Method: Participants (75) were asked to write comments about what information services  should/shouldn’t do with social media and position them along a line of preference.

Results: I’m presenting the results of this task in their nearly raw form (transcribed comments). The only interpretation I’ve attempted is to theme the responses into two major categories – policy and communications style. Feel free to add your own interpretation.

Disclaimer: the nearly-dormant part of my brain that I used to use when I was a scientist would like to emphasize that these results were produced as part of a task used as a device to stimulate discussion at a conference, not through rigourously-designed research.

IT services should…

Policy, rules and regulations

• Allow staff to use social media as a tool in their working day
• Encourage a policy of “light touch” regulation
• Provide guidance/principles on use of tools
• Lead by example – show best practice with technology
• Try new technologies
• Raise awareness
• Explain social media to users
• Provide examples of good practice
• Use the tools and understand their significance and value
• Enable use of social media, rather than “push out” what we think is best
• Provide the infrastructure to allow flexibility
• Get SMT buy in
• Have an e-responsibility policy
• Consider who is communicating on your behalf
• Discuss best practice in relevant meetings
• Know why we are doing it
• Use it themseleves – individually or as a group
• Motivate the university community

Communication style

• Listen!
• Engage
• Show we care
• Be personal and respond as you would in person
• Learn how students really use our services day to day – not how we think they use them
• Interact with clients/audience, engage them in dialouge
• Make it two way; respond to customers
• Invite feedback and discussion from users about services
• Consider what their audience may want to know
• Share knowledge and experiences
• Use it as a collaborative platform
• Give a balanced, human view
• Be honest!
• Encourage innovation and new ideas
• Interact in conjunction with helpdesk systems
• Engage staff – especially academics

Activities (a bonus sub-category I forgot to mention in the intro)

• System status/alerts
• Alerts
• Provide service updates
• Service status messages to keep users updated
• Promote IT services to students and staff
• Promote services
• Feed any annoucements to as many channels as possible
• Promote internal and external events
• Integratge social media into service to improve “social support”
• Help answer user questions – shape support/helpdesk
• Respond to support requests
• Give user access to support, or direct them to support channels

IT services shouldn’t…

Policy, rules and regulations

• Restrict access
• Dictate a social media policy
• Prevent use of social media
• Put barriers in the way of people being creative
• Make rules and regulations about social networking
• Try to restrict/limit use
• Pro-actively monitor staff/student social media activity for “abuse of AUP”
• Dictate the tools and restrict access
• Give a sharp intake of breadth when social media is mentioned
• Let technical infrastructure limitations get in the way
• Be prescriptive
• Choose the tools
• Tell people what to/not to use
• Rule with an iron fist – over-censoring, trying to control or restrict excessively
• Try to stop people using tools
• Dictate how the tools are used
• Annoy people with stupid rules and regulations
• Waste time evaluating
• Think social media will go away
• Try to setup an alternative Facebook, Twitter, etc.
• Create poor tools as alternatives to those already in use
• Make it so time-consuming it detracts from core business
• Suggest it in the first place
• Compromise security
• Be an after thought

Communication style

• Try to look “cool” and down with the students
• Diss their staff
• Leak personal information
• Think they know best
• Don’t try to be cool
• Share social life with colleagues
• Socialise
• Personal use
• Invading students social spaces
• Inappropriate language/material
• Respond inappropriately
• Argue
• Lie!
• Spew ‘bad news’ from corporate accounts
• Fill it with overly-complicated tech speak
• Use as the only means of communication

(BTW, the event was good  - check the event coverage on Lanyrd for slides, write ups…)

The slides are below, with slide by slide notes available on slideshare and are copied as a transcript below.

Notes from the slides

This talk was part of an event on ‘Emerging Technology for Learning’. When making guesses about the future, we are in the territory of a cliché (Garlic bread is a reference to Peter Kay line “Garlic bread, it’s the future, I’ve tasted it”). In the tech world, the brilliant, but perhaps over-used vision of the future is the sixth sense TED talk, which shows one possible direction for linking physical to digital. So instead of emerging technology, this talk focuses on emerging practice. QR codes are not an emerging technology, but in education, they are still emerging in practice.

