Part of the application of my learning during YouShow has been designing a connected professional development course for our OLFMs in Open Learning. I have taken a great deal of what I’ve learned here about RSS and general WordPressing and applied that knowledge to the course and I am grateful for Alan’s and Brian’s openness and willingness to help.
Anyways, the course I designed was, at one time and in another version, offered through a traditional LMS and when I first started the redesign, I copied a couple of the activities straight into WP without really considering the implications of them having been designed for an LMS.
As I was working through the final edits today, I noticed one particular activity that hadn’t been ‘indigenized’ to WP. Notice a few things about the activity?
- Downloads!
- I hate downloads. They have a tendency to either get lost or they languish in my downloads folder and then I end up with several versions of the same file since I forget that I downloaded it the first seven times.
- Uploads!
- Uploads can work for some student work in an LMS, but for a portfolio that is intended to be a dynamic and constantly updated resource, uploads are silly…especially when WP won’t accept many filetypes.
- WordPressNessLess!
- The activity wasn’t native to a WP environment. As I just mentioned, the activity was to produce a resource that could easily be updated and used. Having students complete the activity in a document and upload multiple variations of the document (and require anyone who wants to read it to download multiple variations) to a blog is antithetical to the affordances of a public blog designed for sharing.
The newly revised and indigenized activity is, I think, much more appropriate for an activity in a blog environment.
- It builds capacity in using WP.
- Instead of students filling out fields in a templated document, they are empowered to expand their knowledge and skills in using WP. The activity helps them build resources but it also builds competence in managing WP menus.
- It is extensible and searchable.
- By using categories and tags, students will be able to build a large repertoire, curate it, share it with others and search on their own tags and categories.
- Versioning is a non-issue.
- Keeping a single document up-to-date while editing and revising it can lead to difficulties knowing which version of the document is the most recent. By having the resources tagged and categorized, there are no ‘versions’ to remember, just resources.
What do you think? Would you add anything to the new version?
Comments welcome.