Bonus episode! This extra episode finds us in conversation with Instructional Designer Lynn Bello and GCE Instructor (and Wescoe alum) Jason. The Division of Graduate and Continuing Education uses the SUNY Online Course Quality Review Rubric (OSCQR) to analyze courses. This process between Lynn and GCE faculty is not an assessment or an evaluation, but an opportunity to grow and adopt effective online pedagogy.
This past June, I attended the Reclaim Roadshow, a two day staff development opportunity for folks who manage Domain of One’s Own at a college or university. Reclaim Hosting always puts on great conferences and workshops. Over two days I attended many remote presentations and breakouts full of useful how-to information and some great discussion of digital learning and digital pedagogy.
We did much of our engaging in the Discord application, which allowed me to work backward through breakouts I wasn’t able to attend. One of the more lively conversations concerned how Domains institutions like Muhlenberg might handle short- medium- and long-term preservation and archiving of student and faculty work on Domains. WordPress is far and away the most used application on Berg Builds at Muhlenberg, and we’re not unusual. But WordPress presents a particularly thorny question — how do you archive and preserve websites built with WordPress that depend upon a database and have a lot of moving parts, so to speak, regarding software and software dependencies?
WordPress, among other things, is a dynamically-generated web content management application that employs a relational database. So, to archive it and make it available in the future, one may need to archive the entire operating environment: the operating system, that relational database management system, WordPress software itself, and of course the content and configurations of a particular site, itself. This is a pretty complicated thing to do with assurance it will all work as desired in, say, five or more years into the future. This scenario also demands a pretty sizable amount of storage space and the archival object is really complex and dependent.
Let’s assume a future reader or visitor to an archived Domain site is primarily interested in the content of the site, and may be willing to sacrifice the digital or technological gestalt of engaging with a dynamic CMS like WordPress. A better approach might be to generate a static version of the WordPress site and store that for future access. What do I mean exactly? Well, essentially every access of a WordPress page or post is a call to a database that, in that moment, generates a version of that page for your browser. Visiting a single WordPress link might culminate after several queries of multiple data tables to pull words and images from associated records in those tables. What looks like a standard web page to visitors is actually a bunch of chunks of content stored within tables and served up when requested. In fact, you may have seen some WordPress posts depicted as record IDs in the URLs, themselves.
So, if I were to generate a static equivalent (a few interlinked .html, javascript, and css files) of that dynamic WordPress post, this archived thing would be (to a future reader):
nearly human-readable as markup files
much smaller with respect to storage of bytes, and compressible
organized hierarchically in nested folders
rendered more simply (maybe via a single index.html file in a future browser that works on old web pages)
These were the merits and demerits flying back and forth in that Discord channel during the Reclaim Roadshow. Folks also mentioned the power of reflective assessment for faculty who teach with domains and the benefit to future scholars of access to the volumes and volumes of student and faculty work that otherwise are likely lost forever.
Lots of folks in conversation came to this conclusion — generate flat files from a dynamic WordPress sites and store them. But what’s the best way? Several hd tried building crawlers, but that means writing scripts using some of the more arcane Unix/Linux tools like wget or cURL and then parsing streams with any of a dozen different libraries out there. Or perhaps automating the process using software like Site Sweeper, but when I tried this, I was mistaken for a crawler on our campus network and blocked by security software partway through extracting a WordPress site. Scraping the web is, as it sounds, painful.
In this fast and amazing conversation, Ed Beck from SUNY-Oneonta asked, “Why isn’t everyone just using the Simply Static plugin?” The what? OK, please tell us more…!
Simply Static is a really easy WordPress plugin that converts your WordPress site to a nested set of folders and files containing everything. Posts, pages, images, categories, tags, dates, links. All that stuff. And built to work as the public sees your site. The administrative backend of WordPress is gone. The site is frozen at the point of conversion. But it’s all there.
And with that, everything I had been struggling to do for years became easy and fast to accomplish. That crucial piece of information that one colleague had, and that others like me needed, was provided.