One thing we can be certain of is that mobile will play a part of the future and will be an important conduit for linking physical to digital. While mobile learning is really about the mobility of the learner and allowing them to move seamlessly between contexts, mobile devices do play an important role in this. Mobiles are personal devices that act to filter huge amounts of data from many different sources and present it in meaningful ways. At present, this data is mainly from other people in an individuals’ network. It can also come from objects that the user is interacting with via for example, QR codes. In the future, it is likely data will increasingly come from smart objects with sensors that broadcast information (Internet of Things). By ‘knowing’ about people, networks, location and personal preferences, mobiles filter ambient data and present it in real time at the right time and place, leading to augmented cognition.

QR codes

Until the Internet of Things arrives, interacting with physical objects requires user-initiated action, such as scanning a QR code.These are an already established technology, but one that is mainly seen in the context of advertising and other non-educational uses. For example, on cupcakes, cows and even gravestones. In education, we have a chance to reclaim this technology and doing something more useful with it. To link physical resources to digital ones, to situate learning, enhance an object, space or place to allow (self-)directed exploration, to make learning more authentic, such as the examples given in the slides.

When implementing QR codes, you are likely to meet with some apathy and reluctance, if not downright resistance. They are sometimes seen as a pointless technology because of the poor experience of using them. However, that is (mostly) a case of shooting the messenger. If we get the use right, they can be effective. How would you indicate that a physical resource is interactive? How would you provide guidance on how to interact with it? What is required to interact? Connectivity, decvices, software? Where and when can people interact? Why would people bother to scan it? What does the object link to? How would people know what to expect? What would the user experience be like for people who do scan it? It is optimized for mobile devices? What issues are there for access and accessibility, authentication, data usage and cost, privacy…?

Augmented Reality

Augmented reality is often presented as terminator vision – in this case for rabbits to read email?! How can we use AR in education right now and where might it go in the future? Aurasma allows for creation of simple image based AR from within a mobile device. Workshop participants tried this after the talk, as well as Juanio creator.

Where I start to fall out with AR – navigation and POIs. Difficult to represent lots of information spatially in a useful way. Takes careful thought not to overwhelm users. This has been done well at Exeter where the AR campus map has filters to allow users to reduce the visual clutter to just what they are looking for. For example, available computers around campus. They are presented with live availability data overlaid on the camera view and if they need directions, this is done through a traditional 2D map. An AR campus map has also been implemented at Sunderland (I’m playing to a local crowd here!)

Similar to QR, implementing AR in practice is all about considering the user experience.

NFC and the Internet of Things

So far, NFC seems to be mainly about mobile wallets and the Internet of Things has been described as being at the Geocities of things stage. However, as with QR and AR, education has an opportunity to make wider use of this technology.

Where AR relates to the internet of things is in providing a virtual interface to physical objects that don’t have them. For example, a lamp that you can remotely set an on/off timer for is unlikely to have a keyboard or other physical inputs, but AR can provide this as an interactive layer. AR also allows the huge amount of data to be filtered and presented in context. For example, buidling schematics for a firefighter or in education, learner analytics for staff and students.

If as educators, we don’t engage with this, then this could be a future: A rabbit that reads your email – as well as it’s own!

What is a child theme?

A WordPress theme is simply a set of template files and stylesheets that work with the core to control the look and function of a site. A child theme is one that (by default) uses the same files as it’s parent and so inherits the same style and function. However, you can customise virtually any aspect of the theme by adding new  style definitions and template files. The key point to understand is that changes to the child are independent of the parent, so updates to the parent theme will not overwrite changes to your child theme.

How do you make one?

To make a child theme, you simply create a new folder in your WP themes folder and add a new stylesheet to it. I also added a screenshot.png to show a preview of this file, which you don’t need to do, as well as a template file which I’ll explain later.

The CSS file starts with some comments that tells WordPress that this is a child theme, as follows:

/*Theme Name:   Our Kid
Theme URI:      http://www.netskills.ac.uk/
Description:    Child theme for the Twenty Eleven.
Author:         Steve Boneham
Author URI:     http: //www.netskills.ac.uk/about/
Template:       twentyeleven
Version:        0.1
*/
@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");
body {background-color: #000000;}

The important parts of this are the Template and the @import declaration that link this to the parent theme and import it’s styles for use in the child theme.

Once you’ve done this, the themes area in your dashboard will show your new child theme.

You can now add your new style rules to your child theme stylesheet (after the @import) and these will override those of the parent theme.

