do it. This screencast is definitely too long for a quick start, but the idea of using a screencast in conjunction with step-by-step instructions for quick start documentation is appealing. For other examples of screencast quick starts and/or overviews see: Alas these screencasts are a lot of work and am not sure how effective they are or how they can be improved… Though I think generally they should be as short as possible. ShadowBox Theme Introductory ScreencastNovember 3rd, 2009 by Alex ChapinI made a ShadowBox theme introductory screencast during a presentation of the theme to Academic Consulting Services. This screencast describes some of the WordPress UI challenges I was trying to solve with this theme. The first was finding a consistent way to display the log in link and information about a given user’s role on a blog. I also wanted to create a UI for setting theme colors and layout and other options. Finally I wanted to more consistently map some of the blog editing UI onto the blog itself so people could more easily add new posts or edit existing posts. (click on the Am working on a new release of ShadowBox that includes the display of category and tag RSS links, custom author pages and more header options. For more information, see ShadowBox Changelog. Contact me know if you would like to see a preview of this new version. Curricular Technology Team Meeting Notes 10/6/09October 19th, 2009 by Alex ChapinKey Topics: CT and CTLR collaboration, review of technology in education sites, curricular technology site information architecture, categories of technologies/tools and uses/pedagogies, tech buzzwords CT Team Meeting Minutes of 9/28/09October 6th, 2009 by Alex ChapinTopics: MiddMedia, ShadowBox theme, Classes Server, Web Redo Updates, e-portfolios, Breadnet, CT and LIS blog, CTLR and CT collaboration, CT IA… Review of Technology in Education SitesSeptember 30th, 2009 by Alex ChapinTo help us create a section of the LIS site on Curricular Technology, I thought it would be good to see how other institutions publish comparable information. What we are currently calling “curricular technology” is described in various ways including “instructional technology“, “educational technology,” “academic technology,” and “technologies for teaching, learning and research.” What all of these labels have in common is seems to be the use of technology in education. New Blog ThemeSeptember 29th, 2009 by Alex ChapinAdam reviewed the code for ShadowBox, the new WordPress theme I developed and installed it in on WordPress at Midd. Of course, I immediately used it on our CT team blog and took advantage of some of its capabilities to give a sense of the new possibilities for layout and presentation that it introduces. I should make it clear that this theme doesn’t introduce any functionality that other themes haven’t explored. It is modeled first and foremost on Kubrick, the default WordPress theme. In addition to this basic theme, I looked at a number of the most popular themes at wordpress.org including Atahualpa, Ahimsa, iNove to get a sense of the direction of theme development in the WordPress community. I am hoping this will help us determine where we want to publish our work. In particular, whether we want to merge all of our work into the new LIS blog and discontinue this blog or perhaps keep this blog around an example of innovative uses of WordPress… Surveys and Focus GroupsSeptember 14th, 2009 by Alex ChapinClearly both surveys and focus groups are important tools for gathering information about a particular population. Usually surveys are used first, to a get general sense of the population. Surveys are then followed by focus groups that get more in depth information. However a case can be made for reversing this order and starting with focus groups first, followed by surveys (see: “Use of Focus Groups in Survey Item Development“, The Qualitative Report, Nassar and Borders, March, 2002). Focus groups can often help to define survey questions or inform how questions are phrased. This can be particularly important for technology surveys, helping to couch questions in terms that those surveyed can understand. Curricular Technology Team Progress ReportSeptember 14th, 2009 by Alex ChapinSubmitted by Alex Chapin Part of the re-organization of LIS was the introduction of “teams.” Teams consist of individuals from different areas within LIS who are brought together to take on a particular project or initiative or area of activity not covered by a single functional area. Last June, LIS introduced three teams, one focused on the LIS website, another on digitization and another on curricular technology.
