[Prof. Paul King]

Hi everyone.
I am determined to get this tool to work well with my group methodology so in addition to reviewing the tools introduced during the workshop I spent most of my time strategizing on how to create a series of interrelated sites that allow me to have students work as individuals (each student will have a personal site for this course) and 4-5 group sites (a group of up to 4 students as well as me the professor will be administrators).

My goal is to use the primary site as my own self expression and communication tool with my class and to also have each student track their progress individually on their own site and then also have each group document their work on their group site.

I am still on the fence about how structured I will want the individual and group sites (meaning uniform structure) – or if I will let them organize it own their own. I am leaning toward a hybrid approach that defines several required pages and categories/tags plus letting them create additional on their own.

To organize this I intend to create two mockup sites (one for the individual and one for the group) and then export this format to a file that each individual and group can import so they can get started quickly.

I will create two individual pages on my primary course site called “Student Sites” and “Group Sites” and will have each student and group add a post with a link to their site so that we can easily navigate.

I am also thinking forward to how this site will be organized in the greater structure of all my courses and the running of the same course in multiple semesters.

I plan on developing a diagram and some handouts so that I can get the students all started quickly on the first day of class. I will post these for everyone to see when they are done.

Paul

[Prof. Gold]

Very cool, Paul. What you’re describing sounds like what is often called a “hub-and-spoke” model. FeedWordPress is an aggregation plugin that you might use to have all of the posts from your students appear both on their own sites and on the course blog. That’s what we did pretty extensively in the Looking for Whitman project (http://lookingforwhitman.org) — each student had his or her own blog, but through aggregation and tagging, we were able to pull those student posts into course blogs and project-wide blogs. The nice thing about doing that is that if you or the students want to see all blog posts from the entire class, they only need to visit one site.

[Jody R. Rosen]

I love how what Paul spent two days figuring out Matt can identify and refer to by name! It would be great if we could learn about FeedWordPress and how we might use it to showcase work from our classes in a Living Lab project, or work from this Living lab project and the other cohorts together in one place.