While you can do an awful lot with just CSS, the more ambitious of you might want to change the templates or functions used by your theme as well. Child themes make that easy.

Templates and Functions

Templates files in a child theme work like styles in that they are used instead of files with the same name in the the parent. So to override how a single post is displayed, you just add a new single.php (or for twenty eleven content-single.php) template file to your child theme folder. This will now be used in place of the parent template. The same goes with any of the other template files that are used to control posts, pages, views and comments in a theme.

As to functions, if you add a custom functions.php file to your child theme folder, this will load as well as that of the parent. This means you can  easily add new functions to your child theme without modifying any of the files in the parent theme. When that updates, your added functions will remain.

If you want to know more, then as always, the WordPress codex is a good place to start and links on to some more detailed posts.

Bit.ly isn’t just a URL shortener. Bundles offer a simple & rich way to collate and share a list of multiple shortened links. So, when you add a link to a site to a bundle, Bit.ly generates a preview image and extracts some descriptive text. Add a YouTube video and it shows in an embedded player. Add a link to a tweet and get a screenshot with clickable links. Add a link to Flickr and get a photo thumbnail, Foursquare and get a location map… you get the idea.

This is similar to how other services handle media, such as posterous and facebook, but it also has features built around link sharing. So you can add an overall description for your bundle, add commentary for each of the links in bundle, track clicks for each link, get summary stats for the bundle and allow for discussion through Disqus commenting. Viewers can toggle the view of links from preview to lists, share links and clone bundles to their own bit.ly account

If you’re interested in seeing the one I used for the workshop, you can find it at: http://bit.ly/netskills-screencasts

My intention for using this was as a quick and disposable way to share links. It worked for that, but I’m still not sure this is the best way to share multiple links when you want to engage people in discussions. There are also issues in using third party URL shorteners as intermediaries to resources and the potential for link rot. If you have a better service or approach that you use for this, let me know in the  comments.

For background, our face-to-face (f2f) podcasting workshop starts with evaluating and discussing ‘what makes an engaging podcast?’ before moving on to practical tasks where participants script, rehearse and produce a podcast for review with other participants. I’ll focus here on how the online event ran and highlight where this is significantly different from the original course.

Orientation

The first difference was running a pre-workshop online orientation a week before the event. This allowed us and the participants to introduce ourselves, to get comfortable with the elluminate environment (none of the participants had used it before), distribute the course materials (PDFs) and set a bit of pre-course homework. In future, I’d plan to do this even if the event runs f2f.

Presentation

For the workshop itself, we started off with a fairly standard approach to presentation – me talking with them asking questions and chatting in the chat box with my colleague Chris Thomson on hand to respond. As it was a relatively small group (8 participants), it was more feasible for all participants to use their mics than it is with larger groups. Although it felt a little formal, we still used the ‘raised hand’ feature to flag up when someone wanted to speak and we handed them the mic. As an aside on group size, our face-to-face workshops are limited to 12 people to ensure we can offer adequate support. For online events, maintaining that level of support probably means fewer participants or more facilitators.

Evaluation

In the first real task we asked them to listen individually to a range of podcasts and consider ‘what makes an engaging podcast?’ We allocated 40mins for this as a self-directed task. I set a countdown timer within Elluminate (with audio & visual alert), but must admit I was concerned about people returning on time for the next task. Maybe I got lucky with a good set of participants, but they all came back on time, everytime. We did have their phone numbers just in
case.

For feedback, we used the whiteboard to quickly add words/concepts describing an engaging podcast. I arranged these into themes, participants voted them up (+1) or down (-1) and then we had an open mic discussion around the issues raised.

Scripting

After a break for tea/coffee (make your own I’m afraid), we moved on to scripting, where participants create a script for a short podcast to record later. After a brief overview on why and how to write a podcast script (but avoid sounding scripted), I set them off writing on their own for 30 mins (with further direction in a handout).

Peer review

Next, we got the the bit people always cringe at – presenting their script and getting feedback from another participant. For this, I created a series of breakout rooms into which I ‘sent’ two people. This gives them their own room in Elluminate where they can use the full set of tools (audio, chat, slides, desktop sharing…) in a seperate space from the main room and other breakout rooms. As moderators, we could dip in an out of each room to listen in, check things were going OK and join the discussion. It was reassuring to see that they spent 25 minutes actively enagaging in this and in fact it seemed to work better than the same exercise in a real room. I’d put this down to less awareness of/disruption by other groups.

