Luke Waltzer over at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY just turned me on to an awesome use of a WordPress blog in a course. Professor Zoë Sheehan Saldaña of the Fine and Performing Arts Department has her students sharing the resources they find online by way of a class blog. More than that, each student designed an animated, flash-based header for the blog as an assignment, so the actual class blog is now also a dynamic portfolio of the work the students are doing. What an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.
Click on the image above to be taken to the class blog, and click the refresh button to view the 20 flash-based headers designed by the students in the class.
Prof. Sheehan-Saldaña has been one of our pioneers at Baruch and we’re very proud of how she’s embraced blogs for her courses. Luke has done a tremendous job of “teaching her to fish” and I’m expecting nothing but sheer brilliance from here on in. We’re dubbing her our first “Blogfessor of the Month.”
This looks like the neoclassical theme – I’m trying to get past my aversion to reading code so I can figure out how to make that nifty rotating header work… This is good inspiration, thanks.
Brian: Neoclassical it is.
Replace the code in rotating_images.php with this.
FTR, this is Zoe’s code. I’m just glad to be supporting a faculty member intrepid enough to try this. Also, the movies now playing are placeholders; her students are working on more ornate/polished swfs for later on in the term.
Perfect timing, I was presenting our plan for course blogs today and this class was a great example of the great potential of blog based courses!
@Andre:
Glad to be of service, especially given how good your blog has been to all of us these days 🙂