[wp-edu] wp-edu Digest, Vol 25, Issue 5

Sun Jul 10 04:56:26 UTC 2011

Hi Alexandre,

My university, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) leads a WordPress Multi-blog platform located at this url: http://blogs.ntu.edu.sg. It has been almost 1 years we have initiated this project and now in the process to move it up to WordPress 3.2.

Yups, we experienced all of both technical and implementation knowledge during this process. Neverless, we are looking forward to expands it further. This blog management platforms is currently hosting more than 100 blogs for the university and a combined initiative between academic librarians and the fellows at the Centre for IT services. And hosted locally in the university.

If you are looking for the areas of all the elements such as new media and cloud computing, my team did a step out from our comfort zone in the university. We start of a social enterprising project to help non profit organisation (academic purpose) to embrace WordPress as their core site and spread to micro site advocacy. One local organisations is Angakatan Sasterawan 50 (http://asas50.com) , a Non Profit Organisation formed by scholarly writers and author, we collaborated with them to build a digital portal that embrace library science. And we used WordPress as the foundation seed.

Another project that is currently going and built is SMSO (http://mysmso.org), a non profit organisation formed by two student from Cambridge and Imperial Collage, decided to collaborate with us from NTU to create a portal that have resource sharing with the community on scholarship & researches overseas. This is to give a priority to local Singaporeans to look abroad to further their studies into colleges and universities level.

Yups, my team did not start this project with a big bang. We start off small as a single platform blog and then it grew into a multi-site. We are willingly to share out. We are not perfect, as we still need help and advice on the technical infrastructure of hosting this project. We start this project when we are in our graduate school. Now, it is deployed at university level and we are now working with the university making this initiative grow and sustain.

Regards,
Hazman Aziz

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Today's Topics:

   1. WordCamp Montreal (Alexandre Enkerli)
   2. Using WP to Integrate Social Media in Academia (Alexandre Enkerli)

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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 23:35:45 -0400
From: Alexandre Enkerli <enkerli at gmail.com>
Subject: [wp-edu] WordCamp Montreal
To: wp-edu at lists.automattic.com
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By any chance, anybody coming to WordCamp Montreal, this weekend? If so, I?d
appreciate a shoutout. I usually feel a bit isolated, as an edu WPer?

--
Alex
http://enkerli.com/
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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 23:47:11 -0400
From: Alexandre Enkerli <enkerli at gmail.com>
Subject: [wp-edu] Using WP to Integrate Social Media in Academia
To: wp-edu at lists.automattic.com
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All,

Impressed by and grateful for all the thoughtful responses to my query about
getting acceptance for a WordPress instance on campus. Very useful advice
and important cautionary tales.

More specifically, it helps me situate my university in that context. In
some ways, resistance is less rigid than in some of your cases. Key people
are trying to listen to all of these arguments, and they are open to some
initiatives. At the same time, there's a chilling effect related to fears
about potential legal issues which not only creates distortion in the
conversation but makes it difficult to integrate social media projects with
other activities.

And social media is really what we're talking about, in our case. Not only
blogs, podcasts, and microblogging, but social networking, user-generated
content, and even ?cloud computing?. WP can help with all of these but the
fears come from issues with commercial services.
And this where things take an interesting turn.
Many people at the university are using a variety of social media services.
At our institution, people are struggling with policies and guidelines to
adopt, in order to prevent all sorts of issues having to do with privacy,
copyright, branding, security, etc. While there are diverse initiatives to
use social media in relation to university work (including community
outreach, teaching, and research), the ?official word? tends to be that
proper authorities should be notified. Obviously, nobody has a way to
monitor what members of the university community are doing on Twitter,
Facebook, or even WordPress.com?
And we happen to be a community-oriented institution. It?d make so much
sense to connect with the local community through social media!
Now, the search for a university-wide CMS allegedly does include several
things about social media. But it?ll be a long process and it?s one which
doesn?t really involve members of the community.
This is probably where I?m not framing the issue properly. As diverse people
have explained, getting a WP instance on campus should probably start from a
modest initiative. With some technical support (I?m not skilled or
credentialed enough to do much), individual initiatives could work well and
eventually spread more broadly.

We?ll see how things go.

In the meantime, very sincere thanks for all your help. Further proof that
the WP community is friendly and helpful. Honestly, I?m touched.

--
Alex Enkerli
http://enkerli.com/
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