//Here are the slides I used for JISC’s Greening ICT Programme Meeting. There are 25 slides with lots of notes and references from slide 26 onwards.
//These are slides to accompany an eight minute ‘Lightning Talk’ for the dev8D conference in London, 24-27th February 2010. Each slide is a link to a blog post I have written on ways to use WordPress and WordPress Multi User, that are not about blogging.
Brief notes are available from slide 12 onwards.
//Best viewed full screen or downloaded as PDF or ODP formats. This includes the slides (1-29) and my notes (30-58). All references in the slides are bookmarked on delicious under the altc09WPMU tag.
//This is just a reminder that I’ll be giving a demonstration of WordPress Multi-User and BuddyPress at the ALT Conference at 10:50-11:50 on Wednesday, 9 September in room 1.219
Here’s the blurb I submitted.
I write quite a lot on this blog about the use of WordPress and WPMU. Here’s a list of posts that may interest you. Here’s the RSS feed for that search, so you can keep updated with anything I write on the subject.
I’ll be setting up an ALT-C BuddyPress site for anyone to play around with over the course of the conference. It will be available from the 6-17th September 2009. Expect to find it at: http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/altc2009
//Here’s some information on a conference that my department, the Centre for Educational Research and Development, is hosting. I’m looking forward to it.
//I’ve just re-submitted this proposal for a demonstration at ALT-C 2009. It’s called WordPress Multi-User: BuddyPress and Beyond. It won’t be confirmed until June, but for the record, here it is…
‘BuddyPress’ is a new social networking layer for WordPress Multi-User blogs. It provides familiar, easy to use social networking features in addition to a high-quality and popular blogging platform. The University of Lincoln have been trialing WordPress MU since May 2008 and have been using BuddyPress since February 2009 to promote an institutional social networking community built around personalised and collaborative web publishing.
This session will demonstrate the versatility of the WordPress MU platform. We’ll look at an installation that is enhanced with BuddyPress, LDAP authentication, mobile phone support and advanced privacy controls. You’ll see how simple it is to set up site-wide RSS syndication and aggregation, enhance your blog with semantic web tools, publish mathematical formulae with LaTeX, send realtime notifications to Facebook, Twitter and IM, publish podcasts to iTunes, and embed GPX and KML mapping files. We’ll also look at how to embed WordPress content in your VLE and other institutional websites. The use of a temporary ‘ALT-C 2009 BuddyPress’ installation will be encouraged.
There will be opportunities throughout for questions and answers and participants will leave with a good understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress and the resources and skills required to provide a social networking and blogging platform in your institution.
//My recent proposal to do a workshop session on WordPress MU and BuddyPress at this year’s ALT conference was accepted on the condition of a couple of modifications. It’s been suggested that it should be run as a demonstration rather than workshop and that I offer more detail on what will be demonstrated. Fair enough. The reviewer of my proposal suggested that I might aim the session at “teachers of mathematics-intensive disciplines because of WordPress’ decent support of 
This isn’t an area I would normally think to support (although I did write my MA dissertation in
//
Having heard about the WordCamp Ed event in Washington DC, I’m thinking of organising a WordCamp, focussing on the use of WordPress in HE and FE in the UK. Would anyone be interested in helping with the organisation of this?
There is some support for organising WordCamps from Automattic. A lot of the items listed there would be easy to facilitate with support from one of our institutions. I’d be happy to ask the University of Lincoln. We’re just off the main North-South East Coast rail trunk, but the access isn’t bad from London up to Edinburgh, and it’s a good, modern university, with decent facilities in a historic city worth visiting.
I’m sure there would be a lot of interest in attending. It could appeal to teachers, students, researchers, ICT and web dev staff. We could appeal for the involvement of edubloggers who have a lot of experience in advocating the use of blogs in HE and FE.
There was a WordCamp in Birmingham in July 2008. We could contact the organisers of that event for advice as well as the organisers of the DC event.
The day might be organised like this:
Is anyone interested in helping organise a WordCamp(Ed) in the UK? Please leave comments below and join our new Google Group.