Below I walk through installing and using the Simply Static WordPress plugin to generate a snapshot static version of a WordPress site. Something suitable for storing into the future with a fair degree of certainty it will be accessible at that time, presuming we can parse the various file formats that comprise our web (HTML, CSS, JS, JPEG, PNG, and so on). Hopefully you’ll see how easy it is to use, and maybe try it out, too.
Installing Simply Static
Within your WordPress administration dashboard, click on Plugin, and then click Add New.
from the WordPress dashboard, select the Plugins option, and then select “Add New”
Search for the Plugin named, “Simply Static” and install it.
Search for Simply Static, then click “Install Now” and then “Activate”
You should notice a new menu option over on the left of your WordPress dashboard entitled, “Simply Static”. Here, you can configure the settings of the Simply Static plugin and generate a static version of your site.
There are a couple things to consider. First, if you merely want to create a usable archive of your site, you’ll likely want to select the option “save for offline use” when you generate a static version. This will give you a .ZIP archive that can be unzipped and navigated on your local drive as if it was your online wordpress site. Some features, like the search box widget, will not operate. But navigating the content of your site via menu links, hyperlinks, and category or tag links, will work perfectly.
On the other hand, if you wish to host on the web a fully functioning version of your WordPress site as a static site, you’ll need to decide if you want this static version to be accessible from its current web URL, or a different URL. Do you have a lot of visitors to your existing site? Is your site used mainly by your students, or are there others who may have bookmarked your site and continue to visit it? Is your site essentially complete in terms of its contents, or will it continue to grow and evolve in future iterations, perhaps when you teach the class again?
There is an option when generating a static version of a site to create either absolute or relative links. An absolute link incorporates the current fully formed domain name (for example, https://archive.diglearn.bergbuilds.domains/blog/ ). The internal links within your static site, any pages or posts or images hyperlinked within your static site, will prepend this fully formed URL to the link (for example, https://archive.diglearn.bergbuilds.domains/blog/resources/simply-static). This will only work properly if you place your static site generated by Simply Static, within the directory or folder currently housing your WordPress site. In other words, after generating your static site, you’ll need to remove AND replace your existing WordPress site.
Relative links work a bit differently. These are links that point to files relative to the site’s main directory. Put another way, Absolute links resolve by going out onto the web, looking up domain names and URLs via DNS, and resolving down to the area of a web server where these files reside. Relative links resolve by navigating the local file and folder hierarchy, relative to the top-most folder (or directory) of your website.
Think of it like this…there are two ways to get to your kitchen (at the rear of your house) from your couch in the living room (at the front of your house). The absolute path is to stand up, leave through the front door, walk around to the back door, and enter the kitchen. The relative path is to stand up, walk down the hallway connecting these rooms, and enter the kitchen. Absolute links are resolved, absolutely, using a specific, unique to the world web address. But relative links navigate a local file structure to, essentially, arrive at the same file or image.
To summarize, if you’re making a static copy of your WordPress site that will overwrite and answer to the same knock on the front door (the known URL to your site’s homepage), then you’ll want the option to use absolute URLs. However, if your static surrogate for your WordPress site will reside elsewhere on your server, you’ll likely want to choose the option to use relative URLs, and furthermore, you’ll want to reference in advance what these URLs are relative to. Put another way, you’ll need to know the folder or directory where your index.html file will reside, and put it into the Simply Static form field for the use relative URLs option.
The Destination URLs options within Simply Static’s settings. You’ll need to give some thought to where your static site’s files and folders will reside to choose the appropriate option.
In nearly every case, I’ve worked with ZIP file archives when generating static versions of my WordPress sites. Once you generate a ZIP archive, Simply Static will give you a link to click to download the ZIP file.
Advanced Options and Alternate Uses
There are more advanced options that can be configured when using Simply Static to exclude specific file types (for instance CSS) or specific directories (for instance, a bunch of stashed PDF files in /wp-content/uploads/documents/) as you generate your static site. I’m happy to work through these and why they might be useful, just let me know.
There are also other potential uses for static versions of sites generated with WordPress. If you would like to discuss this, explore, goof around, share ideas then please just reach out.
