It is dynamic, and starts from a year ago of the very day. Don;t worry, I’ll give you a boost. Also, I love the idea of hacking templates as aggregator blogs, and like…

@Gardner is suggesting, why not hack a template that acts kind of like a netvibes or Google reader, it would be easy enough. Although the point should be raised, why not just use Google Reader, to which I would respond, “I know, right?” But still, sometimes it just takes an example of the idea, and when you have a kind of reader pace out in the open, that’s kind of powerful and gets the utility of the idea across, which may lead to a Google Reader addiction–who knows.

@Jeff It will be beautiful when it’s done!

@Chris Simple is the key, and we started out first WPMu with all of three courses, it grows quick, or at least has the potential to. Do you have one setup there?

2) One of the real balancing issues in the iterations of this assignment has been between the work students need to do to learn the technology and the appearance of the final result. I knew since the start of UMWBlogs that WPMu offered a real way to get the right balance here. However, Jim’s idea to hack a custom WP theme for the class (something I wouldn’t have considered, at least not in my first year as a department chair immediately resonated with me and the early results look better than I could have hoped. I do really like the way that it provides a common interface, yet allows some creative room for students to explore and present their research.

Okay, three points. Cole, it’s not just the people in UMW’s Teaching and Learning Technologies who gain from this ability to work one-on-one with faculty and on these smaller classes, it’s the faculty and students in those classes who benefit. I’m amazed every time I sit down with Jerry, Patrick, Martha, Andy, or Jim by how lucky I am to have these partners in teaching….

I’m trying to imagine how this might work for ongoing blog aggregation, which is what Cole’s commenting on (if I’m reading him right). The trick here is that each of Jeff’s student is compiling a research site, not a blog. The portal or aggregator page wouldn’t work as well as a dashboard for tracking ongoing blogging, would it? Or am I missing something obvious here? (Always a possibility.) I’ve gotten the question about large classes several times recently, and I can’t do much more than talk about RSS readers at this point.

By the way, as a staunch MediaWiki user from way back, I think you’re right about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been using Wetpaint for my class this spring and loving it. I’m thinking about springing for a premium account, in fact. All I need to do now is figure out how to use its RSS functionality to get good stuff into the aggregator blog page.

Your solution has given me a idea for a similar, yet slightly different approach for our environment. This same approach could be used to build an aggregate course blog dynamically … once students have their blog setup, they could easily submit their URL to let a single faculty blog turn into an aggregate gallery of sorts — the icons could come from students’ profile picture in our Blogs at PSU environment. I am thinking we could create a template set that would basically be a faculty blog space that pulls it all together for them. That way we could do something similar in any course that was living on our blog platform. The biggest complaint we hear is that once the class becomes so decentralized (with each of the students having their own blogs) it becomes tough to pay attention to them all — remember, we are talking about classes that number in the 100s of students.

Thanks for the inspiration! Great design and it is a very transferable idea!