Today myself and Jen Ross took part in the PressEd Twitter conference, brilliantly organised by Pat Lockley and Natalie Lafferty. They had the genius idea of re-mixing the Public Archaeology Twitter conference format and with much heroic cajoling succeeded pulled in over 40 presentations from across several continents. What we have collectively created through presentations and comments is a hugely rich, freely available resource that I know I’ll be digging back into over and again. If anyone cares for such things, I have a TAGS archive for #pressEdConf18.

Jen and I pulled our talk together during a period of travel for both of us, and I can’t pretend I was always as timely with updates as I planned to be – a lot of the time I think I wasn’t actually sure what time it was. “Saturday morning” is a very relative measure when both of you are in transit across the globe. However, it was a lot of fun looking back over 10 years of collaboration on the MSc Digital Education at Edinburgh. I’m an alumnus of this programme in it’s initial guise as the MSc E-Learning (I was in that first cohort in 2006) and so I have a special fondness for the work that this programme does and the colleagues who teach on it. Re-reading the course descriptors, many of which are new since I took the programme, I wanted to go back and do it all again.

Our ambition with this retrospective was to highlight the range of uses that we’ve been able to put WordPress to over that time – as an illustration of how flexible a platform it has proven to be. I think we could have done a presentation about each and every example in it’s own right. Perhaps if there’s another conference we will. In the meantime, here’s an archive of our tweets and we’d be delighted to talk more about any of this.

Since it launched in 2006, the fully online MSc in Digital Education programme at the University of Edinburgh has explored multiple forms of online contact, interaction, and representation of knowledge. https://t.co/LZN2YLR19G #mscde #pressedconf18 1/15 pic.twitter.com/SA4QDBpv7x

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

WP has been part of #mscde life for much of this time, & we have pushed it to & sometimes beyond its obvious limits, in a partnership between the academic team (inc @jar) and the central University e-learning team (inc @ammienoot). #pressedconf18 2/15 pic.twitter.com/LDytSbn0aD

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Our evolving use of WordPress has supported many different approaches to assessment, feedback, scale, reflection & community. Here’s how it’s all gone down, in what we call ‘Digital Education & WordPress: a historical romp’ https://t.co/4IsC40IXFy #pressedconf18 3/15

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

In the beginning: E-learning and Digital Cultures 2009. An open-access course which used ‘lifestreaming’ as an assessment method (see https://t.co/90cfz7iqY1 ). Here is the 2010 course site https://t.co/THbkGWUGih @sbayne #pressedconf18 4/15 pic.twitter.com/qn3BG2RlAG

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

With the demise of the lifestream plugin, the course switched to using IFTTT, challenging students to configure and curate their own archives of their online traces.https://t.co/FVSAgPZE7v @j_k_knox @james858499 #pressedconf18 5/15 pic.twitter.com/k186EuIefH

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Other open courses have followed, including the Digital Student Experience https://t.co/8cBg2O4q2D @velmc . Students have a range of reactions to working in public like this, but those who choose these options generally get a lot from the experience. #pressedconf18 6/15 pic.twitter.com/aeoI3CHe9X

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Assessed blogging has been an integral part of the programme from the start. In 2014, after many years of using Elgg, the main student blogs switched to WordPress to better support multimodal blogging. https://t.co/lte8tgJpJu @CMSinclair#pressedconf18 7/15 pic.twitter.com/aUxviAKCv0

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Several courses, including Digital Education in a Global Context, and Digial Eduction Strategy and Policy use assessed group blogs to develop sustained and in-depth interactions between course groups. #pressedconf18 @speedysnail @eksploratore 8/15

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

The programme as a whole has a Hub, built using Buddypress – now more than 400 accounts, and alumni still visit and engage with it. We are currently discussing with colleagues & students what the future shape of this Hub should be. https://t.co/N1pXKV32Xf #pressedconf18 9/15 pic.twitter.com/wLsDcUHHLP

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

In 2013 the team developed and launched one of the University’s first 6 MOOCs, #edcmooc . Participants worked in and beyond the Coursera platform, inc blogging. @ammienoot built a WP aggregator to bring posts together. https://t.co/Jg1luMQuB9 #pressedconf18 10/15 pic.twitter.com/B2b6DU83eH

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

The #edcmooc teaching team kept a blog over the first two instances of the course, reflecting on the experiences and challenges of teaching in this (still very new at the time!) mode. https://t.co/0R6uWep6DF #pressedconf18 11/15 pic.twitter.com/DJ5uTRC0mt

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

The #deresearch manifesto for teaching online also has its home on a WordPress site! https://t.co/TOMN3aI1XH #pressedconf18 12/15 pic.twitter.com/akD4QmxORA

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

WordPress is a great platform for rich, multimodal, student owned spaces, group work, & working in the open, things which are a lot harder in a traditional VLE. Challenges remain, such as managing external examination, maintenance and bespoke development. #pressedconf18 13/15

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Building further on themes of student ownership and digital identity, future directions may include helping to pilot and develop Domain of One’s Own work at Edinburgh. #pressedconf18 14/15

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

Thanks for listening! You can find out more about the #mscde programme at https://t.co/VRtlhKmZEc and @jar and @ammienoot are happy to answer any follow up questions. #pressedconf18 15/15 pic.twitter.com/ktZd6XqTIU

— Jen Ross (@jar) March 29, 2018

(Stitching the Standard, Edmund Leighton, Public Domain)