Tag Archives: Curricular Technology

Curricular Technology Workshops

The Curricular Technology (CT) team will be organizing workshops this summer on new technologies for teaching, learning and research including the new Course Hub and the Moodle learning management system (LMS).  The first series of these workshops will be offered next week.  Here are details:

Curricular Technology Platforms Overview

1:00 – 2:00 pm, Tues, June 21,  Library 105

This workshop will give an overview of the platforms that will be available in the next academic year for creating course websites including the Course Hub, Moodle and WordPress.  For more information on the Course Hub, which will become the definitive starting point for all online course resources, see:
The Course Hub > About

Moodle workshop

2-3:30 pm, Weds, June 22, Library 105

This workshop will introduce Moodle, one of the platforms that will replace Segue for creating course sites.  For more information on Moodle, see:
Moodle @ Middlebury

WordPress workshop

1-2:30 pm, Fri, June 24, Library 105

This workshop will introduce WordPress, another platform that can be used as a replacement for Segue for creating course sites.  For more information on WordPress, see:
WordPress @ Middlebury

Are you reading this post via a feed reader? If so, read on…

On Tuesday May 31st we’re going to change the categories on this blog, so if by any chance you’re using a feed of a specific category, that’s going to break. We suggest subscribing to the whole blog for maximum enjoyment! If you’re not a LIS staff member & would like to filter out the more staff related posts, you can subscribe to the new “Middlebury Community Interest” category after May 31st. The other categories will be “LIS Staff Interest”, and “Post for MiddPoints” which will cause the post to be added to the MiddPoints blog too. All the old categories except “The Essentials” will be converted to tags for easy searching.
The LIS Web team developed this new scheme, following recommendations that came out of the open meeting about the future of the LIS Blog (including a call for simplified categories). The AD Team reviewed and approved these changes. We welcome your comments.

Subscribe to feeds on private blogs

Today we released a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of private blogs using any RSS reader.

When you are logged in and viewing a private blog, the RSS feed links will now contain a special key unique to you and the blog that gives your reader access to the feed. There is nothing special you need to do, just subscribe as usual and feeds from private blogs will now work without redirecting your reader to the login page.

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WordPress feeds can now include pages

During the past few years new versions of WordPress have made this system much easier to use — and our community has made use of these new abilities to make a wide range of sites structured in many ways.

Most of the content in WordPress sites are Posts, chronologically ordered entries that make up a ‘blog’ or news site. Pages on the other hand, are non-time-dependent content that can be arranged in a hierarchy. Traditionally, Pages in WordPress sites were used mostly for describing the blog, contact information, or other content that rarely changes and isn’t ‘newsworthy’. (more on Posts vs. Pages)

Recently, a number of sites have been making increasingly large use of Pages, such as to hold curricular resources that are then referenced from Posts describing assignments that use them. For sites that make significant use of Pages, site-owners can now enable the RSS Includes Pages plugin so that new pages are added to your site’s main feed. For course sites in WordPress, enabling this plugin will allow page additions to be fed into the Course Hub as updates.

We still recommend making use of Posts in WordPress sites to share new material with readers rather than heavily using Pages as Pages are still second-class citizens in many ways (such as support for tagging and categorization). With the new RSS Includes Pages plugin, Page-heavy sites can now feed new content to the Course Hub and others subscribed to their feeds.

DrupalCon 2011: Day 1

This week Ian and Adam are in Chicago for the bi-annual DrupalCon developer conference. Drupal is the software that we use to manage the Middlebury and MIIS websites, as well as a couple others.

Read on for notes on the sessions we attended.

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WordPress Update

Yesterday, we updated WordPress to v3.1. Most noticeable change in this update is the introduction of a new “admin” bar that appears after you log in. This admin bar includes quick links to all sites in which you are a registered user.  Site authors will also see links to add new posts and editors will have quick links to comments.  The other notable new feature is a “link browser” that allows you to search and quickly link to other posts/pages on your site.

Most importantly, this release includes over 800 bug fixes by over 180 developers from around the world. It has been downloaded over 1 million times in the last week.

Let us know if you have any questions about this update or experience any problems.

WordPress Workshops

I’ll be doing a couple of workshops on WordPress this month, showing some of the ways this platform has been used for blogging, courses, research, projects and initiatives.  Will give an overview of what’s possible with WordPress and then open up for discussion and questions.

Dates/Times/Location

  • 2:30-3:30 Feb 17, in Library 105
  • 2:30-3:30 Feb 24, in Library 105

For more information, see:  WordPress @ Middlebury

WordPress Workshops

I’ve coordinated with the Education and Training Team to offer some workshops on WordPress next week, here are details:

  • 2 – 3:30 pm, Monday, January 17, Library 105
  • 1 – 2:30 pm, Weds, January 19, Library 105

These workshops will give an overview of latest version of Translucence, the theme framework that powers many Midd blog themes and will showcase a variety of sites that have recently been created to highlight the many different ways that WordPress can be used.

For other upcoming workshops, see: How to Learn More » On-campus Workshops.