And you may have security concerns not addressed directly here but that a static version of a WordPress site could ameliorate. If you do, please let me know and we can work through them together.
Summary
Archiving student and faculty work within WordPress has presented challenges in the past. The Simply Static plugin makes it easy and fast to generate an off site archive of student work that takes up little space and that should operate far into the future. This presents, really for the first time, a feasible path to reflecting on or assessing past work (our own, our students, across programs and time) created with WordPress as part of Domain of One’s Own initiatives.
Simply Static is quick to learn and generates a compressed archive of files and directories from a dynamic WordPress site. This ZIP file, when expanded, works as a static website and can be a substitute for or snapshot of a site originally built in WordPress. Some possible advantages of a static site versus a database-dependent (e.g., dynamic) WordPress site include faster load time, decreased future maintenance of software updates and upgrades, a diminished attack surface, and use of fewer system resources like storage space and processing cycles.
The semester had barely begun when my colleague, Professor Tineke D’Haeseleer (History) tweeted:
Professor D’Haeseleer’s tweet on August 26, 2020
This was the tweet we all needed, after a day when the videoconferencing platform was down, along with the media platform in Canvas! No sweat for Professor D’Haeseleer, who centers Domain of One’s Own in her online pedagogy. This post spotlights her work with Domains and the exciting ways her students are beginning to build their digital presence–not only in the course featured in this post, “People and their stuff in Chinese history,” but across all of her courses. For Professor D’Haeseleer, blogs are central to the ways she aims to create and expand a community of explorers and writers.
Professor Tineke D’Haeseleer opened her course, “People and their stuff in Chinese history,” a week prior to the start of the semester. Built entirely on her own domain, which she’s been growing and evolving since she connected with the Berg Builds initiative in her first year at Muhlenberg, Professor D’Haeseleer’s course invites students to participate as co-creators in the online learning environment. As they construct their own domains, students expand the digital ecology of the course, guided by weekly assignments that critically engage and reflect upon course readings and materials. Deep engagement with Domain of One’s Own is one of the fundamental ways that Dr. D’Haeseleer creates opportunities for students’ “thoughtful participation in the learning community.”
By the first week, students were already digging into their domains. The night before the semester officially started, Jose Maldonado published his first post and a welcome on his site, http://josethenotjose.bergbuilds.domains/. “Hello everyone! My name is Jose Maldonado and I live in the suburbs of Chicago. This site is, for now, a blog for my People and their stuff in Chinese History course at Muhlenberg College. I hope to not only learn about Chinese history but to also manage websites and properly broadcast my thoughts/ideas.”
Homepage of Jose Maldonado’s blog at http://josethenotjose.bergbuilds.domains’
With guidelines for their very first post from Professor D’Haeseleer, students learn to insert an image and a hyperlink, add it to a category, and add tags–skills they will need for later posts. What better way to initiate this practice than with Growth Mindset Cats! In their first post assignment, students are pointed to http:/growthmindsetmemes.blogspot.com/p/cat-index.html where they must find a Growth Mindset cat that speaks to them and write about how it resonates. Along the way, students also learn about captions, Alt text for accessibility, and categories.
We’re sharing this brief update about some of the exciting things we’re collaborating on this semester.
Faculty Online Learning Cohort 2018 Begins!
The Digital Learning Team is gearing up to begin working with a new group of faculty for our fourth annual Spring faculty development program for online learning. Throughout the spring semester, the following faculty are developing online and blended courses, primarily in the humanities and arts:
Sharon Albert — Islamic Traditions
Greta Brubaker — Introduction to Digital Photography
Kelly Cannon — Copyright
Amy Corbin — Melodrama
Roberta Meek — Music and the Civil Rights Movement
Mark Stein — Frontiers in History
Tim Clarke (Instructional Technologist) is leading the Spring program, with Bill Feeney (Lecturer) and Jenna Azar (Instructional Designer). Also supporting the work is a group of Faculty Digital Fellows with past experience teaching online including Keri Colabroy, Susan Kahlenberg, Lanethea Mathews-Schultz, and Danielle Sanchez. We look forward to building on our strong foundation in online pedagogies for liberal arts learning and cultivating Muhlenberg’s intentional approach to human-centered, interactive, and experiential online learning.
