Tag Archives: blog

December 4, 2012, 11:00 am

Build Your Own Academic Community with Commons in a Box

Before I finished grad school, I took a month-long seminar on teaching with technology. Among other things, we talked about how to build an “interactive syllabus” using that Tool of Tools: Dreamweaver. I seem to recall the instructional design team spending two hours talking about how to format tables correctly in order to assure we got proper alignment. Fast-forward a few years, and I almost never build a web page from scratch. Instead, I use blogs in almost all of my classes: it’s a much simpler way to publish to the web.

It turns out many of us here at ProfHacker use blogs in the classroom. That explains why we’ve got posts on creating a printable syllabus from your blog (rather than vice versa), evaluating student blogs, re-using course blogs, moving your blog, and better blogging assignments. Blogs are great, and they help you get your work done, in an online space that…

May 24, 2012, 11:00 am

When a “Catastrophe” Turns Out Well

By Amy Cavender

We’ve all dreaded it: the day something goes horribly wrong with something that’s of ongoing importance for a course we’re teaching. It happened to me the middle of the semester.

I use a multisite installation of WordPress to run my courses. I try to be very faithful about keeping up with updates as appropriate. It was just that fidelity that caused a problem.

One evening in late March, one of my students emailed to let me know that she couldn’t access the course site—she kept getting an error that said something about too many redirects. I tried to go to the site myself, and got the same error. So I decided to try the sites for the other courses I was teaching this spring. I got the same result. In fact, I was getting the same error for every single site on my domain. Ugh.

I’d done some automatic updates on my WordPress installation earlier in the day; I can only conclude …

April 28, 2011, 11:00 am

Integrating Tweets Into WordPress Blog Posts

By Brian Croxall

Last week, I wrote about a fast way to integrate tweets into WordPress blog comments. Getting tweets about one of your posts included in the comments of that post can help people see the conversation as it is developing on multiple social networks. But tweets are not just conversation about blog posts; sometimes you might find yourself wanting to quote a tweet when writing a blog post. After all, tweets are just as likely to spur the writing of a blog post as vice versa. As is the case in this post and last week’s, I’m inspired by Kathleen’s blog post about missing blogging, but it was actually her tweet that made me notice her post and begin thinking about my two posts here.

If you want to include tweets in your blog posts, you could simply copy and paste the text of the tweet into what you’re writing. But while you’d be capturing the message, you would be forgetting the medium. To …

April 19, 2011, 11:00 am

Integrating Tweets Into WordPress Blog Comments

By Brian Croxall

It’s true that we at ProfHacker love Twitter. We’ve covered how to start tweeting (and why you might want to), practical advice for teaching with Twitter, handling Twitter spam, and using it for conference backchannels. But if we like our Twitter, we also like our blogging.

In many cases, Twitter has replaced much of the blogging that happened several years ago. This makes sense as Twitter is itself a microblog, complete with RSS feeds. If many a blog previously served as a place to post links you found provocative with a short piece of commentary, then Twitter can more or less handle that for you. Interesting conversations can develop on Twitter and other social networks like Facebook in the same way that they previously did in the comments sections of blogs. One person shares something, and several others can respond, often much more quickly then you had ever received comments. And…