One of the ideas addressed on the blog a few weeks ago is molecular gastronomy. One of the current movements in dining and food preparation is this idea of molecular gastronomy and one of the students posted a good overview video of what it is and demonstration of how a restaurant is doing it. Something to chew on:

As of today, we have decided to disable a sitewide plugin that we installed last fall called BuddyPress. We added it to the site because we were interested in the social networking capabilities that it might allow us to build on top of the UMW Blogs platform. However, at this time, we are concerned that it may be contributing to the performance issues we have been seeing.

The good news is that the removal of this plugin should cause very little inconvenience. We have contacted the handful of users who are currently experimenting with the system, and the removal should have little impact on them.

The most widespread change you will notice due to this removal is the disappearance of the gray toolbar that used to appear whenever you were logged into UMW Blogs. This toolbar provided quick access to a list of your blogs as well as a logout button. We know that some users may have been relying on this interface, so we want to provide the following information about alternative ways to complete these tasks.

Accessing a List of Your Blogs
Whenever you are on the dashboard (or backend) of your blog, you should see a sidebar menu item labeled “Dashboard.” If you click on it, the menu will expand to reveal an item labeled “My Blogs.” Clicking this link will show you a list of all the blogs on which you are currently a user.

Logging Out
On most blogs, you should be able to find a “Logout” link in the sidebar or menu of the site. However, if you can’t find one, you can always logout of the system by going to the UMW Blogs home page  http://www.umwblogs.org) and clicking the “Logout” link at the top of the right-hand sidebar.

If you are concerned about any other implications resulting from the removal of Buddypress, feel free to contact any member of DTLT.

UPDATE (2/18): Avatars on UMW Blogs

Another feature of BuddyPress that some UMW Blogs users may have been taking advantage of was the ability to upload and display avatars. It is still possible to associate your account with an avatar using the free Gravatar service.

If you have a blog on UMW Blogs and would like users’ avatars to be displayed, go to your “Appearance” menu and choose “Gravatars.” Simply toggle the option on and save. Now, if a user has a Gravatar set up, it will appear when they leave a comment on your blog.

If you are a user and would like to have your avatar appear whenever a blog enables this option, simple visit www.gravatar.com and set up an avatar. For this to work, the Gravatar must be associated with the email address that you use with your UMW Blogs account.

MUTO from K?safilmci on Vimeo.

Via Profhacker.

During the spring 2009 semester, Steve Greenlaw’s international finance students did more than just study the current financial crisis — they created a persistent online resource about the global recession. Students carefully studied and analyzed the international crisis and decided they wanted to build a Web site that shed light on the reasons behind the meltdown and the ongoing events surrounding it. Working on a site in UMW Blogs, Dr. Greenlaw and the students developed a structure for their analysis and presentation and then spent the spring and summer publishing and updating their findings. In addition to sections on the site that examine the intricacies of everything from the subprime mortgage market to the government bailout, students created a timeline of events and developed a robust bibliography of references.

In 1862, poet Walt Whitman went to Fredericksburg, Virginia, searching for his brother George who had been wounded in a Civil War battle. Whitman was so moved by the carnage he found that he worked as a nurse for the rest of the war.  Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart (University of Mary Washington) say Whitman was helping heal wounded soldiers in the same way he hoped his poetry could heal the war-torn nation.

It’s exciting to see UMW’s faculty mass communicatin’ about Whitman’s Civil War, something they’ll be taking to the next level as part of an NEH Grant that will be experimenting with the possibilities of harnessing online social media for studying and discussing Whitman’s poetry with five different courses in four distinct locales. See more on this project here.

Download “Whitman at War” July 4th, 2009

Some additional features include “friending” people who are on UMW Blogs as a means to follow their activity. Also, everyone automatically gets their own profile page which lists their recent activity, blogs they author, and groups they are a member of. As you may already be thinking, “this kinda seems like a Facebook knock-off.” In many ways it is, but we aren’t really imagining it as a UMW replacement for Facebook, because that would just be silly.  Facebook is impressive at what it does (although it locks you in like a cornered rat). What we are interested in exploring with this simple set of tools is the possibility for making it easier to discover the work that is happening throughout the UMW Blogs environment. This is really just an experimental space, and we will evaluate just how useful it is or isn’t over the course of the next year.

One immediate difference you will notice across UMW Blogs when you login in is that there is now a grey admin bar across the top of every page once you login. This is a nice feature of BuddyPress that helps consolidates your blogs all in one place while giving you direct access to your personal profile information and the BuddyPress directories—just keep in mind that admin bar may not work with all blogs themes, and this is something we will be remedying shortly.

So, anyway, if you are intrigued, poke around in BuddyPress and let us know what you think, or what can be improved. We will be redesigning the space so that it integrates more cleanly with the old gold UMW Blogs site, as well as adding a number of additional personal informational fields to the BufyPress profile, but other than that it should pretty much fully functional as of now, so don;’ be afraid to give it a try.