Muhlenberg Faculty Develop Hybrid Course Initiatives with Teagle Foundation Grant
In 2015 Lafayette College, working in collaboration with LVAIC, was awarded a three-year grant from the Teagle Foundation. The primary goal of the grant was to build a network “of ‘Digital Faculty Fellows’ who will mentor each other and generate interest among colleagues to pursue hybrid course development opportunities that enrich the academic experience, while sharing costs and using classroom and laboratory facilities more efficiently.”
Over the course of the grant, there where 12 collaboration projects completed, consisting of 42 faculty members total from all six LVAIC institutions. Muhlenberg faculty from chemistry, education, and media and communication participated in collaborations funded through the Teagle grant and include:
Marsha Barr
Keri Colabroy
Kate Ranieri
Sally Richwine
Kim Rohrbach
John Sullivan
Lora Taub-Pervizpour
Sheri Young
To celebrate the conclusion of the grant, and to share the amazing work that was done by each group, we would like to invite you all to attend the final Teagle Sharing Symposium on March 22nd at Moravian College from 4-6:30pm. Light refreshments will be provided. Please register for the symposium by March 15th here: https://www.lvaic.org/event/lvaic-teagle-sharing-symposium/
One of the highlights of the initiative was opportunity to collaborate both within and across institutions and a recent report on lessons learned features faculty voices on the value of collaboration. Read the full report on lessons learned from the project here: http://www.sr.ithaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SR-Report_Teagle_Faculty_Collaboration_Technology_Liberal_Arts_01292018.pdf
Center for Ethics and Digital Learning Team Up to Host Talk on Digital Redlining
On March 1, Muhlenberg welcomes Chris Gilliard, professor of English at Macomb Community College, for a presentation titled “Against Complicity: Surveillance, Education and Digital Redlining.” Chris will speakon issues of privacy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these topics apply to college students. The talk is in Miller Forum at 7 p.m. and open to the public. This talk is co-sponsored by the media & communication department.
Bryn Mawr Blended Learning Conference Call for Proposals
Faculty, staff, and students engaged in blended learning (broadly defined to encompass any mix of face-to-face and online teaching and learning activity) may be interested in submitting proposals to share their work at the seventh annual Blended Learning in the Liberal Arts Conference at Bryn Mawr. The conference is May 23 – Thursday, May 24, 2018 at Bryn Mawr College. Please see the full call for proposals here: http://blendedlearning.blogs.brynmawr.edu/blended-learning-conference/ .
Join the Digital Learning Team on April 25 for a Tech Tuesday discussion on a pilot project we initiated this year: Domain of One’s Own. Members of the Digital Learning Team have written about the early months of this initiative in a series of blog posts that are rounded up in this post: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/2016/10/31/blogging-is-everything/. In this Tech Tuesday session, we update the community our progress with the initiative and introduce future possibilities for getting involved.
The focal point of our Domains initiative launch this semester is a Faculty Learning Community. Ten faculty and several Digital Learning Team members have been meeting throughout Spring semester to explore new possibilities for faculty, staff, and students to design and build their digital presence with greater flexibility and independence, and to exercise greater agency in determining what and how to share their scholarship and learning publicly online. Each faculty member is developing their own domain, some focused on teaching, others focused on scholarly projects. The themes, readings, and activities for the FLC are openly available here: http://dooo.flc.bergbuilds.domains/. The FLC site provides much more background on the project and the motivations behind our Domains initiative than we can address in our short Tech Tuesday presentation. We hope you’ll take a look and perhaps even encounter material there that you want to share with students or colleagues.
Throughout the year, the Digital Learning Team has been developing the resources necessary to support faculty, staff and students in developing their digital presence via Domains. Tim Clarke has developed a thorough site for support documentation here: http://help.bergbuilds.domains/. Building on and extending the knowledge base created by folks who developed Domain of One’s Own at University of Mary Washington and its early adopters at Emory University and Oklahoma University, Tim’s documentation takes you step by step through the process of creating a Domain and getting up and running.
