Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

Knowing my proclivity to start awesome projects that get lost in the flow of life, this may be premature. But in the tradition of publicly declaring dieting goals to stay honest, I want to share a glimpse of a new plugin for WordPress: Press+Canvas.

I had previously thought about ways to get Canvas to aggregate and auto-submit learner blog posts to URL assignments, further freeing them from the bother of having to deal with conventional mechanics of the LMS. That would take significant work, and I probably won’t be convincing the Instructure engineers that this is a priority right now. But, what about going the other way around? Canvas has an open API, so why not have the blogger push their new posts into Canvas?

I have to credit Martha Burtis and friends up at UMW for inspiring this plugin. We were on a call discussing ways that their work on a syndication bus might cross-pollinate with my ideas to further extend and leverage Canvas as an open learning platform when Martha suggested this approach.

So, this WordPress plugin will do just 2 things:

1. Store your school’s Canvas URL and your personal access token
2. Allow you to send a Post’s URL to a specific Canvas course and assignment when you publish

I just began stubbing out the plugin this morning after thinking through specs on the plane. I’ll be building out the WP plugin parts in the next two weeks in anticipation of InstructureCon ’12, with the intent to work out the API calls and potentially troublesome AJAX during Hacknight.

Everyone who uses WordPress probably knows about the “Blogroll”, or list of links that can be shared as a widget on your site. In education, this feature is great for sharing useful web sites, or collecting students’ blogs. Rather than inserting links one by one, WordPress lets you import an OPML file that contains numerous links (more…)

I’ve re-added the WP-reCaptcha plugin today, now that my spam levels are 50+ a day in spite of anti-spam plugins. It took half an hour to figure out a bug in my theme that caused it to disobey for commenters in the past, and all looks good. I have to hope this isn’t too much annoyance for readers of this blog–I’m betting on the fact that there aren’t a lot to complain about it!

For our pilot run of WordPress MU for Utah Valley University we have installed and configured the WPMU LDAP plug-in to control user registration–basically syncing student/faculty/staff accounts with our Banner student information system. That’s a small tale in itself, but the short of it is Paul Nuffer and I had it working successfully after just a couple of hours. Or so we thought (more…)

Those of you with PHP experience may already know by reputation how easy WordPress is to modify, and I’ve been having a lot of fun customizing themes for the past year. This is a quick and dirty post illustrating how to customize a WP theme to select a Creative Commons license for each post. (more…)