The second session was called Developing and Extending WordPress for Higher Education. (Ten points if you can spot the difference in the titles!) In this session the CUNY teams were joined by Tim Owens from UMWBlogs. Tim spoke about ds106, an “open, online course that you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need.”
In addition to bragging a bit about our role, we also want to be sure our users check out the important work going on there, so PLEASE check out ds106, particularly if you’re one of our CityTech faculty. One feature of DS106 is crowd-sourced assignments (here’s a bunch of great examples, and so is the ‘slideguy’ at the top of this page). Users submit assignments for others to do, complete assignments, and write tutorials describing how to do the assignments. And the result, sometimes, is this:
Tim also talked about the Inspire blog, which we just love as a solution to the problem of making sure people see good work done on our sites, even as those sites get larger and larger. Because ds106 participants create hundreds of posts, it’s easy for things to fall by the wayside: Inspire was created to allow users to act as curators, and recommend their favorites. Our own home page was designed with this kind of thing in mind as well. Here’s a great one.
Pretty inspiring!