We’ve also been cultivating expertise among a cadre of Digital Learning Assistants who have offered workshops, one on one consultations, and course visits to help faculty and students begin building their Domains. Faculty consistently note how helpful it is to have peer assistants–much like a writing assistant or a learning assistant–to help introduce Domains to students and support them as they begin creating, curating, and organizing their sites. The DLA website and schedule is here: http://diglearn.blogs.muhlenberg.edu/people/digital-learning-assistants/. While we don’t know the DLA Fall 2017 schedule just yet, it’s certainly possible to begin thinking about a DLA-led workshop to help introduce your students to Domains.
In May and June, DLT members are giving several presentations at conferences near and far about our early work with Domains. Check back soon for blog posts and slides from those presentations.
In mid-October, Jim Groom and Lauren Brumfeld of Reclaim Hosting spent two jam-packed days with us at Muhlenberg, helping us open the door (or Pandora’s Box, as Jim might argue) to our Domain of One’s Own faculty and student learning community. Time spent with Jim and Lauren was everything we’d hoped it would be–catalyzing and supportive, a chance to peer around some corners to glimpse “what might be” even while we’re in the thick of what is needed now to get off to a strong start. I’ve reflected on our work with Jim and Lauren here in some detail, but in this post I just want to provide a roundup of the several blogs that have spun out of those two October days.
Over on his domain, Tim Clarke is inviting us to consider What Would a Domain of One’s Own Implementation Cohort Look Like?
This post is my effort to extend this question, and share my thinking about what may, and what may not be helpful to schools as they implement Domain of One’s Own initiatives. I’m especially interested in teasing out if there is enough commonality among institutions, or enough similarity around this work, or enough fun to be had, to warrant effort to form an implementation cohort.
One of the things that strengthens our Domain of One’s Own initiative is the multiple perspectives and backgrounds of the people collaborating to make it happen. Jen Jarson, over on the ACRLog blog, situates Domain of One’s Own in the context of her work on information literacy within librarianship. In her post, Jen asks, “What does open pedagogy for information literacy look like?” and is connecting our work on Domains to larger interests in open pedagogy:
The success of Domains, Jim said in his keynote, is not about technology. Instead, its success is the openness it facilitates: thinking out loud, engaging in reflective practice with a community of peers. As part of the Domains story, Jim shared his experiences creating ds106, an open, online course on digital storytelling. As described on the site, the course was “part storytelling workshop, part technology training, and, most importantly, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape that is ever increasingly mediating how we communicate with one another.” The course embodied openness in many ways. UMW students enrolled in the semester-long course and served as its core community, but the course was open to anyone who wanted to participate alongside the UMW students. But the part that piqued my interest most was its open pedagogy; Jim talked about how he did the assignments with the students and also described how students created the assignments. “The only reason it worked,” Jim said, “was because we built an open ecosystem for it to thrive.
Jen’s post concludes with the observation that “Open pedagogy is about being flexible and responsive. It means meeting learners where they are, rather than where we think they are or should be”–and this seems to me another excellent way to think about the value of students working with/on their own domains.
We were really excited that Lauren Brumfeld accompanied Jim on this campus visit, because as a recent graduate, she paid close attention to student perspectives and experiences. This is a focal point in her reflections on A Visit to Muhlenberg College where she casts special attention on our student Digital Learning Assistants:
The Digital Learning Assistants, DLA’s for short, are in the beginning stages of something very similar to UMW’s Digital Knowledge Center. The DLA’s are a diverse group ranging from incoming freshmen to graduating seniors. These students are all at different stages of finding their “niche” in the digital world. This semester they’re framing out what it means to provide peer tutoring to other students, and how they can best teach themselves and learn from each other.
Jim and I had a chance to chat with them on Friday afternoon about what this teaching and learning could look like. Any passerby could have seen how much excitement was sitting in that room- the DLA’s are so ready & willing to better themselves and their peers. I loved it.
One of the DLAs, Meredith Salisbury, has published her Notes on DLAing on her domain–her first ever blog post.