Production

The main task of the day came after a lunch break. We asked participants to record a short (2-5min) podcast based on the script they had written, with the option of including interviews, music and whatever else they thought made a good podcast. We assigned around 1.5 hours for this task, with it being mainly self-directed.

This is the point on the workshop where they start using new hardware and software that nearly always needs tweaking in slightly different ways to make it work properly for each person. This means lots of frantic support so they can get on with the real business of recording thier podcast. It was always my intention to provide support primarily within Elluminate, but I also made sure they had ways to reach us outside this system (email, phone, Skype…). In the end, the support within elluminate was so simple and effective that we didn’t need to use other systems.

We setup two support breakout rooms in elluminate to manage this. Participants needing support ‘raised hands’, then we moved into a support room for more private discussions. Most issues were resolved via chat or audio (as in talking), but we also used screen sharing to demonstrate a procedure, or to watch a participant demonstrate one to us (by making them a moderator temporarily). This worked very well and as Chris pointed out, removed the temptation to grab the mouse and solve the problem, rather than letting them work through it themselves

By the end of the event, 6 out of 8 people had submitted a podcast to our channel, listened to them and given feedback through comments or discussion. That compares well to the outcomes we get f2f.

As an experience, I felt more connected with the participants than I thought I would. There was a sense that we were part of an event, even if separated by distance. In some ways, I feel that this model doing practical work in your own (work)place, using your own kit, working on your own project in a self-directed way, but with support where needed, has benefits beyond convenience and reduced costs. I think it reduces the expectation of training as being something procedural, to something more like supported development, that I hope will make a long term difference.

Photo credit: My second patio office via marylkayoe (CC BY|NC|SA)

1. You’ll first need to download the Aurasma app (lite version is free). It is currently iPhone only, but the developers say it will be ported to other devices.

2. Open the app. You’ll be asked to sign up for an account on first run.

3. Take a photo of your target image from within the app. Use pinch and drag gestures to position the onscreen handles around the image you want to select.

4. Associate the target image with your media. This can be any image or video on your phone (you can’t link to stuff on the web…yet)

Your media will be uploaded to Aurasma. The app indicates that some kind of compression/optimisation takes place (for video), but the upload is pretty quick.

5. Position your media where you want to it be displayed or played back, resizing it as appropriate.

That’s it. Now you simply hold your phone over the image and when it is recognised by the app, the media is shown.

I had a quick go with adding a video to one of our printed web2practice guides. This plays back the video accompanying the printed guide when you  scan the image with the app. We currently use QR codes for this, but image recognition could be a nice supplement.

(Apologies for the shaky hand and poor focus. That was more me than the app – it was early and the day after Eurovision )

I did this as a quick proof of concept of this specific use case of linking printed instructional material to related media. The app makes this pretty easy and for the user, the image recognition and playback in context is pretty slick. However, it could do with more sharing options (coming soon) to get beyond the rather disappointingly Ad focussed content currently on offer from the limited range of selected providers. I scanned a Kelloggs logo to see an animated chicken

To see where this kind of technology could take us though, the New York Times piece ‘Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality‘ has a great example of augmenting a newspaper with relevant videos.

For a more in-depth analysis of tools for mobile AR, you might want to check out the TechWatch report Augmented Reality for Smartphones.

The core features offered in a zipcast are probably the ones needed for most live presentations/slidecasts. One-way broadcast of slides, video and audio by the presenter to participants. They can watch, listen, (text) chat and have some individual control the slides they are viewing. As Slideshare has a freemium model, there are a few additional pro features – password protection, removal of ads and a conference call number so participants can add their voice to the conversation.

Even with the pro features, it’s not really a competitor with the more sophisticated web conferencing systems out there like Elluminate and Big Blue Button. It lacks the features they offer for administration, moderation and recording and it still needs to prove it’s reliability. However, I can see this working well enough to just deliver a live, remote presentation over the web, a use case that will suit many people where other systems can be a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Avoiding feature bloat can have advantages. It has a relatively clean interface and is pretty simple to use. To start a meeting, from any presentation click Zipcast, select public or private and then invite an unlimited number of people to join via a custom URL. Participants are required to sign in, either with a Slideshare account or via Facebook, which may be a barrier to consider for public events.

