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A review of Commons in a Box – the free, easy-to-install package that turns WordPress into a powerful community site. These are my reflections on installing and testing it and what I think it could offer education. Read more
Using XAMPP and Apache virtual hosts to allow local clones of WordPress sites and sub-domains to be accessed via the live site URL, meaning less need to faff about with database & config changes. Read more
I’d like to offer our workshop “Making WordPress Work for You” online. However, the nature of the workshop makes translating it to an online course presents a different challenge to others I’ve done this with and so this post is a form of thinking out loud in the hope of getting some feedback on whether this is a good idea and advice on the best approaches to take. Read more
Report on the seminar ‘Reality Remixed: Augmented Reality without Gloves and Glasses’ in which David Kim presented recent advances in augmented reality sensing and display technologies developed at Microsoft Research that aim to make AR interactions more natural. Read more
While WordPress offers a pretty good mobile experience, a few tweaks can make it better for both publishers and readers. In a workshop at IWMW12, I presented some approaches to Mobilising WordPress through plugins, adding a separate mobile theme, changing to a responsive theme and ‘responsifying’ your current theme. This post considers each of these and some resources and tools that can make them easier to implement. Read more
As part of a session at the UCISA event ‘Using Social Media to Communicate’ I facilitated a task designed to explore attitudes to the use of social media by information services. Participants were asked to write comments about what information services should/shouldn’t do with social media and position them along a line of preference. The opinions expressed are presented here in the hope that they might be of use to services (re)considering their use of social media. Read more
Presentation on linking the physical to digital with QR codes, augmented reality and NFC from the event Emerging Technology for Learning. Outlines simple ways to link physical objects to digital resources and considers the importance of the user experience when doing so in education. The talk was followed by a set of practical activities investigating the use of these technologies and a discussion around designing effective educational experiences with them. Read more
There are lots of great WordPress themes out there, but I always find something I’d like to change. Being open source, that’s pretty easy to do with a bit of CSS, HTML and PHP. However, when a theme is updated by the author, you risk loosing your hand-crafted customisation. That’s where child themes come in. They offer a simple, but flexible way to create a customised theme that inherits the style and function of it’s parent, but can be customised independently. And as any parent knows, their kids are always way cooler than their parents 
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To support a screencasting workshop I ran for Newcastle University library I wanted participants to explore and evaluate a range of screencasts. As this as a custom course, I had a bit of freedom to consider the alternatives to a page on our site. I looked at using delicious with custom tags and a diigo list, but neither offered quite what I wanted – something quick, simple, that I already used, that didn’t need registration and looked stylish. Enter bit.ly bundles. Read more
This posts reflects on the first full-day Netskills workshop run entirely online through Elluminate. This was a podcasting workshop adapted from an existing face-to-face event covering planning, production and publishing. In moving this course online, I wanted to provide the same practical learning experience and meet the same outcomes. This post describes how the online event was structured and supported and highlights where remote training required a significantly different approach. Read more
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