I’ve spent the last few years of my life nerding out about social media + new media research. I have this fascination with how we portray ourselves and communicate with others online. I wonder how the concept of a DoOO impacts the ways in which we think about what we put online and how it will be different then the existing social media and web presences that we have already. What’s different about domains is that I own whatever I put on my site instead of it living in something like canvas or being sold as data by Facebook or Tumblr. But, the thing is that sites like ello were created with the same concept and they didn’t get adopted… I guess my lasting question is do students (or anyone) care about owning our data or are people so used to being the product that its to late…
P.S. Follow the DLAs on Twitter cause we’re the best
Really, follow the DLAs on Twitter @bergDLAs. They are the best!
Screenshot from Margo Hobbs, Contemporary Art Spring 2016 Scalar Book Project
When Margo Hobbs, Associate Professor of Art, was frustrated with the limits of available textbooks for her Contemporary Art course, she had the idea to engage her students in researching, producing, and collaboratively publishing a a digital textbook for on the topic. For this Spring 2016 project, Margo’s students explored global contemporary art since 1989 through a variety of digital and openly available online resources and tools. Together with Margo, they learned to use Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing tool, collaboratively generating a digital textbook published to the web. The platform offers a great degree of flexibility in design and structure, making it easy to produce multi- and non-linear paths within a multimedia project. Scalar was a good choice for Margo’s Contemporary Art project, because it can showcase images as well as text, and you can build items that annotate or comment upon other items.
The possibility of creating multiple pathways and non-linear multimodal narratives within Scalar was ideal for a collaborative student project in the interdisciplinary RJ Capstone Seminar. In S
Screenshot from RJ Fellows Spring 2015 Community Connections Scalar Book Project
pring 2015, the project, “Many Ways of Connecting,” asked students to reflect upon and document the changing relationship between Muhlenberg and the wider community of Allentown, and to explore this relationship along multiple dimensions. In their Scalar publication, students were able to represent the diverse and sometimes intersecting avenues for connecting with Allentown that, as students, shaped their experiences at Muhlenberg. Their project highlights the multi-linear pathways through which students participate in community-based learning, service, engagement, and activism.
After building the digitized Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection in Shared Shelf, Muhlenberg archivist Susan Falciani was interested in extending the collection into a platform that would make these resources more public and accessible, especially for use in teaching and learning. Omeka afforded her the ease and customization necessary to build a rich, searchable collection of the objects in this collection. It required no HTML knowledge, though she was able to rely on colleagues with CSS skills for help with design customization. All said, Susan produced this exhibit in about 20 hours time. Her presentation on the project at the meeting of the Council for Independent Colleges Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Learning, is here.
Screenshot of the Robert C. Horn Papyri Collection
In this Tech Tuesday, we explore both of these open-source, free, and widely used tools for digital scholarship. We will touch on some of their affordances, show examples produced with each tool, and consider some of the reasons for choosing one or the other depending on the type of project faculty are interested to produce and the kinds of materials to be integrated. Omeka is used widely to build digital exhibits, collections, and archives that are image-rich, with the key feature that it integrates Dublin Core metadata schema for describing items within an Omeka site. This standardized vocabulary means that data can easily be moved into and shared with other systems. Scalar is a media-rich digital publishing platform allowing multiple authors to add and annotate text, image, audio and video elements, and connect those elements in multi- or non-linear narrative paths. The annotation feature in Scalar is particularly rich–anything in a Scalar book can be annotated in just about any format. Beyond annotating images with text, text can be annotated with audio or video, video can be annotated with audio, and so forth.
If you are unable to attend in person, we are offering a live stream of the session through Zoom. Please sign in to the link below before the session begins at 8:30. A moderator will be there to share any questions you may have with the presenters. Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android: https://muhlenberg.zoom.us/j/963994155
Resources on Digital Pedagogy and Digital Publishing
Jen Jarson, Information Literacy and Assessment Librarian and Social Sciences Subject Specialist, has curated the following resources to provide additional information on these featured tools, and in particular, to highlight their affordances for developing digital literacies and pedagogy. If you have discipline-specific information literacy questions related to Tech Tuesday, please contact Jen at jarson@muhlenberg.edu.