The Curricular Technology team has been meeting once a week since its formation. The team spent a fair amount of time just figuring out its mission, “to research, evaluate and recommend technologies for teaching and learning” and to come up with some sort of vision, an elevator pitch if you will. Once these were in place we posted them to our blog and have been documenting our work ever since. Currently, we have a lot of projects we are working on simultaneously. Many of these are focused on gathering information about curricular technology needs at Middlebury. We’ve already began to document what we think we know about technology needs, what we think we need to verify and what we really don’t know. We have also been compiling a “matrix” of features we think are important for technologies that support teaching, learning and research and have been analyzing how technology is currently being used in the curriculum. What we really need to do now is talk to people, many different people, faculty, staff, students, administrators and find out what the community wants and thinks it needs in the area of educational technology. In doing so, we may need to educate people about what is possible with current technologies and what may be possible with emerging technologies. It is likely we’ll follow the lead of the web redo project. We hope to publish a survey soon that will begin to ask some basic questions. We likely follow up with invitations to join focus groups. We invite you to visit the Curricular Technology Team blog regularly or put it in your favorite RSS reader and join in on the conversation. Meeting Notes 2009-09-08September 8th, 2009 by Alex ChapinIn this meeting we took a step back and reviewed what we have done to date and how to proceed this fall. (more…)Overview of Projects and PrioritiesSeptember 7th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Curricular Technology team did a lot of brainstorming over the summer. This seems like a good time to step back and compare what we have done to what our priorities are:
We have a lot of projects started whose focus is to find one or more replacements for Segue including a CT feature matrix, a CT needs “knowledge grid” (i.e. what do we know and not know about technologies that faculty and students need), course site platform survey questions. Meeting Notes 2009-09-01September 2nd, 2009 by Alex ChapinThis meeting focused on brainstorming about the use of curricular technologies at Middlebury in terms of:
Meeting Notes 2009-08-19August 19th, 2009 by Alex ChapinKey Topics and Debates: Curricular Technology on LIS site: A ProposalAugust 17th, 2009 by Alex Chapin
Bryan suggested that rather than writing abstracts just for the CT landing page, we could pull in actual content from those resources using the Drupal Views module. Essentially, if I follow Bryan’s explanation (see whiteboard diagram), each CT resource would defined as a particular content type which the views module could be configured to fetch from that source, be it WordPress, Segue, eRes or Drupal. Eating our own dogfood… yumAugust 17th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe current tagline for the Curricular Technology blog is “eating our own dogfood… yum.” I recently changed this from “That’s Team with a capital T, baby!” in consultation with Bryan Carson. The phrase, eating one’s own dogfood is frequently used by technology companies to indicate that employees in these companies use the software they are developing. This is done for various reasons including helping to test the software, gain familarity with the products being developed, expressing confidence in the product and so on. Responding to the Curricular Technology Blog Tagline survey is a good example of eating one’s own dogfood. The survey was created with Google Apps which we have used quite a bit in our team work. The survey is essentially a form that is linked to a spreadsheet. It’s a great way to quickly gather information from others and can evolve as responses come in. For example, as others submit tagline suggestions, the form can be updated to include these new suggestions and also people to rate them. Reseach: Twitter plugins for WordPressAugust 17th, 2009 by Alex ChapinThe Helpdesk received a request for a WordPress Twitter plugin. If we decide it would be good to have such a plugin, what kind of functionality would useful for the Midd community. See: http://blueprintds.com/2009/01/19/top-twitter-wordpress-plugin-roundup/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/ http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2007/04/10-best-twitter-tools-for-wordpress-blogs/ Team Report to Area DirectorsAugust 11th, 2009 by Alex ChapinI gave the Area Directors a report on the progress made by the Curricular Technology team over the last 5 weeks. In my report, I reviewed our mission statement and vision (i.e. elevator pitch). I also described some of our working methodologies including our extensive use of Google Apps for collaborative writing and our attempt to be as open and transparent as possible. Finally I listed some of our activities including our course site platform recommendations, our curricular technologies feature matrix and our review of Breadnet. Meeting Notes 2009-08-04August 11th, 2009 by Alex ChapinBreadNet Evaluation: Next Steps
Action items:
WordPress Plugins
|
Bryan and I were chatting after the last CT meeting. Bryan had an interesting idea for how Curricular Technology documentation could be aggregated on the LIS site. We both agreed that we need more than simply a list of links to documentation sites. Instead of just links, we should have some explanation of the resource/site being linked to, some sort of abstract describing that resource/site.