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Ten ways to use UMW Blogs

Personal Blogging

Joe's Blog
Joe's Blog
Figured we would get this one out of the way first. UMW Blogs can be used as a good, old-fashioned blog. You can easily share your opinions, generate discourse, and interact with others using the best blogging software out there. Below are a couple of examples of personal blogs on UMW Blogs.



Courses

There is more than one way to skin a course with UMW Blogs. Below are a few examples:

A Group Blog

Poetic Sequence Directed Study
Poetic Sequence Directed Study
This blog is for the professor who wants to have the class blogging together as a group on one blog. This is probably the easiest to implement given the “Add Users” widget, which allows students who already have a blog or username to simply sign-up for the blog with their e-mail address. Zero work for the professor! (Loosely quoted from Andre Malan)



A couple of examples:

A Ghost Blog

Banned & Dangerous Art
Banned & Dangerous Art
This blog is for the professor who doesn’t want to be confused by hundreds of student posts knocking around his/her blog. The blog simply uses BDPRSS and the add-to-BDPRSS widget to populate a WordPress page with aggregated student entries. When another year of students comes, the old posts will still be there (or not, or in another blog that the new blog links to), but as newer posts come in, the old posts will fall off of the bottom of the feed and the blog will have just new fresh content without having to delete anything! (Loosely quoted from Andre Malan)

Examples:

An Aggregated Course Blog

Intro NMS
Intro NMS
If many distributed posts are relevant to a certain subject or topic, they can be aggregated into one course blog (or to quote Barbara ganley "Mother Blog") for a running stream of the latest work from various students within the class. This option allows students to own the work they do for a variety of classes in their own "digital notebook."


A few examples:

E-Portfolios

Rob Lynn's Blog
Rob Lynn's Blog
UMW Blogs is an ideal way for students to create a portfolio of class projects. Such a portfolio could conveniently go on a resumé or C.V. An example is at Whitney Roberts' "Intertextuality" blog, and Robert Lynn's "Roblog."




A couple of examples:

Websites

Tools Blog
Tools Blog
The flexibility of Wordpress can be used to create powerful static websites as well, without using external applications such as Dreamweaver. A couple of recent examples from Jeff McClurken's Digital History course are the Farmer Project site and the Fredericksburg, Stafford, and Spotsylvania Historical markers site.

In fact, faculty have even starting to use it as a kind of quick and easy way to create their own homepage to publish information about their scholarship, teaching, publications, etc. professors Warren Rochelle, Jeffrey McClurken and Marcel Rotter offer a few compelling examples.



A number of examples:

News

The Times
The Times
Blogging is a popular way of sharing information with others. UMW Blogs is no exception. Bulletins about UMW Blogs development, featured blogs, and recent content from throughout the community are posted to the front page regularly. Using blogs to keep your community up-to-date is becoming increasingly more popular, and several people within the UMW Blogs community have been using it just for that.

Take for example the recent blog sharing information about UMW visiting Scholar Eric Mazur, or the the blog sharing news about UMW's chapter of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. Or even news about more controversial local issues such as the proposed Kalahari Waterpark in Fredericksburg.

A few examples:

Collaboration

Jterm Writing
Jterm Writing
UMW Blogs offers an excellent platform for creating virtual meeting spaces for completing group projects, and makes collaboration easier. There are many examples of using blogs as such a space, where multiple users can quickly share with one another.

More specifically, Fragment (which is using the Twitter-inspired theme Prologue, is a proof-of-concept site on UMW Blogs that provides a unique interface for collaboration, project management, and/or a social stream of sharing thoughts and ideas.

A few examples:

Publications

Nonce Journal
Nonce Journal
UMW Blogs reduces some of the technical and monetary challenges to creating high-quality online journals, magazines, zines, and numerous other publications. The work of Claudia Emerson's students have been doing in the Literary Journals class provide an excellent example of this possibility, which has really only just begun to be explored.


Numerous examples:

Multimedia

Great Lives
Great Lives
People can share their personal multimedia, such as audio and video, by using Wordpress plugins like the Anarchy Media Player of wordTube. The beautiful thing is that multimedia plugins are already built into UMW Blogs! An example can be found at the Great Lives blog.

Additionally, Antonella Dalla Torre's Italian 202 class created a series of Italian language mashups using public domain footage from the Internet Archive which was then published on a UMW Blog as a media presentation platform for the videos.


Creating New Web Applications

Fragment
Fragment
Wordpress is flexible enough that advanced users can utilize themes and hacks to create their own social networking tools. Fragment is one such already discussed under the collaboration section. Fragment allows users to give short "shout-outs" in an expressive space, use the Prologue theme that is a Twitter knock-off.

Additionally, Professor Marie McAllister is using a UMW Blogs to create a audio sharing site focused on Eighteenth-Century Poetry. The site leaves very few traces of a blog, in fact it is using RSS to aggregate poems by specific authors on a page, each of these links that leads the visitor to a post that has the audio. Moreover, the audio comes from a combination of sources such as the public domain audio files at Librivox, as well as poems recorded by professors and students more locally. So far the site has over 175 audio poems, ans it is less than 5 months old.

Examples:

Presentations

Not A Blog Presentation
Not A Blog Presentation
Given how attractive a blog on UMW Blogs can be, and all the features it affords you ---why not use it to create a presentation for a conference that can serve at the same time as a resource for references, ideas, and concepts long after the presentation is over? It has been done pretty effectively already, follow the links below to see a few examples.



A few examples:

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