(In case it isn’t obvious, the red bars aren’t part of the interface. They’re to protect the identity of the people who unexpectedly turned my quick test into an impromptu live presentation – explaining why I look a little uneasy on the webcam! )

Interestingly, you’re not restricted to broadcasting just your own presentations either, but can use any public presentation. That could turn more of us from participants into presenters and lead to some interesting (re)interpretations of the ideas expressed in other people’s slides.

Zipcasting worked pretty well when I tried it, though this was just as a test, rather than for real. It will be interesting to see if this starts being used in preference to some of the alternative systems and approaches out there for online presentations. It certainly is good to have another option available.

Most JISC programmes require the projects they fund to setup a blog. However, it isn’t always clear to projects why this a good idea and how it will help them, the programme and the community. To help address this, we’re looking to produce a guide to blogging for JISC projects. I first want to address the ‘why?’ so that hopefully the ‘how?’ will become a little easier.

An informal space: for things that might not seem significant enough to put in a report, journal or to present at a conference. A place to think out loud, ask ‘what if?’ and discuss progress and difficulties as they arise. A blog can provide an outlet for such things that might otherwise never be seen, but have the potential to turn into something more.

Openness: Like working in an open kitchen, blogging can make the process of project work more transparent and encourage understanding. Saying things in public, even if you’re not sure who will read it, increases the chances that someone will and in doing so be able to help you or themselves.  Publish, then filter.

Opportunities for feedback: putting things in a public space means it’s more likely that others will offer input, help, advice as you go. That might be from other people in your project, other projects or the community. It can also help to manage expectations.

Encourages clarity: Blogging helps you to focus on the essentials of why you ‘re doing something and why it matters to other people. The act of writing can encourage consolidation, claification, reflection and metacognition.

Being part of a community: regular posts on relevant topics and engaging in discussions around them demonstrates your interest in the field, that you have ideas to contribute and the motivation to do so. Being an active part of a community can also help you establish links with a network of people who share your interests and can provide advice and support. That community could be based around the programme you are part of and/or a wider community

A project portfolio: A single place focussed on the project, self-contained with a well-defined scope and custom domain. That’s good for search, dissemination, measuring impact through analytics and closure when the project is finished – or sustainability if you have built something that has a life beyond the project. A blog is also an ideal ‘hub’ for other social media activity, so somewhere that all project-related activity can be referred  back to, aggregated, displayed, interacted with and resyndicated.

Sets your content free: Blogs are designed around syndication and subscription so help take the content to people, rather than the other way around. They can help you engage beyond the traditional boundaries of projects, programmes, organisations to reach beyond JISCworld to a greater diversity of disciplines, interests, backgrounds, experiences and opinions.

Designed for participation: Blog design is based on well-crafted themes and rich functionality designed to engage and involve your audience, not just broadcast to them. Blogs aren’t just a place to share ideas, they promote discussion too. Release early and often model of getting ideas out there where others can help make them better.

Creates a dynamic archive: blogs store and automatically organise posts, comments and other content to help you keep track of things you’ve done, as well as the things you didn’t, but might be worth persuing.

Makes reporting easier: Rather than waiting until the last minute to write your report, blog it as you go and then compile it in a few clicks. Considered use of categories and tags will make this easier. This can also help improve programme support to your project and others in the programme, as well as subsequent synthesis work intended to help JISC and the community learn lessons broader than those of the individual projects.

Project team work: Blogs can reduce the burden of internal project meetings and more formal reporting by allowing people in the team (and beyond it) to subscribe, track and discuss as you go. Helps the project team to stay informed, to remain aligned, work together and keep up momentum. It can also enable partners across different institutions to communicate and collaborate more easily. Use of public/private posts can allow the same system to perform different functions for different audiences.

Eating our own dog food: JISC projects are funded to investigate the innovative use of digital technologies. Blogs may have been around long enough not to seem innovative anymore, but their use to openly share practice around your project is.

It isn’t as hard as you might think: It gets easier. You will get better. You will get more feedback, rewards and ROI.

It isn’t as easy as I might make out: Of course, in practice, it isn’t as straightforward as just starting a blog. It can take a good deal of time and effort to keep up with posts, especially when it can sometime feel like your talking to yourself, not a vital part of a thriving community.

This is something I’ll try to address in another post for another part of the guide on what/how should JISC projects blog?

