Tag Archives: Reviews

Review of Technology in Education Sites

To help us create a section of the LIS site on Curricular Technology, I thought it would be good to see how other institutions publish comparable information.  What we are currently calling “curricular technology” is described in various ways including “instructional technology“, “educational technology,” “academic technology,” and “technologies for teaching, learning and research.”  What all of these labels have in common is seems to be the use of technology in education.

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New Blog Theme

Adam reviewed the code for ShadowBox, the new WordPress theme I developed and installed it in on WordPress at Midd.  Of course, I immediately used it on our CT team blog and took advantage of some of its capabilities to give a sense of the new possibilities for layout and presentation that it introduces.

I should make it clear that this theme doesn’t introduce any functionality that other themes haven’t explored.  It is modeled first and foremost on Kubrick, the default WordPress theme.  In addition to this basic theme, I looked at a number of the most popular themes at wordpress.org including Atahualpa, Ahimsa, iNove to get a sense of the direction of theme development in the WordPress community.

I am hoping this will help us determine where we want to publish our work.  In particular, whether we want to merge all of our work into the new LIS blog and discontinue this blog or perhaps keep this blog around an example of innovative uses of WordPress…

Towards a better Features Matrix

A common approach to choosing a technology solution is to create a “feature matrix” which lists all the features required and numerical rates or weights each solution’s implementation of that feature.  The best solution is then that one with the highest “score.”

For a good critique of this strategy see: CMS Selection – Death to the Features Matrix.  This article suggests another approach, that of listing “doubts” regarding the importance of features or a solution’s implementation of a feature.