The PressEd Twitter conference took place again yesterday, thanks once more to the tireless efforts of Pat Lockley and Natalie Lafferty. This year I flew solo and did the hard work myself. EGads! I had to make some gifs and everything and they were rubbish. I really need to up my repetoire, skills and tools in this space. I’ve created a wee record of my presentation below, though I know it’s also been collated as a moment onto the PressEd schedule page.
Drafting in Excel and scheduling via Tweetdeck worked a treat though, and I honestly wasn’t scheduling the last tweet as the first one began to fire…
Freedom of movement : LTI is no big deal for linking together
Blogging tools in VLEs are universally poor; however even when WordPress is available as an alternative, the admin overheads of setting up user accounts can mean it remains out of reach. This presentation will demonstrate using an LTI integration plugin to make the pain go away.
(1/15) Hello, I'm Anne-Marie Scott, I work at @EdinburghUni I live with a cat & I'm going to explain how you can use WordPress as another tool from within your VLE, in order to support use at scale with minimal admin overhead & generally make some pain go away. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/0WHd56j2Ck
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(2/15) Blog tools have been built into VLEs for a while, but they tend to support a very limited set of use cases, don’t lend themselves to working in the open, or to more creative uses that we are keen to pursue.
Hence WordPress. #PreachingToTheChoir #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/KClHTaQyNf
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(3/15) However, even when WordPress is available the admin overhead of setting up spaces and user accounts can be a barrier for some academic colleagues.
Especially where they might be relatively new to WordPress themselves, or be teaching large classes. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/xnmxb898zq
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(4/15) This is where a thing called the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard comes in handy.
Don't glaze over – stay with me. I promise it'll be good. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/yonBGdZEcF
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(5/15) LTI is used to connect VLEs to external tools so that the setup of user accounts is done "magically" based on the info in your VLE course.
This means you can automate the creation of a WP blog space & student accounts, with no developer skills required. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/xcB2hWWFvN
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(6/15) All that you need to do is install and configure a plugin within WordPress.
You do need to be using WordPress multi-site btw… #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/fpZ9qVeLxs
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(7/15) And then do some configuration in your VLE to set up the LTI connection (there will be help docs online that explain LTI for *your* VLE).
The plugin supports 2 different modes so set it up twice to appear as 2 separate tools in your VLE. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/ZqVahMDwFh
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(8/15) The first mode is a single blog for the course with all students as Authors (and teachers as Admins).
Teachers add the link to their course, follow it to create the space and their account, then do whatever set up they need to. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/EJYEz8JrDF
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(9/15) Students follow the link and their accounts are set up automatically (or they are added to the space if they already have accounts).#PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/cb3NDPkTNZ
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(10/15) The second mode is a blog per student with students as Admins (and teachers as Authors).
Teachers add the link to their course.
Students follow it and their spaces and accounts are created automatically. #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/kNvmwXyK4n
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(11/15) When teachers follow the link, they see a list of all the blogs that have been created for the course (we are pretty pleased with this bit!). #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/4yercytWLn
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(12/15) All blogs are cloned from a master template so you can pre-configure the set up that students receive.#PressEdConf19
(Dolly the Sheep by Toni Barros from São Paulo, Brasil [CC BY-SA 2.0]) pic.twitter.com/TqPJrDKgsz
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(13/15) You can have more than one WordPress blog within a VLE course.
For example if you wanted to have a whole course blog for a collaborative writing task, and also give each student their own space for reflection.#PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/cP4Po63yT9
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(14/15) The plugin I've talked about here is the one we use @EdinburghUni.
We made it, and we've shared it as open-source for you to have too.
(We also made documentation to explain how to do this in more detail). https://t.co/dOL7IulK89 #PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/zYPaapvlIf
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(15/15) I hope that made some sense. I'm happy to take questions now or later.
Kudos to @sephster, Richard Lawson, @karenhowie2008 Lila Pitcher @baldcyclist & @callumkerr for their work & to colleagues in other Unis who helped us test.#PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/aGEntZo0KW
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
(16/15) P.S. The title of this talk was originally a #Brexit joke. I thought we'd have crashed out of the EU by now and all be living on gruel.
Apparently we're saving that for Halloween instead. Joke's on me…#PressEdConf19 pic.twitter.com/hOnfjrEKnw
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) April 18, 2019