Credits

• Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects
• Some more reasons to blog
• Blogs as organisational dialogue
• Why blog?
• If you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a résumé

Thanks to Mark Power and Will Allen for their comments already – and to you if you make any yourself

Photo: professor from istock photo under licence to JISC Netskills. I’m Blogging This from Michael Heilemann (BY-NC-SA)

Connectivity: Free wifi was everywhere. Well, not quite, but between the airports, hotels, cafes and major sights it was rare not to have access when I wanted it. Without this my phone would have been little use. With it, my phone was so much more than a phone.

Getting around: I use google maps so much I can take it for granted, but it and the services built onit are incredibly useful. Gmaps offered the usual detailed maps, but also psuedo-3D rendering of buidlings, live train/bus times and streetview. AroundMe was useful for providing nearby listings of things like cafes, restuarants, linked to ratings/comments. AR apps, much as I like the idea, didn’t really work for me for navigation. Too many POIs for the UI to cope with at times when a 2D map worked better.

Enhanced experience: I like tech when it compliments an experience, rather than being a distraction. For example, the American museum of Natural History provide free wifi and a free museum Explorer app. This guides you around the museum by getting your current location and providing maps and directions to any exhibit you want to find. It could do more in terms of describing the exhibits, allowing commenting, etc., but I preferred that it didn’t lure me into to exploring stuff online, but just got us to the things we wanted to see.

One place AR did ‘pop up’ that I wasn’t expecting it was in the Lego store. They used marker-based AR and a booth to show you what you’re model of the space shuttle should look like once you’ve put it together and what it would look like if it could actually take off. Think the box should have had a warning that ‘liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen not included’ to avoid later disappointment!

Games: I’m not really a gamer, but having a few decent games helped pass the time on two six hour night flights with the kids. I even let them have a play

Self-service travel: Last time I took a long haul flight, you had to be at the airport 3 hours before departure, most of which was spent waiting in line to check in. Self-service now means that we could check in, print boarding passes, chose our seats, meals and in flight movies from the comfort of our hotel.

In case of emergency

It was when our flight home was cancelled that tech proved it’s worth. Being able to check the live status of flights, booking new flights, getting the latest news from the media and airport authorities, being able to communicate through email, IM and Skype, using Twitter search as a self-building/updating FAQ built by people in a similar situation and those trying to help them. All of which meant much less hassle sorting out a return flight that got us home on Christmas day, just before the snow closed the airports in New York.

What I was just as happy about was that I found it remarkably easy to treat this technology as just a tool, using it when I needed to, but putting it down when I didn’t. That’s something I struggle with at work/home, so perhaps the cure to my addiction is more holidays!

As this is a post about holidays, I guess I have to include a few holiday snaps. In case your wondering, I did take some of the family, but they’re over on facebook.

I’m aware that there are lots of great resources out there already – which really helped me learn this stuff – so I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Rather, I see this event being a day of supported practicals,  where participants can install WordPress (locally), play with plugins and themes and start to explore how WordPress is put together and can be customised.

My provisional workshop description is below, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether you think this would be worthwhile and if so, what you’d want from a WordPress workshop? Note we already have an event dealing with the art of blogging, so this would focus  more on the practicalities.

Hosting your own WordPress Blog

(…suggestions for a better title than this would be appreciated!)

WordPress is the blogging platform of choice for millions of users. While wordpress.com offers a simple way to create a basic blog, there are restrictions that may frustrate those who would like more control over the style and functionality of their site. A self-hosted installation of WordPress offers complete control over your theme, plugins and more, but is more challenging to run.

This workshop will help you learn the practical skills needed to install, maintain and customise WordPress. Participants will build their own fully functional installation of WordPress on a USB drive, which can later be published or used for ongoing development.

Topics

• Installing WordPress
• Securing & maintaining your install
• Themes and plugins
• Hacking the source – customising your themes and plugins
• Not just blogs – alternative ways to use WordPress (e.g. multiple sites, BuddyPress, CMS…)
• Promotion, syndication and social media
• Analytics, metrics, monitoring and impact

Who is it for?

This workshop is for anyone considering hosting their own WordPress for a blog or website. It provides an opportunity to install and customise a working WordPress site and explore what would be involved in running it in practice. While it is not a technical workshop on server administration or developing WordPress, some knowledge of HTML, CSS and perhaps a little PHP would be useful.

*******************************

Photo credit: katietower via flickr (CC BY)