Lafayette College Piloting WPMu

This tweet from Bryan Alexander,who has been generously tracking the discussions and presentations at the NITLE Instructional Technology Leaders conference, alerted me to an impressive pilot of WordPress Multi-User at Lafayetter College. It’s a fine looking educational publishing paltform, and I really like the way their pilot includes academic courses, administrative offices, student groups, and individuals (you can see the various examples here).  Such an inclusive pilot immediately  frames the wealth of opportunities in exploring the impact of simple and elegant web publishing throughout a campus community.

I’m also jealous they are already running WPMu 2.7 (we aren’t upgrading until Summer) because they get to play with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which from what I have seen is quite impressive. What I’m also impressed with about this pilot is how transparent they are about everything, you can actually see all of the pilot blogs (I love this Intro to American Studies course blog–tell me the students aren’t digging this!) and they give you access to the list of plugins they are exploring. This is a superb model for exploring the possibilities of a tool like WPMu for a campus community, and I’m pretty sure it cost them little in the way of hardware and software infrastructure. As is often the case, it’s all about an investment in some good people who get excited about the possibilities of teaching and learning with technology. And if the header image for the main blog is any indicator, the instructional technology folks at Lafayette seem to be having an extreme blast. Fine work Courtney, Jason, and Ken!

So why is your school afraid to jump? What do you have to lose save the LMS chains that bind you to the 20th century!

Also, while I’m on the subject of WPMu and Bryan Alexander, it’s nice to see Nitle’s Liberal Education Today blog made the jump 🙂